2018, Vol., No.38

Korean Review of French History 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.67

pISSN : 1229-702X
https://journal.kci.go.kr/krfh

The Armagnac-Burgundian civil war from 1410 to 1435, provoked by the assassination of Louis, duke of Orléans on the 23th November, 1407, originated from heated rivalries between the royal princes to acquire more financial resources in order to conduct ambitious expansionist policies and power strife. The struggle of the two ‘parties’ resulted in a vicious circle of hysterical political violence. As much as the political violence, what stood out in this civil war was an intense propaganda war, the so-called ‘battle of symbols and words’, with various symbols, slogans and inflammatory rhetoric. This civil war, as a watershed in terms of the integration of the French kingdom, thus showed new dynamics in the field of political culture. Not to mention the military strength, the princely parties needed to receive the support of public opinion, so they tried to win over influential supporters who could mobilize public opinion. It was certainly a new phenomenon that the politically overheated moods appeared, rearranging under the name of parties the various people including ordinary citizens as well as nobles and urban elites irrespective of their status and using physical and verbal violences against each other. It was also an event that heralded a change of direction of political struggle in the French kingdom that would be henceforward more and more open to public space and public opinion.

This article aims to examine the political coup of the Thermidor 9 from the viewpoint of the liquidation of the Terror. After the elimination of Robespierre, the Convention put this task on the order of the day. In the process of this liquidation of the Terror, the coup leaders were liquidated, and the popular movement was weakened. The thermidorian Convention abolished the command economy and got rid of the sans-culottes, but the popular resistance was negligible. Finally, it established the Constitution of the year 3, which aimed to block the return of the Terror and the political intervention of the sans-culottes. Then, the French Revolution got out of the popular deviation and reenter in the bourgeois revolution. The liquidation of the Terror by the thermidorian Convention deserves to be evaluated positively. It is not appropriate to qualify it as a reaction, because the liquidation of the Terror is not a historical regression. In place of the political terme of ‘the reaction’, the term ‘the political coup’ seems to be pertinent.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the controversy surrounding the hijab, an item of clothing traditionally worn by Muslim women, is closely connected with colonialism and republicanism in today France. This paper is primarily aimed at clarifying its relationship with colonialism, as the existing debate mainly focuses on the principle of the French republic, i.e., its relevance to the current ‘laïcité’ problem in the country. The second purpose of this paper is to present a critical point of view for rethinking the existing concept of republican laïcité. In other words, this paper introduces the new concept of “the open laïcité”, namely liberal interpretations of laïcité, and also intends to examine its applicability. Ultimately, this paper argues that the hijab controversy should not be confined to “the republican laîcité”, but should be expanded to include a colonial perspective as well as an open discussion of laïcité in France. It also examines how historical views regarding the hijab during the colonial period of Algeria have been transferred to the contemporary hijab controversy.