"L’Invention du Midi": The Rise of the South of France in the National and International Imagination ed. by Tania Woloshyn, Nicholas Hewitt (review)

Administrative services were forced to align their activities with the new dates and were directed to reach into private lives to regulate schedules of work, markets , and even public behavior. The widespread inconvenience, together with the attempt to replace religious ceremonies with civil ones, created ongoing tensions and even social unrest. After ascending to power, Napoleon gradually tolerated lack of compliance and eventually was quite willing to abolish the calendar, especially since it had not been widely adopted beyond France. Shaw argues that the calendar was in part a response to time issues that existed before the Revolution and that it had a lasting effect on the modern understanding of the temporal rhythms of society. The new calendar “marked a conscious move to a secular, religiously neutral calendar” (152), which is characteristic of the modern era. Time and the French Revolution presents a convincing argument that the Republican calendar is significantly more than a twelve-year curiosity in French history. Southeast Missouri State University Alice J. Strange WOLOSHYN, TANIA, and NICHOLAS HEWITT, eds. “L’Invention du Midi”: The Rise of the South of France in the National and International Imagination. U of Nottingham, 2011. ISBN 13 978-0-8535-8275-5. Pp. 119. £45. According to the introduction, Edward Said’s Orientalism has an equivalent in the term “Mediterraneanism,” whereby “the Mediterranean functioned as ‘semi-mythical construct,’ and imagined geography, like the Orient” (3). The ‘Midi’ as a social construct is the topic of this special issue of Nottingham French Studies. The first article focuses on the Festival d’Orange in its artistic and political context. The choice of plays, as well as the geographical and historical setting, associated Provence with the ancient Greek and Latin world. This image was used to promote the illustrious roots of the French Nation, while the literary movement Félibrige used it to promote a regional identity, language, and culture. The next article explores the problematic status of Maurras, whom the journal La Pensée du Midi erased from the ‘boundaries of the Midi’ for ideological reasons. But in spite of Maurras’s fascist association, he is not as coherent in this regard as his accusers would like to think. Maurras the writer was both a Neoclassicist and an untamed Romantic, two sides that do not necessarily converge politically. The next article explores the evolving usage of local festivities. From the revitalization of old customs to the invention of new celebrations, a new style of interaction has been developing between economic and touristic interests and the defenders of local identity and cultural heritage. This article includes the result of fieldwork to sustain its conclusions. The images of Provence are later studied through the analysis of old touristic posters, promoting Provence as part of the diversity of the French Nation and/or an area with a distinct identity and culture waiting to be discovered. Through the following study of the paintings and letters of HenriEdmond Cross, we are confronted with a somewhat similar paradox: the evocation of Provence as a remote utopia when in fact it was accessible by train and already a prime touristic destination. The film industry provides the next example of an imaginary Côte d’Azur as the origin of a distinct kind of “Frenchness,” populated with playboys and gentlemen thieves in fast cars. Two articles are devoted to Marseille. The first, “Marseille, a City beyond Distinction,” describes vividly and with interesting examples the peculiarity of a 408 FRENCH REVIEW 86.2 city that escapes the national or even the European framework of identity. The second retraces the itinerary of the review Les Cahiers du Sud. Thanks to Jean Ballard, who ran it from 1922 until the end, the review played an important role in the definition of a Mediterranean humanism. This article reveals the complexity of Marseille’s identity: once the center of the colonial project, it nonetheless remained a space somewhat separated from France itself. The last article is about the images of the Basque region, a construct heavily influenced by writers such as Pierre Loti but also by tourist guides. The Basque people are difficult to situate as belonging to the Midi, first since they are viewed as...