Contenu du sommaire : De la pleureuse à la veuve joyeuse

The “fantôme de crêpe” and the Woman to Grip. Criminal Widows in the Court of Assizes (1880-1940)The “tribunaliers” invent a new criminal figure: the widow. Can a woman who killed her husband to show up with the clothes of mourning? Under the pen of the “legal journalists” parade: widows ghosts and authoritarian women. They wonder what were the weapons used? Can what sense we give them? They wonder about the motive for the crime. The criminal wife sow disorder in the genre and in the press.

Euphémie Lacoste. Black Widow or Happy Widow?
The woman who kills her husband is not only a criminal but also a widow. In the 19th century, exclusively tried by men, she creates, in the judiciary reports published in La Gazette des Tribunaux and in the general press, some comments that let well up the standards of that time. The aim is here to understand for what reasons, in July 1844, at the Palais de justice d'Auch, Euphémie Lacose, accused of having organized the poisoning of her husband, has left the Tribunal free, contrary to Marie Lafarge, who, according to the legal reporters, had been her model four years ago.

The Killer Widow. La mariée était en noir, by François Truffaut
The scrutinizing of the conditions in which François Truffaut's La Mariée était en noir was thought up, written and then shot is aimed at shedding light on the multifaceted expressions of widowhood via a close up on in the author of the film, on the writer of the adapted text, and on the actress of the film, Jeanne Moreau. Irish, a perpetual widower with a fetichistic taste for black, Truffaut who was desperately seeking ways get beyond the loss of passions both in the flesh and on the screen, and Moreau, the way in which mourning becomes Moreau with the black and white outfits designed by Pierre Cardin, grieving over the brutal death of her fictional husband who was shot dead on the very steps of the church immediately after the wedding, and helping every single character/next target to die cinematically. As Truffaut admits in a letter to Hitchcock : “The widow is a virgin” a paradox which lies at the core of the film and of all the interpretations of the film.

The Iconography of Widows in the 19th Century and its Posterity in the 20th Century
The place of widows during the 19th century was regulated by law and customs. Customs and collective representations influence an iconography that is not one but plural: the widows of official painters are not those of modernists nor than those of illustrators of precious books or press cartoonists. This article aims to identify the types structuring the iconography of widows in 19th century painting, to determine their dependence on collective representations and to draw a differential assessment with precious illustration and popular iconography.

Widowhood and the Status of Widows: The representation of Widows in the French Illustrated Press at the End of the 19th Century and the Beginning of the 20th CenturySatirists and cartoonists of the turn of the 20th century denounced the ambiguous relationships between widowhood and womanhood and illustrated the sometimes contradictory yearnings of widows for social welfare and individual freedom. On the one hand the cartoonists associated widowhood with financial security and the need for taking out provident schemes prior to the death of the spouse and exacerbated the fear of living in poverty. On the other hand they showed the conflicting aspects of the status of widows. Widowhood was actually a rather unclear status: it complied with moral obligations which imposed heavy constraints on the widow who was as a result protected by a life-long sacred status but it also freed the woman from the bonds of marriage and thus exposed her, as an independant individual, to the moral judgement of the community. Sometimes cynically, cartoonists figured out the strategies used by the people of the time to bypass the usual social conventions and etiquette while still conforming to the norms, particularly during the mourning period. As she was represented as a woman divided between her past and present lives and with great expectations for the future, the widow reflected the common prejudices of the time but also embodied the doubts and questions which brought about the feminist awakening.

Weeping Widows, Happy Widows, Obscene Widows. Spectacularization of Widowhood's Topics through Different Media Forms (19th-20th century) and the Beginning of the 20th CenturySocial type par excellence, the widow is a very complex figure of our collective mind. The widow characters, hardly ever present in illustrations, significantly absent in the nineteenth-century littérature de physiologie, invest the stage both in tragedies and comedies. With what aims at being an intermedial approach, this article studies the progressive spreading of these stage tropisms (operetta, boulevard theatre) towards the printed image (satires, back pages items) by clarifying the erotic connotations of “happy widows” and by contrasting them with the weeping figures particularly numerous at the end of wars.

Talking about a Man, Asserting Oneself as a Woman. Artist's Widows: Witness, “Muses”, Experts (19th-20th century) and the Beginning of the 20th CenturyThe rights of an artist's widow, regarding the preservation and authentification of the art works, their sale and donation, make her a key actress in the posthumous valorization of the work ; but also a marginalized one, in an art sector where professionalism grows, as well as forgotten by an art history more interested with creation and heritage. The cases of Sonia Delaunay, Nina Kandinsky, Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss and Nelly van Doesburg, who have in common to have been the companion of an abstract artist deaceased before 1945, allow us to show both how important (although uneven) their media presence was and how they tried and used these shows to shed light on their own efforts to promote and patrimonialize the work of their late companion.

Seafarer's Widows in Saintonge (17th-19th centuries) Beginning of the 20th Century
On the Atlantic coast, the widows participate in most of the activities in connection with the sea. We find them in the exploitation of the foreshore, since the picking until the shellfish farming, including fisheries, widely opened to the fishing in the “écluses” of Oléron, and also the fish of oysters “in the iron hand” on all the rocks of the coast. Producers, the widows of the villages of the coast of the Saintonge were also businesswomen. It is at the head of transportation companies, since the coastal navigation up to the scale of the international trade, that these widows finally assumed the same functions and the responsibilities as the men, in maritime Saintonge.

Heartbroken Women. From Widows to Girls Orphans, Privates Histories in the History of 20th century Beginning of the 20th CenturyOut of a traditional history, but rigorously written, this article shows a familal and private history about the Augustine Guyon-Gellin (1910-2011) memories. She went through the 20th century full of wars and violences, letting behind him widows and girls orphans who became the real familiy pillars, in Manosque, a little city from Provence.

Digital projects at the Bn
F (1990-2018)Initiated by a meeting with Laurent Duplouy (Head of the digitization office in the department of conservation, Directorate of services and networks of the French National Library), this paper presents an outlook and a reflexion about the current challenges of digitization within the « Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) ». The reconstitution of steps, the analysis of the actions of the people responsible for it and the observations of the on-going mutations constitute the main angles of attack. Finally, digitization appears to be a good way to analyse the evolution of the BnF policy in terms of conservation and valorisation and more broadly, that of a public service institution. 

A Night at the Musée Grévin: An Imaginary Visit to the Wax Museum. “L'Enlèvement de Louis XVII au Musée Grévin”, by Hervé GuibertThis article analyzes an unpublished text by the writer Hervé Guibert, “L'enlèvement de Louis XVII au Musée Grévin,” (1981) as a basis for reflecting on the place of the musée Grévin in the Parisian cultural landscape and the realm of the imagination at the end of the 20th century. Through the lens of a fantasized show that builds on the original scenography established by the institution, Guibert invites the visitors to take a critical look at this intricate and unique institution, founded at the end of the 19th century. The analysis of this text, written one hundred years after the opening of the Musée Grévin, allows for study of the ways in which wax doubles and the representation of the History of France are apprehended, and it highlights the museum's scenographic contradictions at the time.

Criminal Justice Contemporary (1789-2018) to the Test of the Comic Francophone. Lowercase and Famous Criminal CasesEarly on, the comic took crime. In appearance, criminal justice interested only little authors. However, looking more closely, one realizes that the time of the trial occupies a significant place in the comic boards. Writers and designers show a great diversity. The Court looks like a theatre. Onstage, the roles are reversed. Grotesque characters have the power of life and death. The judiciary appears as a relentless machine.

The Paris Commune: A Sphinx  in Front of its Pictures“Dusk”, “sphinx” or “dawn”: These metaphors full of imagery are often use to understand the Paris commune of 1871. Pictures about this event seem to be a perfect sum up of antagonistic memories, emphasizing, more clearly than texts, one of the main stake: effacement, or not, of the very communards from the memories. Struggling against full effacement done by the Versaillais, the vanquished mix up the living and the dead; oppose their revolutionary specters to monster drawned by the winners. But, after 1971, when the Commune is said “alive”, pictures also come alive again, and the memory of communards too.

The Recovery of Casa Susanna's photographs
In 2004, three hundred and forty photographs were found in a New York's flea market. On these old snapshots, dated from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, men are smiling to the camera but they're dressed in women's attire. They enact an ordinary woman, the same one we see in all family photo albums. These recovered photographs are only a small part of a huge underground cross-dressers network of married men, good fathers and good patriots. They belong to the American white middle-class. They embody the American dream. And its nightmare. Because America was, at the time, the Cold War America, anyone who would disobey the normative order would be implacably banned, repressed, excluded and hunted down. Despite the risks, these men wrote to each other, met regularly and organized themselves around a secret magazine. They refused to submit to the cult of ideal manliness and they transgressed the normative prescriptions of gender. They have created a singular and unique collective identity through photography. This rare visual archive is incomparable because it provides insights into a transgender subculture that fully belongs to the political history of US post-war sexual minorities.