Between the end of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth, France's military decline sparked much thought regarding reforms that would increase combat effectiveness. While some reformers believed the problem to be technical and thus targeted tactical and organizational aspects of the military system, others maintained that the problem was moral, social, and political stemming from a corrupt civil society. Espousing a more anthropocentric and phenomenological account of war, the latter group pioneered ideas in military and social psychology that set the stage for changes in military policy and for the foundation of a more modern vision of selfhood and the experience of war.
Entre la fin du dix-septième siècle et celle du dix-huitième, le déclin militaire de la France suscita de nombreuses réflexions visant à améliorer les performances françaises sur le champ de bataille. Si certains objectèrent des défaillances techniques et proposèrent donc des ajustements tactiques et organisationnels du système militaire, d'autres soutinrent une origine morale, sociale et politique liée à l'état corrompu de la société civile. Epousant une analyse plus anthropocentrique et plus phénoménologique de la guerre, ce dernier groupe de penseurs développa de nouvelles idées portant sur la psychologie sociale et militaire et posant les jalons d'une conception plus moderne du « moi » et de l'expérience de la guerre.
F or specialists of the eighteenth century, teaching the history of race is a necessary dimension of our practice. We are experts of the age when the modern conception of race coalesced through (and in service of) enterprises of global economic and military power that were fueled by enslavement, colonization, exploitation, and genocide of peoples designated as other. Antiracist protests of 2020 have brought urgency to examining this history in our classrooms. Yet as I have written elsewhere, there remains extraordinary resistance to and controversy surrounding the concept of race and its study, especially in the French context. 1 For scholar-pedagogues who take up the challenge of teaching race in the eighteenth century, it is essential to work together to share resources for building curricula, methods, courage, and creativity that will foster deep inquiry and learning for students and professors alike. It is in this spirit that I will discuss-though not prescribe-some of my own experiments in teaching race in the eighteenth-century French empire through the lenses of diversity, decolonization, multiculturalism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). While certain scholars object to the use of CRT, deeming it an inapplicable or unwelcome American import into the study of French texts and cultural phenomena, I strongly disagree with this rigid appraisal. CRT not only attends to the historical period in question, but can illuminate structural forms of discrimination that are evident in artistic, social, economic, and political life in the first French empire. It is
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