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ABSTRACTThis article examines different factors which may have influenced the decision of 37 men and women to leave the parish of St. Martin in the Island of Ré to go to Canada during the XVIITH century. For the majority of them, the emigrants and their families originated from St. Martin, if not from the Island of Ré, and lived in a specific social, economic, and religious environment, influenced in particular by the proximity of La Rochelle. Many factors may have played in favor of emigration. Firstly, St. Martin lived from wine cultivation. The average family wineyard being small but still profitable, it was important not to diminish its size through a strict equalitarian sharing among the heirs. Some compensatory strategies were used in order to preserve the integrity of the land, and these strategies may have encouraged children to emigrate. Secondly, many among the future emigrants may have been familiar with transoceanic voyages, since St. Martin was an important harbour. And lastly the religious influence of La Rochelle must be taken into consideration. This strong hold of the Reform spread many Protestant ideas to which part of the population from St. Martin adhered, including some emigrants to the New World.

AbstractThis essay explores the seemingly disjointed relationship between politics and aesthetics in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), questioning why the first articulation of conservative traditionalism would be announced in a shockingly new, experimental style. One of Novalis's aphorisms suggests that Burke's Reflections inverts common assumptions about the relationship between politics and aesthetics: “Many antirevolutionary books have been written for the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.” As Novalis observed, Burke's Reflections defies the formal conventions of political prose; Burke outlines his defense of traditional British institutions in an idiom that approaches the excesses of modernist montage in its patchwork of genres. His unsystematic style juxtaposes and blends, often in seemingly incongruous ways, diverse literary genres and rhetorical forms: the legalistic-latinate idiom, the captivity narrative, the biblical epistle, the political tract, the gothic novel, enthusiastic prophecy, chivalric romance, and tragedy. While these disparate literary forms erupt unpredictably in the Reflections, they do so in a fragmented, at times even grotesque manner, revealing what Burke himself admitted, that his conservative project is premised on an invented tradition devoid of all referential consistency and stability. In the face of an economy that was changing the very nature of value as such, Burke aesthetically revives fragments of tradition from the past and arranges them in an anti-utilitarian way that might conserve what he understood to be their pre-capitalist, non-relative value.

In the XIXth Century, the city of Quebec was one of the world's shipbuilding centres. After a description of developments in macro-economic terms, the author uses a theoretical framework based on the sociology of organisations to develop an understanding of the interaction between economic forces and the sociocultural context of these enterprises. This industry was built up by Scottish and then English and Irish immigrants after the Conquest. French Canadians participated as workers or subcontractors but became entrepreneurs only toward the end of the industry. The nature of the relationship between the management and the workers, set apart by their language, their religion and their industrial values, led to the appearance of an original mode of work organization, namely the masse trades.

In recent years, there have been changes in the status of participation in urban affairs. Over and above its inherent limits, this form of participation has been contributing to the development of a new political culture. Such at least is the hypothesis used here as a point of departure for the examination of the hearings and of the positions of the main categories of actors who have contributed to the development of the consultation policy defined by the city of Montreal in 1988, as well as to its review in 1995, following the accession to power of a new political party. By accepting to participate in the definition of the public consultation policy on the municipal scene, the actors of civil society, particularly the representatives of the community and social movements, have undertaken a twofold process: a process of confrontation with the public authorities, and a process of building recognition of their own identity.

Even though they may appear at first glance as radically different, Québécois and Israeli societies nonetheless offer startling similarities when it comes to the centrality of language in the creation of a national identity. This is also true concerning the language policies put in place by the different Québec and Israel governments, notably vis-à-vis recent immigrants, cultural minorities, the official use of French and Hebrew, and resistance to the dominance of English. These parallel developments have appeared despite the fact that Hebrew is a reborn language, in fact one of the rare instances in the twentieth century of an idiom revived after an almost total eclipse, and Québec French an emergent language similar to many other minority languages in Western European countries. These socio-linguistic considerations eventually bring us back to the concept of nation-state as it appeared at the time of the French Revolution, and which found among East-European Jews unique applications that heralded the rise of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel.

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to explore a macrohistorical hypothesis concerning the depiction of leisure as opposed to the reality of leisure, a hypothesis which, briefly, may be stated as follows: throughout the countless centuries during which humanity possessed only pre-industrial or pre-technological tools, there persisted a fairly stable depiction or notion of leisure; the existence of leisure was justified as a privileged way of life enjoyed by the dominant classes of society, in perfect dichotomy with work, which was associated exclusively with the dominated classes. From the moment when the industrial revolution, under the direction of the bourgeoisie as dominant class, began to transform the means of production and the social relations arising from production, contemporary forms of leisure began to make their appearance as a visible means of consuming the wealth made possible by the prodigious development of the forces of production. Initially, this contemporary leisure was revealed as a privilege of the bourgeoisie in its role as the dominant class and served to point up its position. Subsequently, in liberal societies, leisure activities became accessible to an ever-wider social group within the framework of the so-called "consumer society", in proportion with the degree to which consumerism had become an instrument necessary for the development of the interests of the bourgeois class and an essential cog wheel in the continuation of existing social relations.

AbstractThis article presents Tocqueville's federalism as both unusual and equivocal: unusual because less unconditional than the federalism of most of the other major figures of the history of modern federal thought, especially Montesquieu, Kant and Proudhon; equivocal in the sense that Tocqueville states the virtues of the federal system, while refusing to prescribe it, to predict its apparition or even to consider it as a future possibility for any other country than the United States and Switzerland. The article maintains that beyond the sound prudence characteristic of Tocqueville's writings, nationalism, eurocentrism and imperialism largely explain the incapacity of the author to more seriously consider the range of possibilities offered by federal systems. In conclusion, it appears that the Tocqueville case may be very instructive for the contemporary debates on federal citizenship in contexts of cultural diversity.