Julian Jackson. Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS.

Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS by Julian Jackson Review by: By Matt Houlbrook The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 2 (April 2011), pp. 523-524 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.2.523 . Accessed: 28/07/2012 07:04
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern

cle (pp. 17, 326). It is this sanitized, timeless, and heavily nostalgic version of the French capital that persists today. Bridging traditional urban history and cultural theory (Jurgen Habermas, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Cer teau gure prominently), Wakeman untangles the complex relationship between the Parisian public sphere (understood as a discursive realm of political sociability and collective experience) and public space (manifest as material urban geography) during the decades following World War II. Erudite and intellectually stimulating, the book can be faulted only for its tendency to participate in the very nostalgia that it purports to describe. And if one wonders, in the wake of Jennifer Anne Boittins Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (2010) and W. Brian Newsomes French Urban Planning, 19401968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (2009), how greater attention to gender, race, and religion might recongure Wakemans story, her book nonetheless delivers important insights about the reconstruction of the City of Light during a critical moment in contemporary history. While dense going for undergraduates, the book is recommended to scholars of urban planning and cultural history alike. TAMARA CHAPLIN University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign JULIAN JACKSON. Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Pp. xiii, 321. $40.00. Julian Jacksons book is a challenging and meticulous study of the formation of queer social and political networks in France between World War II and the 1980s. Jacksons focus is Arcadiesocial club, journal, and homophile organization akin to the Mattachine Society in the United States. Drawing on personal papers, newspapers, oral testimonies, and the journal Arcadie itself, Jackson charts the organizations origins in 1954 and transformation through the very different contexts of 1960s permissiveness and 1970s gay liberation. In so doing he rescues the organization from the enormous condescension of post-1970 activists who dismissed it as conservative and reformist. At its inception the masculinist ideology of the Resistance, the shadow of collaboration, the obsessive natalism, the celebration of the family, the fears of delinquency, and the obsession with protecting the young . . . created an exceptionally unfavorable climate for homosexual men (p. 50). Rather than hiding in the shadows, Arcadies founder the domineering Andre Baudryshrugged off encoun ters with law to challenge Puritanism, ignorance, and hypocrisy (p. 56). In the early days, Jackson argues, far from being the pusillanimous bourgeois gure of legend, Baudry was a kind of driven visionary who took extraordinary risks (p. 9). Until the late 1960s Arcadie

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remained Frances only homosexual organization and publication, and the only Parisian venue where men could safely dance together. In its national-historical context this volume is an original and suggestive contribution to modern French history. As Jackson notes, republican universalism and the difculties this creates in dealing with forms of particularism has meant that French queer historiography lags behind that of North America, for example (p. 4). Building on the excellent work of scholars like Florence Tamagne, this is thus a vital exercise in historical recovery. Jacksons book also has important broader resonances for our understanding of sexual politics and communities. Year Zero notions of the queer past that animated the Homosexual Revolutionary Action Fronts attacks on Arcadie were paralleled by the fractious relationship between Britains Gay Liberation Front and older Homosexual Law Reform Society (p. 7). Like recent work on Mattachine, Jackson rejects the caricature of the timid homophile and challenges the present-centered histories that inform contemporary queer politics: We need to escape from a teleological reading of homosexual historyto liberate ourselves from gay liberation and understand the contingent and contextualized nature of preStonewall politics as a formative but misunderstood historical moment (p. 13). Jacksons work has these resonances because of the careful way in which he locates Arcadie in a transnational homophile moment. Such organizations were the product of a postwar collision between liberal idealism and social reaction, internationalist progressivism and national conservatisms, the aspiration to create a new world and cultural pressures to restore an old one (p. 114). Arcadie developed through Baudrys work with the Swiss homophile movement Der Kreis (p. 65) and his connections to the International Committee for Sexual Equality, an umbrella organization for the various [European] homosexual rights organizations that had been established by the Dutch COC and had its origins in interwar German rights movements (p. 69). Tracing these intellectual and interpersonal exchanges Jackson describes Arcadie as part of a shared historical movement in which organizations throughout the West found themselves defending a common vision of homosexuality and claiming social and legal rights for the respectable citizen (p. 111). Journals like One and Arcadie publicized each others activities and believed in a common enterprise of enlightenment (p. 112). Jacksons preoccupations remainrightly within a national-historical framework, but his works shows the potential of a genuinely transnational approach to radically recongure our understandings of the queer past. While much existing work on queer politics focuses on institutions and political process, Jackson is equally concerned with moving beyond this to consider questions of ethics. Arcadie became a forum in which to explore ways of thinking and talking about being homosexual and new models of affect and intimacy (p. 15).

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Reviews of Books
ologically the volume ranges from the late Middle Ages, through Reformation and confessionalization, all the way to the end of the rst phase of the Thirty Years War. In this entire period territorial jurisdiction in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach belonged to the Hohenzollern dynasty. Smith tells a rich and complex tale, one that addresses all of the major issues and themes debated by historians of early modern Germany in recent decades, including the periodization of the Reformation, the relation of Reformation to political modernization, communalism, confessionalization, Catholic reform, and the witch craze. On communalism, Smith departs from the school of Peter Blickle with a nuanced portrayal of the range of political strategies and ideological resources deployed by villagers in pursuit of increased self-determination in matters political and religious. Not surprisingly, a close examination of these villagers (i.e., inhabitants of the so-called Gemeinde) reveals that a broad range of social status, educational levels, and wealth spelled considerable variation in the practical applications of the basic principles of the communal Reformation. Similarly, Smiths very close engagement with a vast set of archival data leads him to concludeborrowing from Marc Forsterthat the formation of strong confessional identities could proceed even in the absence of actual confessional state building or effective social disciplining as postulated by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling. Signicantly Smith concludes that such confessionalization operated in comparable fashion for all three major confessions. Smith likewise challenges Lyndal Ropers analyses of early modern German witch hunting in terms of a gender/sexuality nexus on the one hand and demographic/ economic nexus on the other. Instead, Smith argues, the fates of hundreds of hapless victims of the witch mania in Upper Franconia can best be explained in terms of the conventional local politics of jurisdictional competition, border insecurities, and the personalities of dominant individuals like the demonologist and polemicist-publicist Friedrich Forner. Smith never stretches the limits or applicability of his evidence, and his argumentative points are invariably understated. It is the sheer weight of his evidence that makes Smiths work both compelling and convincing. The range and volume of sources he has located and mined are nothing short of awesome (the critical apparatus accounts for about one third of the volume). Smiths detail-oriented approach inspires condence in at least two regards: rst of all, his apparent total assimilation of all things Upper Franconianone is reminded of the prosopographical studies of an earlier generation of German historiansmakes it seem very unlikely that he has missed anything signicant. More than that, though, his decades-long immersion in the material allows him to guide the attentive (again, the approach is ever so gentle) non-specialist through the dangerous shoals of obvious assumption and reasonable conclusion. How easy would it be to confuse the Bishop of Wurzburg with a bishop of Bamberg

Its emphasis on dignity was thus never an uncritical internalization of heterosexual norms. Alongside regular dances, Arcadie provided lms, lectures, and talks. In 1971 men discussed the homophile approaching old age and watched Midnight Cowboy. Through discussion, opinion pieces, and book reviews, Arcadie offered virtual community and the cultural resources through which to make sense of selfhood. Throughout, Arcadie sought to change the worlds perception of homosexuality; to connect homosexuals to their history and culture; to make them, as it were, experts on themselves by equipping them to assume their identity and resist the opprobrium to which they were daily subjected (p. 134). In a sensitive discussion, Jackson teases out Arcadies place in its members everyday existence, locating it at the center of what might be described as an archeology of mid-century queer lives. This book is an important intervention into a burgeoning transnational queer historiography. In establishing the points of connection between the social, the cultural, and the political, Jackson suggests how historians might integrate realms of analysis too often treated as discretelocating queer political institutions within their broader social contexts. While Jackson might engage in a more explicit and sustained scrutiny of queer theoretical frameworks in the French context, these are fundamentally important connections to make and have continued resonance. In the 1970s, Jackson argues, Arcadie was not displaced by radical gay politics but saw its public presence and inuence reinvigoratedjust as an emerging network of bars and discotheques made it increasingly anachronistic. The story of the 1970s, he suggests, is therefore not just about a conict between two visions of homosexual mobilization. It is also about how the very idea of homosexual mobilization confronted the challenge represented by the development of commercial networks of homosexual sociability that had little interest in homophile ethics or gay politics (p. 171). A challenge for our times? MATT HOULBROOK Oxford University WILLIAM BRADFORD SMITH. Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia, 13001630. (Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe, number 8.) Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2008. Pp. xiii, 280. $85.00. William Bradford Smiths book is a study of the long Reformation in relation to the workings of the territorial state in a single region of Germany over the course of three centuries. In fact, Upper Franconia actually contained three geographically contiguous but distinct jurisdictions: the powerful bishopric (Hochstift ) of Bamberg, anked by the margraviate of Brandenburg-Kulmbach to the north and east (bordering on Bohemia), and by the margraviate of BrandenburgAnsbach to the south and west (abutting the territory of the powerful Imperial City of Nuremberg). Chron-

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