On November 27

On this day in ...
... 1912 (100 years ago today), the Treaty Between France and Spain Regarding Morocco was concluded. The pact divided Morocco into two protectorates, the larger portion controlled by the French and smaller parcels controlled (ultimately, through a caliph) the Spanish. The contemporary lithograph below claims a civilizing force in North Africa as a result of this European project (along with that of the British in Egypt).

(credit)

It is thus to be noted that part of the Spanish Zone is now known as the contested region of Western Sahara. As posted, for decades since an International Court of Justice decision, Western Sahara has been occupied by the state of Morocco, Morocco having secured a declaration of independence in 1956.

(Prior November 27 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On October 18

On this day in ...


...1797 (215 years ago today, though some sources say October 17), France and Austria signed a treaty acknowledging Napoleon's victory in Italy. It was signed at Passariano, yet became associated with a different city, Campoformio, and so is known today as the Treaty of Campo Formio (left). (photo credit) The pact gave France much territory, and "marked the end of 1,100 years of Venetian independence."


(Prior October 18 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On October 16

On this day in ...
... 1997 (15 years ago today), Catherine Trautmann (left), then France's Minister of Culture and Communication, announced that the official archives concerning an October 17, 1961, Paris demonstration would be opened to the public. As previously posted, the protest by tens of thousands of persons of Algerian ancestry ended with hundreds dead, including some demonstrators who were thrown into the Seine by police. Commanding the operation was the Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, who eventually would be imprisoned for crimes against humanity stemming from his World War II collaboration with the Nazis. As depicted in a news video clip, police unions opposed the decision by Trautmann (who now serves as a member of the European Parliament) to disclose the October 17 records.

(Prior October 16 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On October 3

On this day in ...
... 1866, Austria and Italy signed a Vienna Treaty promising peace between them. Among the treaty's terms were the repatriation of each side's prisoners of war, the building of an interstate railway, and, most significantly, Austria's cession of "the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom"; Venice eventually would be transferred to Italy, via France. (map credit) That last step would put soldiers and others from the region, which had been under Austrian control, to the choice of nationality and allegiance.

(Prior October 3 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On September 23

On this day in ...
... 1907 (105 years ago today), Anne Desclos (left) was born in Rochefort, France. Educated at the Sorbonne, she worked 1st as a journalist and then at Gallimard publishing house, where she adopted one of her pen names, Dominique Aury. She translated into French English-language authors including Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reacting to the contention of her employer/lover that women could not write erotic novels, under the pseudonym Pauline Réage she penned Story of O (1954), which sparked an obscenity prosecution. (photo credit) Declos/Aury/Réage, who was named a Chevalier of France's Legion d'Honneur, died in 1998.

(Prior September 23 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Bullfighting survives French constitutional challenge

(credit for mid-1800s painting by Edouard Manet)

Claims that bullfighting is unconstitutionally cruel to animals succumbed today to counterclaims of cultural pluralism.
Le Comité radicalement anticorrida, an animal-rights group that goes by the acronym CRAC and counts among its supporters French luminaries like Brigitte Bardot, initiated the contest against la corrida, as bullfighting is known in the southern regions of France where it's long been practiced.
That practice has been protected by Article 521-1 of the French Penal Code, which generally forbids animal cruelty. That article makes exceptions however, for bullfighting and cockfighting, if they take place in certain regions "where an uninterrupted local tradition can be invoked."
CRAC argued that this provision violates constitutional principles of equal treatment, set forth inter alia in Article 6 of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, which states:

« La loi... doit être la même pour tous, soit qu'elle protège, soit qu'elle punisse ».

that is

'The law ... must be the same for everyone, with respect to protection as well as to punishment.'

A Conseil constitutionnel judgment, issued today, rejected that argument.
Referring to Article 521-1, the decision of France's 9 constitutional judges determined (my translation):

'The difference that this law draws between acts of the same nature done in different geographic zones is directly linked to the purpose of the law. ... Given, moreover, that the law authorizes judges to determine whether a situation in fact relates to an interrupted local tradition ... is sufficiently precise to guarantee against the risk of arbitrariness.'

Lamenting the decision, CRAC declared, "We are in a tauromachique dictatorship."
Meanwhile, supporters defended the sanctioning of les courses aux taureaux (yet another name for bullfighting) as promoting "cultural, social, and regional pluralism."

On September 7

On this day in ...

... 1927 (85 years ago today), sitting at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Permanent Court of International Justice, composed of 11 regular judges and 1 ad litem judge, issued the decision in The Case of the S.S. Lotus (France v. Turkey). As indicated in prior posts available here, the reasoning by which a court majority ruled for Turkey in this dispute, arising out of the collision of the French at right and a Turkish vessel, would become known as the Lotus principle. Here's the key passage:

'International law governs relations between independent States. The rules of law binding upon States therefore emanate from their own free will as expressed in conventions or by usages generally accepted as expressing principles of law and established in order to regulate the relations between these co-existing independent communities or with a view to the achievement of common aims. Restrictions upon the independence of States cannot therefore be presumed.'

Or, as rephrased by the PCIJ dissenter, traditionally, for states,

'[U]nder international law everything which is not prohibited is permitted.'

(Prior September 7 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On September 1

place de la Sorbonne

On this day in ...
... 1257 (755 years ago today), theologian Robert de Sorbon opened a college in Paris. It grew to one of the world's first universities, and one of its most renowned.  Since the demonstrations of May 1968, the Université de Paris has comprised multiple autonomous universities. Among the institutions claiming the name "Sorbonne" are Paris-Sorbonne ("Paris IV") and Panthéon-Sorbonne ("Paris 1"). Yours truly spent a great sabbatical year affiliated with the latter institution, whose faculty have included IntLawGrrls contributors Mireille Delmas-Marty and Hélène Ruiz Fabri.

(Prior September 1 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On August 30

On this day in ...

Nancy Wake

... 1912 (100 years ago today), Nancy Wake was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She, her parents, and her five siblings moved to Sydney, Australia; soon after, their journalist father left them. Wake herself left home as a teenager, eventually traveling to New York and London and settling in Paris, where she was a free-lance writer said to be fond of the French city's nightlife. By the time Nazi Germany occupied France, she was living in Marseilles, the wife of a wealthy French industrialist who would be executed on account of the couple's work for the Resistance. Wake herself went to England and joined the Special Operations Executive, a British spy agency about which we've frequently posted here, here, and here. Parachuted with into France in 1944, Wake worked behind the enemy lines as a spy. The Germans nicknamed her la Souris blanche because she could not be captured. After the war her efforts were recognized with Britain's George Medal, the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion d’Honneur. Wake, who published her memoirs, The White Mouse, in 1997, died in London a year ago this month.

(Prior August 30 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On August 23

Juliette Adam, 1896

On this day in ...
... 1936, just months shy of her 100th birthday, Juliette Adam died in Callian, a village in southeastern France. The daughter of a physician, she'd become a published writer by her early 20s; her feminist work, Idées antiproudhoniennes sur l'amour, la femme et le mariage, defended 2 women who published under male pseudonyms (and also were known for carrying on love affairs), Marie D'Agoult/Daniel Stern and Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin/Baroness Dudevant/George Sand. Adam's career also included: as a writer, novels, gossipy memoirs, and essays on geopolitics; as an editor-publisher, the "influential" Nouvelle Revue; as a hostess, a salon populated by members of the republican movement of the 1870s.

(Prior August 23 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On August 18

On this day in ...
... 1572 (440 years ago today), 19-year-old Marguerite de Valois, the Catholic daughter of a French king, was married off to a Protestant, Henri de Bourbon, king of Navarre and eventual king of France, "in a marriage that was designed to reunite family ties and create harmony between Catholics and Huguenots," as French Protestants were called. (image credit) All did not work well. Shortly before the wedding, Henri's mother died under suspicious circumstances, and 6 days after, Catholic mobs in Paris slew Huguenots of all classes in what's known as the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Marguerite saved her husband from the bloodbath – and also her lover, another man also named Henri. The marriage, which was marked by infidelities on both sides, ended by agreement in 1599, with Marguerite retaining the title of queen. She went on to publish scandalous memoirs, become a supporter of the arts, and to help care for the children of her ex-husband and his 2d wife. The inspiration for Alexandre Dumas' novel (and a recent film) called La Reine Margot, Queen Marguerite died in 1615.

(Prior August 18 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On August 10

On this day in ...

(credit)

... 1792 (220 years ago today), as detailed in this letter, a mob stormed Paris' Tuileries Palace (right), then home to King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and their family. They fled to the presumed safety of the Legislative Assembly, which placed him under arrest. As previously posted, Louis would be executed within months, and Marie Antoinette within a little over a year; the French Revolution would continue for years after that.

(Prior August 10 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On August 1

On this day in ...
... 1902 (110 years ago today), the United States purchased from France the rights to the Panama Canal -- that is, the Central American land on which the French for decades had tried in vain to build a canal interocéanique that would link the Atlantic and the Pacific. (credit for 1885 illustration of French-led excavation) Congress had authorized the purchase a month earlier, by its passage of the Spooner Act of 1902. (Prior posts on the subsequent completion of the canal and its much-later return to Panama are, respectively, here and here.)

(Prior August 1 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

'La vérité, c'est que pas un soldat allemand, pas un seul, ne fut mobilisé pour l'ensemble de l'opération.
'La vérité, c'est que ce crime fut commis en France, par la France.'

that is,

'The truth is that no German soldier, not one, was mobilized in this operation.
'The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France.'

– French President François Hollande, in a speech Sunday in which he reaffirmed the responsibility of French officials for the 1942 le rafle du Vel d'Hiv. In this incident, as we posted a while back,

'on orders of the Vichy government that ruled after France fell to the Nazis in World War II, French police rounded up at least 13,000 citizens of Jewish heritage -- including more than 4,000 children -- and detained them in Paris' Vélodrome d'hiver, the Winter Velodrome not far from the Eiffel Tower. Of them, "not 1 child or woman escaped death at Auschwitz,"although 40 men did survive.'

Hollande's discours, which is available in full here and discussed in news articles here and here, came 17 years after a similar admission by then-President Jacques Chirac. (credit for photo of Hollande at Sunday's commemoration © Présidence de la République-Pascal Segrette/Laurent Blevennec)

On July 20

On this day in ...
... 1922 (90 years ago today), pursuant to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, lands that Germany had controlled until its defeat in World War I were allotted to victorious Allied Powers. (credit for map showing German colonies circa 1913) For the most part it was France and Britain that were designated "mandatory authorities" charged with administering these African territories. Divided between them were areas formerly known as Togoland, Kamerun, and German East Africa. A small portion of that last territory would be mandated to Belgium the following year; a small triangle to the south of it was mandated to Portugal on this day. 

(Prior July 20 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On July 14

On this day in ...
... 1817 (195 years ago today, and 28 years to the day after the storming of the Bastille), the author known as Madame de Staël died in Paris. She'd been born in the same city 51 years earlier, and was named Anne Louise Germaine Necker. Her father, a Swiss banker, was Director of Finance to France's King Louis XVI; "her mother, Suzanne Curchod, the daughter of a French-Swiss pastor, assisted her husband’s career by establishing a brilliant literary and political salon in Paris." Germaine, as the daughter was called, was an early light in that salon. She also was married early to a Swedish diplomat -- hence her married name, de Staël -- and separated after giving birth to 3 children. As a young woman, she published letters analyzing the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and supported the French Revolution, especially in its early period. Eventually, she went into exile on account of her political views. For the rest of her life, she would alternate between Paris and other European cities, depending on the political winds. Like her mother, Madame de Staël was known for the salons she hosted. (credit for circa-1810 portrait) Today's she's best known for her writings, including her epistolary 1st novel, Delphine (1802), the sociopolitical message of which prompted Napoleon Bonaparte's displeasure, and so another exile.

(Prior July 14 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On June 27

credit

On this day in ...
... 1977 (35 years ago today), the Republic of Djibouti won independence from France, which since the early 19th century had held the territory, located in the Horn of Africa, as a colony known initially as French Somaliland and later as the French Territory of the Afars and Issas. Today this coastal desert state (flag at right), slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Massachusetts, has a population of more than three-quarters of a million persons.

(Prior June 27 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On the Job! Business & Human Rights @ FIDH

(On the Job! pays occasional notice to interesting intlaw job notices)
What 'Grrl could resist a year-long stint in Paris working on business and human rights issues?  You're in luck:  The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) has posted for a Programme Officer on Business and Human Rights to work from their Paris office for a year beginning September 1.
The Programme Officer reports to the Globalization and Human Rights desk.  Her responsibilities include: monitoring and researching corporate actors' impact on human rights; organizing fact-finding missions; drafting position papers, press releases and letters to relevant authorities; contributing to advocacy work at the national, regional, and international levels; participating in field missions; and representing FIDH in advocacy meetings and NGO coalitions.
Candidates must have at least three years of professional experience; a master's degree in international law, human rights, international relations, political science, or economics; good knowledge of international human rights law, particularly economic, social and cultural rights as well as business issues; and fluency in English and French, with Spanish an asset.  She must be a team player, with outstanding organizational and writing skills, and be willing to travel.
Interested? Submit your cv and cover letter, including the job reference number (CP-MOND-06-2012), by e-mail to Marie-France Burq: mfburq@fidh.org by the deadline of July 1.

On June 18

On this day in ...
... 1815, Napoleon met his Waterloo. The British defeat of the Corsica-born French emperor/general in a Belgian field ended "the Napoleonic era of European history." (credit for photo of statue of Napoleon, located in Waterloo) The era had been marked by decades of continental wars, on the one hand, and establishment of the still-influential Napoleonic Code, on the other. At 1st, Napoleon returned to Paris, but within a month he was in British custody, and before year's end he'd begun a life of exile on St. Helena, a tiny Atlantic island about 1,200 miles west of Angola. There he died on May 5, 1821, age 51.

 (Prior June 18 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On June 6

On this day in ...
... 1646, Hortense Mancini was born in Rome but grew up in Paris, 1 of 4 sisters in an aristocratic family, and a favored niece of her politically influential uncle, Cardinal Mazarin. Married at age 15, she gave birth to 4 children despite a "hellish" marriage; at age 22, she fled to her family in Rome. Mancini, the Duchess of Mazarin, was known for many affairs, with kings, princes, and countesses alike. She and a sister, Marie Mancini, who held the title Princess Colonna and also had fled her marriage, were among the 1st women in France to publish their memoirs -- and it is that achievement for which they were honored in Washington, D.C., in a just-ended Folger Library exhibit on women authors from 1500 to 1700. Hortense and Marie died in 1699 and 1715, respectively. (credit for circa-1660s portrait of Marie, at left, and Hortense, at right, with a 3d Mancini sister, Olympia, in the middle)

(Prior June 6 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)