2026 WINNER

Winner: Deirdre Lyons, “‘She Made Her Belly Disappear’: A Microhistory of Slavery and Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” Critical Historical Studies 12, no. 1 (2025): 23-49.

In this smartly researched and elegantly written essay, Deirdre Lyons uses techniques of microhistory to explore the “sexual economy” of slavery in nineteenth-century Martinique, defining it as a system through which “slaveholding men and women systematically commodified and expropriated bondswomen’s reproductive capacity and sexuality for profit, pleasure, and the reconstitution of racial chattel slavery.” The French Caribbean was notorious for its near negative birth rate among the enslaved, which elicited significant responses from enslavers like Pierre Dessalles. Opening with a nuanced reading of Dessalles’s diary and published correspondence, Lyons shows how the enslaver not only complained constantly about the lack of reproduction but also sexually exploited those in his household to perpetrate his literal and figurative dominion. However, rather than focusing exclusively on Dessalles’s abhorrent sexuality, Lyons goes further, delving into the “shared knowledge,” “widespread medical savvy,” and “remedies, care, and silence” through which enslaved women developed a community of support in response to their abuse. Locating formerly enslaved women from the Dessalles plantation in post-abolition civil registry records and other archival documents, Lyons movingly illuminates the lives and family relationships of individuals such as Eulalie, Trop, and Thomassine, sensitively putting a human face on victims of patriarchal sexual violence while highlighting their agency, showing how enslaved women themselves understood and collectively coped with the sexual economy of enslavement. While women’s agency over their reproductive power has often been seen as a matter of individual resistance, Lyons reframes the mosaic of events surrounding reproduction to reflect on collective structures. The web of silence around abortion, for instance, is movingly revealed by Lyons to have been a communal phenomenon. Well situated in cutting-edge literature, her article makes a strikingly original contribution to our understanding of French history, gender, and resistance. Undergraduate as well as graduate students well beyond French History courses will be inspired by this essay.

Honorable Mention: Benjamin S. Bernard, “The Sodomy Consultant of Paris: Abbé Nicolas Théru and the Policing of Morals at the Collège Mazarin, 1688-1737,” French Historical Studies 48, no. 3 (August 2025): 385-416.

This confident and fascinating article explores the role of Nicholas Théru, a regent of the influential Collège Mazarin, in the policing of sodomy in the early eighteenth century. Combining widely used police reports from the Archives de la Bastille with lesser-known records from the Collège Mazarin, Bernard shows how Théru, an educator, was a proactive investigator of prohibited sexual practices in the neighborhood surrounding his institution. Demonstrating a command of well-established historiographies on eighteenth-century policing, Enlightenment thought, and sexuality, Bernard draws upon an untapped archival source to offer an original argument. He shows the frequent recurrence of Théru’s denunciations in police archives reveals that intensified sexual surveillance in this period was not prompted exclusively by agents of the absolute monarchy. His research reveals that within the highly personalized nascent bureaucracy of the Bourbon monarchy, the subjective voices of well-placed individuals could do as much as broad royal policy in shaping structural changes in surveillance. He offers an eye- opening reconstruction of imperial and sexual politics in the era of the shaping of a new French elite. After reading this article, one might never walk past the Collège de France in the same way again!

Honorable Mention: Bonnie Effros, “The Making and Unmaking of a Wax Saint: Prosper Guéranger and the Cult of the Catacomb Martyr Leontius,” French Historical Studies 48, no. 4 (2025): 563–595.

This eloquent essay explores efforts “to revitalize the sacred in the lives of French Catholics” in the decades following the French Revolution. Focusing on the cult of Leontius, a purported martyr whose bones were found in the catacombs of Rome, Effros explores how Abbot Prosper Guéranger tried but ultimately failed to revitalize his abbey at Solesmes by translating the saint’s relics to France encased in a wax effigy aimed at bringing him to life for the faithful. Effros contextualizes Guéranger’s project by moving brilliantly from archaeological research to media studies to art historical analysis to archival history of religion, revealing major changes affecting French society during the 1850s, as well as the devotional impulses of monks and their communities who sought to engage in older forms of religious devotion. During the Restoration through the Second Empire, hundreds of purported martyrial relics were exported as papal gifts from Rome to France with the goal of revitalizing the Catholic Church. Many of these relics were encased in wax effigies whose goal, like the anatomical waxes made famous in Florence’s La Specola collection, was to humanize their subjects, emphasizing their whiteness while making their wounds visible. However, in contrast to the popular cult of Philomena, who inspired paintings and literary works well beyond the faithful beginning with her “discovery” in 1802, Leontius largely failed to elicit widespread devotion. While damage to his effigy in transit contributed to the problem, and while subsequent discoveries undermined the cult by demonstrating that a large portion of the catacomb saints could not have been martyred in the claimed contexts, Effros makes a compelling case that Leontius was more fundamentally undermined by the lack of any compelling narrative that could give greater meaning to his physical remains. Effros’s essay will enliven discussions about post-revolutionary Catholicism and the cultural history of the nineteenth century.

Past Winners

2025:
Charles Bégué Fawell, “Effervescent Seas: Racialized Labor and Mobile Militancy on the Steamship Highways of the French Indo-Pacific,” French Historical Studies 47:3 (August 2024): 399-427.
Honorable Mention: Deirdre Lyons, “‘They Are Free with Me’: Enslaved and Freed Women’s Antislavery Lawsuits in the French Antilles, 1830-1848,” French Historical Studies 47:3 (August 2024): 365-397.
Honorable Mention: Cathy McClive and Lisa W. Smith, “Women at the centre: medical entrepreneurialism and ‘la grande médecine’ in eighteenth-century Lyon,” French History 38 (2024): 11-27.

2024:
Lauren R. Clay, “Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France,” The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 89-119.
Honorable Mention:  Brett Bowles, “Fragmentary, Censored, Indispensable: The Audiovisual Archive of October 17, 1961,” French Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2023): 177-212.
Honorable Mention:  Jeffrey S. Ravel, "On the Playing Cards of the Dulac Brothers in the Year II," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 52, no. 1 (2023): 325-367.

2023:
Judith Surkis, “Custody Battles and the Politics of Franco-Algerian Divorce, 1962–1992,” Journal of Modern History 94 no. 4 (2022): 857-897.
Honorable mention: Jennifer Heuer, “Neither Cowardly nor Greedy? Buying and Selling Escape from Conscription in Revolutionary and Post-revolutionary France” French History 36 no. 2 (2022): 209-229.

2022:
Danna Agmon, “Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63:4 (2021): 979-1006.

2021:
Sarah Maza, “Toy Stories: Poupées, culture matérielle et imaginaire de classe dans la France du XIXe siècle,”Revue historique no. 694 (2020): 135-67.
Honorable Mention: Ethan Katz, “Jewish Citizens of an Imperial Nation-State: Toward a French-Algerian Frame for French Jewish History,” French Historical Studies 43:1 (2020): 63-84.

2020:
Elisa Camiscioli, “Coercion and Choice: The ‘Traffic in Women’ between France and Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2019): 483-507.
Honorable Mention: Julia Gossard, “Breaking a Child’s Will: Eighteenth-Century Parisian Juvenile Detention Centers,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (April 2019): 239-59.

2019:
Kathleen Pierce, “Scarified Skin and Simian Symptoms: Experimental Medicine and Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2018). 

2018:
Jamie Kreiner, “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: An Early Medieval Ecology,” Past and Present 236 (2017): 3–42.
Honorable Mention: Alexandra Steinlight, “The Liberation of Paper: Destruction, Salvaging, and the Remaking of the Republican State," French Historical Studies 40, no. 2 (April 2017): 291-318.

2017:
Nguyễn Thị Điểu, "Ritual, Power, and Pageantry French Ritual Politics in Monarchical Vietnam," French Historical Studies 39, no. 4 (2016): 717-748.

2016: 
Peter Cook, "Onontio Gives Birth: How the French in Canada Became Fathers to Their Indigenous Allies, 1645-73," Canadian Historical Review 96, no. 2 (2015): 165-93.

2015:
Jennifer Edwards, "My Sister for Abbess: Fifteenth-Century Disputes over the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, Poitiers," Journal of Medieval History 40, no. 1 (2014): 85-107.

2014:  
Richard C. Keller, "Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Fear in the 2013 Paris Heat Wave," French Historical Studies 36, no. 2 (2013): 299-330.

2013: 
John Warne Monroe, "Surface Tensions: Empire, Parisian Modernism, and 'Authenticity' in African Sculpture, 1917-1939," American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (2012): 445-75.
Honorable Mention: Victoria Thompson, "The Creation, Destruction and Recreation of Henry IV," History and Memory 24, no. 2 (2012): 5-40.

2012:
Thomas Dodman, "Un pays pour la colonie: Mourir de nostalgie en Algérie française, 1830-1880," Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 66, no. 3 (2011): 743-84.
Honorable Mention: Jamie Kreiner, "About the Bishop: The Episcopal Entourage and the Economy of Government in Late Medieval Gaul," Speculum 86, no. 2 (2011): 321-60.

2011: 
Rafe Blaufarb, "Conflict and Compromise: Communauté et Seigneurie in Early Modern Provence," Journal of Modern History 82, no. 3 (2010): 519-45.
Honorable Mention: Mary Louise Roberts, "The Silver Foxhole: The GIs and Prostitution in Paris," French Historical Studies 33, no. 1 (2010): 99-128

2010: 
Michel de Waele, "'Paris est libre,' Entries as Reconciliations: From Charles VII to Charles de Gaulle," French History 23, no. 4 (2009): 425-45.
Honorable Mention: Christopher Hodson, "Colonizing the Patrie: An Experiment Gone Wrong in Old Regime France," French Historical Studies 32, no. 2 (2009): 193-222.

2009: 
Caroline Ford, "Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria," American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (2008): 341-62.
Honorable Mention: Dan Edelstein, "'War and Terror': The Law of Nations from Grotius to the French Revolution," French Historical Studies 31, no. 2 (2008): 229-62.

2008: 
Lenard Berlanstein, "Selling Modern Femininity: Femina, a Forgotten Feminist Publishing Success in Belle Epoque France," French Historical Studies 30, no. 4 (2007): 623-49; and
Allan Tulchin, "Same-sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Use of the Affrèrement," Journal of Modern History 79, no. 3 (2007): 613-47.

2007: 
Natalie Lozovsky, "Roman Geography and Ethnography in the Carolingian Empire," Speculum 81, no. 2 (2006): 325-64.

2006:
Paul A. Rahe, "The Book that Never Was: Montesquieu's 'Considerations on the Romans' in Historical Context," The History of Political Thought 26, no. 1 (2005): 43-89.

2005: 
Jay Rubenstein, "Putting History to Use: Three Crusade Chronicles in Context," Viator 35 (2004): 131-68.
Honorable Mention: Neil Safier, "'To Collect and Abridge without Changing Anything Essential': Rewriting Incan History at the Parisian Jardin du Roi," Book History 7 (2004): 63-96.

2004:
Richard I. Jobs, "Tarzan under Attack: Youth, Comics, and Cultural Reconstruction in Postwar France," French Historical Studies 26, no. 4 (2003): 687-725.
Honorable Mention: Joëlle Rollo-Koster, "The Politics of Body Parts: Contested Topographies in Late-Medieval Avignon," Speculum 78, no. 1 (2003): 66-98.

2003: 
Patricia Lorcin, "Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria's Latin Past," French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 295-329.
Honorable Mention: Dena Goodman, "L'ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime," French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 191-223.

2002: 
Jotham Parsons, "Money and Sovereignty in Early Modern France," Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 1 (2001): 59-79.

2001: 
Stéphane Gerson, "Town, Nation, or Humanity? Festival Delineation of Place and Past in Northern France, ca. 1825-65," Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (2000): 628-82.
Honorable Mention: Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, "Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept," American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1489-1533.

2000: 
Suzanne Desan, "Reconstituting the Social after the Terror: Family, Property, and Law in Popular Politics," Past and Present no. 164 (1999): 81-121.
Honorable Mention: Jo Burr Margadant, "Gender, Vice and the Political Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830-1848," American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1461-96.

1999: 
Alice Conklin, "Colonialism and Human Rights: The French Case in West Africa," American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 419-42.
Honorable Mention: Michael Kwass, "A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century France," The Journal of Modern History 70, no 2 (1998): 295-339.

1998: 
Daniel Lord Smail, "Telling Tales in Angevin Courts," French Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 183-215.

1997: 
Bonnie Smith, "History and Genius: The Narcotic, Erotic, and Baroque Life of Germaine de Stael," French Historical Studies 19, no. 4 (1996): 1059-81.

1996: 
Elizabeth Rapley, "The Shaping of Things to Come: The Commission des Secours, 1727-1788," French History 8, no. 4 (1994): 420-42.

1995: 
Harry Liebersohn, "Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing," American Historical Review 99, no. 3 (1994): 746-66.

1994: 
Liana Vardi, "Constructing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers, and Officials in Early Modern France," American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1424-47.

1993: 
Judith Miller, "Politics and Urban Provisioning Crises: Bakers, Police, and Parlements in France, 1750-1793," Journal of Modern History 64, no. 2 (1992): 227-62.

1992: 
C. Stephen Jaeger, "L'Amour des rois: structure sociale d'une forme de sensibilité aristocratique," Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46 , no. 3 (1991): 547-71.
Honorable Mention: Gay L. Gullickson, "Le Pétroleuse: Representing Revolution," Feminist Studies no. 17 (1991): 240-65.

1991: 
Carla Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777-1793," Representations no. 30 (1990): 109-37.

1990: 
Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (1989): 4-27.

1989: 
Ruth Harris, "Melodrama, Hysteria, and Feminine Crimes of Passion in the Fin de Siecle," History Workshop no. 25 (1988): 31-63.
Honorable Mention: William Sewell, "Uneven Development, the Autonomy of Politics, and the Dockworkers of Nineteenth-Century Marseille," American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (1988): 604-37.

1988: 
J. Russell Major, "'Bastard Feudalism' and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (1987): 509-35; and
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Social Change and Literary Language: The Textualization of the Past in 13th-century Old French Historiography," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17, no. 2 (1987): 129-48.

1987: 
Nancy Fitch, "Les petits parisiens en province: The Silent Revolution in the Allier, 1860-1900," Journal of Family History 11, no. 2 (1986): 131-55.

1976:
Nancy Nichols Barker, "The French Colony in Mexico, 1821-61: Generator of Intervention," French Historical Studies, IX (Fall 1976), 596-618.

1975:
George D. Sussman, "The Wet-Nursing Business in Nineteenth-Century France," French Historical Studies, IX (Fall 1975), 304-28.

1974:
T. J. A. Goff and D. M. G. Sutherland, "The Revolution and the Rural Community in Eighteenth-Century Brittany," Past and Present, No. 62 (February 1974), 97.

1973:
Robert Darnton, "The Encyclopedie Wars of Pre-Revolutionary France," American Historical Review, LXXVIII (December 1973), 1331-52.

1972:
Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons for Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France," Past and Present, No. 50 (February 1971), 41.
George V. Taylor, "Revolutionary and Non-Revolutionary Content in the Cahiers of 1789: An Interim Report," French Historical Studies, VII (Fall 1972), 479-502.

1971:
Richard F. Kuisel, "The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy," French Historical Studies, VI (Spring 1970), 365-98.

1970:
Louis M. Greenberg, "The Commune of 1871 as a Decentralized Reaction," Journal of Modern History, XLI (September 1969), 304-18.

1968:
Natalie Zemon Davis, "Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy: The Case of Lyon," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (University of Nebraska Press), V (1958), 217-75
Leo A. Loubere, "The Emergence of the Extreme Left in Lower Languedoc, 1848-1851: Social and Economic Factors in Politics," American Historical Review, LXXIII (April 1968), 1019-52.

1967:
William F. Church, "The Decline of French Jurists as Political Theorists, 1660-1789," French Historical Studies, V (Spring 1967), 1-40
George V. Taylor, "Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review, LXXII (January 1967), 469-96.

1966:
J. Russell Major, "Henry IV and Guyenne: A Study Concerning the Origins of Royal Absolutism," French Historical Studies, IV (Fall 1966), 363-83.

1965:
Peter N. Stearns, "Patterns of Industrial Strike Activity in France during the July Monarchy," American Historical Review, LXX (January 1965), 371-94.

1964:
Leon Bernard, "French Society and Popular Uprisings under Louis XIV," French Historical Studies, III (Fall 1964), 454-74.

1963:
Leslie Derfler, "Le 'Cas Millerand': Une Nouvelle Interpretation," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, X (Avril-juin 1963), 81-104.

1962:
A. Lloyd Moote, "The Parliamentary Fronde and Seventeenth-Century Robe Solidarity," French Historical Studies, II (Spring 1962), 330-55.
George V. Taylor, "The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the Revolution, 1781-1789," American Historical Review, LXVII (July 1962), 951-77.

1961:
Philip C. F. Bankwitz, "Maxime Weygand and the Army-Nation Concept," French Historical Studies, II (Fall 1961), 147-88.

1960:
Eugen Weber, "Un Demi-siecle de glissement a droite," International Review of Social History, V (1960), 165-201.

1959:
Paul Bamford, "The Procurement of Oarsmen for French Galleys, 1660-1748," American Historical Review, LXV (October 1959), 31-48.

1958:
David D. Bien, "The Background of the Calas Affair,” History, XLIII (October 1958), 192-206.