2025 WINNER

Winner: 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.

Drawing creatively on archives in France, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam, Charles Begué Fawell’s article reshapes our understanding of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French imperial and labor history by uncovering the resistance activities of a group generally neglected within existing historiography: the large force of non-European workers who made possible the successes of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, France’s leading shipping line to ports “beyond Suez.” Focusing on ship logs from the 1880s to the 1910s, Fawell reconstructs the role and treatment of Arab, Somali, and Asian laborers on French vessels, revealing that they, too, participated in walkouts and strikes at a time of increased labor agitation in France amid a steady development of the French security state. He shows that well before the First World War, French commercial and imperial projects were placed into question by the actions of workers whose “very precarity rendered them elusive and difficult to control.” While his sources do not allow him to directly access these laborers themselves, they do reveal traces of resistance and community-building among these least respected workers within the maritime trades, allowing Fawell to argue convincingly for their creation of a “disruptive politics of mobile labor.” The article exemplifies a creative and thoughtful attempt to work through large conceptual issues through a close and contextualized reading of neglected archival sources.

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.

Deirdre Lyons uses the lawsuits of enslaved and freed women in Martinique and Guadeloupe to analyze the last decades of enslavement in these colonies. Particularly interesting is her account of women’s roles in antislavery agitation in the Antilles. Women were more likely than men to sue, because they were more easily recognized as parents, allowing them to leverage this status in their demands for recognitions of rights. The archival materials with which she works allow one not only to hear echoes of these women’s voices, but also to see how their complaints related to contemporaneous abolitionist demands for colonial reform and to pro-slavery reactions and responses. What Lyons calls “family freedom suits” and “abuse cases” culminated in lost lawsuits or only narrow legal victories. However, she shows that the suits had an outsized impact on abolitionists and enslavers alike. Her case studies, involving women such as Virginie, Rosette, and Elia, will inspire others to seek out the original documents, allowing them to consider other colonial legal complaints in greater detail. Her elegant analysis reminds us how we can hear nearly silenced voices if we know where to listen.

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.

Capitalizing on the accidental survival of the business papers of Marie-Magdeleine Grand and Marie Fiansons, two eighteenth-century Lyonnais healthcare providers, Cathy McClive and Lisa W. Smith persuasively argue that these women’s joint medical practice was central rather than marginal to the broader market for healthcare in the early modern era. Noting how conventional archives are biased toward exclusive emphasis on the guild-based medical practices of male physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, McClive and Smith read the papers of Grand and Fiansons, split between two local archives, as a “counter-archive” revealing ordinary, normative, and communally accepted healthcare practices professionally provided by women in the eighteenth century. Grand and Fiansons were also manual laborers in the Lyonnais silk trade, so the article delves into themes of working-class history, charity, and vertical networks of sociability. Those networks played a crucial role in mitigating these women’s persecution at the hands of the local surgeons’ guild. The recording of any act in an archive is arguably exceptional, making it challenging for scholars to distinguish what is normative based on surviving records. McClive and Smith creatively reverse this equation, arguing that because the papers of Grand and Fiansons are themselves so exceptional, they paradoxically reveal that which was actually quite normal, namely the provision of medical services by women in eighteenth-century France.

Past Winners

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.