Jean Charles De Pradel in French Colonial Louisiana, 1714-1764

Jean Charles de Pradel, a younger son of a provincial robe family of Limousin, France, resided in Louisiana for most of the period the colony was under French control. De Pradel\u27s initial encounter with Louisiana was in 1714 when he was assigned to the colony on his first tour of duty in the military. At that time, Louisiana was struggling for its existence against the natural enemies of disease, famine and starvation as well as against the growing threats of conflict with the Spanish in near-by Pensacola and from the English to the north. This colony on the Mississippi offered little prospect to the Ensign de Pradel for a brilliant military career or for fortune. Unable to obtain a new commission while on leave in France in 1720, de Pradel returned to Louisiana in late 1721 or 1722, determined to make the fortune which the law of Old Regime France had denied him. In the face of impossible conditions for survival much less for profit, de Pradel became a successful entrepreneur on a frontier. He began working toward his fortune, first as a trader at military posts, then as a businessman in New Orleans, and finally, as a landed gentleman who sold his lumber, indigo and wax produced from his land to France and the Islands. By his death in 1764, Louisiana was in a financial crisis stemming from the moratorium declared on the colony\u27s letters of exchange, causing the collapse of de Pradel\u27s fortune. The chief sources consulted in the research of this thesis were A. Baillardel and A. Prioult\u27s compilation of de Pradel\u27s Letters, Le Chevalier de Pradel, Vie d\u27un Colon en Louisiane au XVIII Siecle, manuscript documents from the Archives des Colonies, Dunbar Rowland and Albert Sanders, editors, Mississippi Provincial Archives, published documents of government correspondence

Sénèque revisité : la topique de la Fortune dans les tragédies de Robert Garnier

L’article propose une analyse de l’utilisation du concept antique de Fortune dans les tragédies de Robert Garnier, dramaturge important de la seconde moitié du xvie siècle en France. En prenant pour modèle les tragédies de Sénèque, Garnier propose une lecture à la fois ontologique, sociopolitique, éthique, justicière et héroïque du rôle de la Fortune dans l’économie de la tragédie, concept qu’il est amené à assimiler à la notion chrétienne de Providence.Proposed in this article is an examination of the ancient concept of Fortuna in the tragedies of Robert Garnier, one of the most important dramatic writers of the second half of the sixteenth century in France. Garnier takes Seneca’s tragedies as the model to propound an ontological, political, ethical, judicial and heroic interpretation of Fortuna’s role in tragedy, a concept that he fuses with the Christian notion of Providence

Tokoh Kucing dalam Dongeng Prancis Le Chat Botté dan Dongeng Indonesia Si Penjual Kucing : Kajian Semiotika

Malgré sa diversité d'originalité, les contes ont une valeur universelle comme montrée dans Le Chat Botté d'origine française et Si Penjual Kucing d'origine indonésienne. Ces deux contes ont la similarité sur les personnages principaux (le chat) qui aident leur pauvre maître à gagner la fortune. C'est pourquoi ce mémoirerépond à la question de la recherche telle que comment le chat devient le symbole de lafortune et quelle est la relation entre ce symbole et la situation sociale et culturelle de lasociété de ces deux pays. Les théories structurales et sémiotiques de Peirce sont appliquées pouranalyser le symbole et le contexte social ainsi que le contexte culturel. La méthode utilisée est descriptive qualitative et descriptive comparative.Le résultat de cette recherche montre que dans le cadre de la théoriesémiotique de Peirce, l'objet est le chat Matagot et le chat Busok ou Raas, l'interprétant est la société de la France du Sud et de l'île Raas, tandis que le symbole est le chatqui porte la fortune. Dans un autre perspectif, la similarité de ces contes est la naissance d'une superstition qui valorise un chat comme le symbole de la fortune. La différence trouvée est la fonction de ces contes en raison de la différence du contexte social et culturel. Le Chat Botté n'a pas seulement la fonction dedivertissement pour des lecteurs mais il a la fonction comme la réhabilitation de la réputation du chat noir qui portait la créature diabolique en moyen âge en Europe.Alors que dans le conte Si Penjual Kucing il y a une fonction de la conservation du chatBusok ou Raas dans l'île Raas. Pour la future recherche, nous conseillons à d'autres chercheurs d'utiliser lemême thème en l'analysant avec une théorie différente. Mots clés: le chat, le conte, la sémiotique, le symbole, le contexte social etculturel

Amelia Fontenelle Lockett

This lady, notice of whose death appeared in last week\u27s Economist, was a native of Louisiana, and a direct descendant of a powerful family of the French nobility, a daughter, if we are informed correctly, of the Marquis de Fontenelle, a nobleman of great wealth and character, whose property was contiguous to the city of Marseilles, but who in all probability had sought, like many others, either health or increased fortune on the fertile shores of New France

Fortune, long life, Montaigne

Montaigne’s Essais end with a plea on behalf of old age - “Or la vieillesse a un peu besoin d’estre traictée plus tendrement.” - and the placing of old age under the protection of Apollo, god of the lyre, but also god of health, and the god whose oracle at Delphi pronounced the recommendation to “Know thyself.” This prayer of the 56-year-old Montaigne, for all of its beautiful fusion of interior and exterior, and its profound linking of the essay’s ending to the question of time, is nevertheless typical of a certain early modern attitude towards old age, illness, and death: People are in decline from the moment of birth, cure is the responsibility not of the physician but of the individual sufferer, and, to quote a health manual from 1630, “la guerison des maladies appartient à la fortune, & non pas à l’Art.” This chapter looks into a group of health manuals from the early seventeenth century in France which contest this notion. Chief among them will be Jacquelot’s L’art de vivre longuement, sous le nom de Medee, laquelle enseigne les facultez des choses qui sont continellement en nostre usage, & d’où naissent les maladies. Ensemble la methode de se comporter en icelles, & le moyen de pourvoir à leurs offences (Lyon: Louis Teste-Fort, 1630). Jacquelot declares that “la vie peut estre conservée, & la mort retardée par Art,” thus placing art, long life, and, curiously, the great antique witch Medea, on one side of a line, on the other side of which are ranged ill health, death, and chance. On the one hand, Montaigne’s “De l’expérience” reads right along with the genre of the health manual. Jacquelot too treats questions of diet, heating one’s house, sexual practices, clothing, when and when not to eat fruit, how long to sleep, when to wake up, and so on. To Montaigne’s stance, however, - Whether it is a question of law, the medicine of the social body, or of medicine as such, there is no cure. - Jacquelot opposes "art" and insists that there is. The health manual of the early seventeenth century thus begins to construct a resistance to the power of chance that Montaigne had considered not only futile but, in itself, unhealthy. The chapter concludes with a consideration of this advice in the context of the time, when an audience for tragedy was first emerging in France

Paul Lauter. From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park : Activism, Culture & American Studies.

La métaphore de l’américaniste comme « passeur » connaît une certaine fortune depuis quelque temps au sein des Etudes américaines en France (voir en particulier le numéro 83 de la RFEA sur le thème « Civilisation américaine : problématiques et questionnements » issu du Congrès de Toulouse en 1998). Littéraires, historiens ou civilisationnistes assureraient le « passage » des Etats-Unis en France, et par delà, en Europe, de la matière américaine, sa traduction tant linguistique que culturelle,..

Chance in the tragedies of Racine

In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France

From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero

[ Excerpted from Forword by John R. Kimberly] From Predators to Icons takes us on a provocative and nuanced journey through the business practices of a number of individuals and the companies they built and shows how they navigated through this volatile mix to achieve extraordinary success in their undertakings. In an era in which we are obsessed with rankings of everything from colleges and universities to hospitals to tennis players, we tend to focus on the end result—who is number 1?—and much less on the means: how did they get there? In an era when we are fascinated by stories of leaders as heroes and by the lives of the rich and famous, we tend to let the gloss of the material trappings of success blind us to questions of their origins. In the work they report here, Villette and Vuillermot use the lens of social science as a vehicle for unpacking the roots of extraordinary success in business, for analyzing how success was achieved. They have accumulated evidence from a variety of sources, including the myriad biographies—authorized and unauthorized—of business icons, to build their comparative analysis of the practices of thirty-two businessmen from Europe and North America, of how their wealth was built, and of the common threads that characterize the roots of success across geographies, across industries, and across time. Their approach is highly original, and the data they assemble are wide-ranging. They are well aware of both the promise and the limitations of their data and are careful to discuss both. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to judge the credibility of both the empirical foundations on which their analysis is built and the conclusions they reach, the messages they send. But theirs is an impressive undertaking and needs to be taken seriously