Le bivouac d’Austerlitz selon Louis-François Lejeune : les guerres napoléoniennes entre construction identitaire et construction historique

Le peintre, soldat et mémorialiste Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) entendait faire de son corpus de peintures de bataille et de ses Souvenirs d’un officier de l’Empire (1851) des témoignages historiques de la période napoléonienne, destinés à la postérité. Or, cette conjugaison entre peintures et mémoires renvoie aussi à la dualité médiale de la propagande napoléonienne, qui diffuse un récit unique des événements militaires à l’aide d’organes d’information inédits tels que les Bulletins de la Grande Armée. Ce récit, déjà médiatisé comme étant historique, est repris en images par le mécénat impérial. Ce mémoire vise à démontrer comment Lejeune contribue à ce récit historicisant, d’abord à un niveau individuel en construisant son identité par rapport à sa participation aux guerres napoléoniennes, puis aussi à un niveau étatique. Son Bivouac d’Austerlitz, présenté au Salon de 1808, est une commande du gouvernement. Il sera question de la façon dont ce tableau de Lejeune s’insère d’abord dans sa carrière, ensuite dans son corpus de peintures de bataille, puis finalement dans le récit napoléonien sur Austerlitz. La forme épisodique du tableau, empruntée à la ligne narrative du 30e bulletin de la Grande Armée, où Napoléon rapporte la victoire d’Austerlitz, peut s’expliquer par la complémentarité voulue entre récit textuel et visuel. Ce tableau contribue ainsi à la construction historique de la bataille. Au milieu des transformations profondes du monde académique et de la hiérarchie des genres, la dualité peintre-soldat de Lejeune répond en tous points à la vocation historique attribuée à la peinture sous Napoléon.Painter, soldier, and memorialist Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) conceived his battle paintings and his memoirs, Souvenirs d’un officier de l’Empire (1851), as historical testimonies of the Napoleonic period, destined for posterity. This twinning of paintings and memoirs mirrors the duality of Napoleonic propaganda as a whole, which disseminates a single version of military events with the help of unprecedented information tools such as the Bulletins de la Grande Armée. This written narrative, already thought of as historical, is picked up again in the paintings commissioned by the government. This master’s thesis argues that Lejeune contributes in a unique way to this historical narrative, first at an individual level by constructing his identity from his participation in the Napoleonic wars, and also at a state level. His Bivouac d’Austerlitz, presented at the 1808 Salon, was commissioned by the government as part of a larger order. It is shown that this painting fits first into Lejeune’s career, then into his cycle of battle paintings, and finally into the narrative of Austerlitz that Napoleon himself promoted. The episodic form of this painting can be explained by the deliberate pairing of written and pictorial narratives, which borrows from the 30th bulletin de la Grande Armée where Napoleon recounts the victory at Austerlitz. This painting thus contributes to the historical construction of the battle. As deep transformations threatened the academic genre hierarchy at the turn of the nineteenth century, the duality of Lejeune’s persona as soldier and painter helped promote the historical function given to paintings under Napoleon

Role of Sex Peptide in Drosophila Males

Drosophila male sex peptide ACP70A is a small peptide mainly produced in the accessory glands. It elicits a high number of post-mating responses in mated females; yet its function in male physiology is not well known. Here, we explore its role in male sex behavior and pheromone biosynthesis, using males either mutant or RNAi knocked-down for Acp70A. Courtship was severely affected in both Acp70A mutants and Acp70A knocked-down males, with only 2% of the males succeeding copulation. Cuticular hydrocarbon amounts were moderately affected with 25% decrease in sp0 mutant (without Acp70A expression) and 10–22% increase in flies overexpressing Acp70A. Acp70A knock-down either ubiquitously or in the testes surprisingly resulted in an overproduction of hydrocarbons, whose amounts were double of the controls. We tested eight putative “off-target” genes but none of these led to an increase in hydrocarbon amounts. These results show that male courtship behavior is largely dependent on the presence of Acp70A and independent of cuticular hydrocarbons. The presence of potential “off-target” genes explaining the hydrocarbon phenotype is discussed

Computation of the hindrance factor for the diffusion for nanoconfined ions: molecular dynamics simulations versus continuum-based models

Special Issue: Thermodynamics 2011 ConferenceInternational audienceWe report the self-diffusion coefficients and hindrance factor for the diffusion of ions into cylindrical hydrophilic silica nanopores (hydrated silica) determined from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We make a comparison with the hindered diffusion coefficients used in continuum-based models of nanofiltration (NF). Hindrance factors for diffusion estimated from the macroscopic hydrodynamic theory were found to be in fair quantitative agreement with MD simulations for a protonated pore, but they strongly overestimate diffusion inside a deprotonated pore

Consensus genetic structuring and typological value of markers using multiple co-inertia analysis

Working with weakly congruent markers means that consensus genetic structuring of populations requires methods explicitly devoted to this purpose. The method, which is presented here, belongs to the multivariate analyses. This method consists of different steps. First, single-marker analyses were performed using a version of principal component analysis, which is designed for allelic frequencies (%PCA). Drawing confidence ellipses around the population positions enhances %PCA plots. Second, a multiple co-inertia analysis (MCOA) was performed, which reveals the common features of single-marker analyses, builds a reference structure and makes it possible to compare single-marker structures with this reference through graphical tools. Finally, a typological value is provided for each marker. The typological value measures the efficiency of a marker to structure populations in the same way as other markers. In this study, we evaluate the interest and the efficiency of this method applied to a European and African bovine microsatellite data set. The typological value differs among markers, indicating that some markers are more efficient in displaying a consensus typology than others. Moreover, efficient markers in one collection of populations do not remain efficient in others. The number of markers used in a study is not a sufficient criterion to judge its reliability. "Quantity is not quality"

Zhu et al. Reply

International audienceA Reply to the Comment by S. Gekle and A. Arnold. Original Article: Stephan Gekle and Axel Arnold, Comment on "Anomalous Dielectric Behavior of Nanoconfined Electrolytic Solutions", Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 089801 (2013)

Cities and the geografical deconcentration of scientific activity : A multilevel analysis of publications (1987-2007)

International audienceMost current scientific policies incorporate debates on cities and the geographic organisation of scientific activity. Research on 'world cities' develops the idea that interconnected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. Thus, the increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of others could be observed by certain scholars using measures based on scientific publications. Others, however, show that an opposite trend is emerging: the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in a country's scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries with papers in the Web of Science over the period 1987-2007. The author's addresses were geocoded and grouped into agglomerations. Registering of papers was based on the fractional counting of multi-authored publications, and the results are unambiguous: deconcentration is the dominant trend both globally and within countries, with some exceptions for which explanations are suggestedBeijing (Pékin), Tokyo, Paris, New York, Séoul, Londres... les grands foyers de la science pèsent moins que par le passé du fait d'une déconcentration géographique au niveau mondial. Tel est le résultat de l'analyse statistique systématique menée par des scientifiques du Laboratoire interdisciplinaire solidarités, sociétés, territoires (CNRS/Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail/EHESS) sur des millions d'articles de publications scientifiques, édités entre 1987 et 2007 dans des milliers de revues scientifiques recensées par le Web of Science. Ces travaux sont les premiers à s'intéresser à la géographie de la science au niveau de l'ensemble des villes mondiales

The Geographical Deconcentration of Scientific Activity (1987-2007)

Texte intégral à l'adresse : http://sticonference.org/Proceedings/vol1/Grossetti_Geographical_348.pdfTraditional research on "world cities" tends to develop the idea that large, inter-connected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. This suggests that we should observe an increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of smaller ones. Among analyses using measures based on scientific publications, certain studies support this hypothesis. Others however, show that in certain countries such as China, an opposite trend is emerging; the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in the country's scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries having papers in Thomson Reuters 'Web of Science' over the period 1987-2007. The addresses -present in each article- were geo-coded and then grouped into agglomerations. The result of our analysis is unambiguous: deconcentration is clearly the dominant trend -both: globally and within countries-, despite some rare exceptions for which explanations are suggested

Phenotypic prediction based on metabolomic data : lasso vs Bolasso, primary data vs wavelet transformation

International audienceUnderstanding the relations between various 'omics data (such as metabolomics or genomics data) and phenotypes of interest is one of the current major challenges in biology. This question can be addressed by trying to learn a way to predict the phenotype value from the omic from joint observations of the omic and of the phenotype. In this paper, we focus on the prediction of a phenotype related to the quality of the meat from metabolomic data. As metabolomic data are high dimensional data and as, conjointly, the number of observations is often restricted, model selection methods are a way both to obtain a relevant solution to the prediction problem but also to select the most important metabolomes related to the phenotype under study. During the past years, model selection has know a growing interest in the statistical community: the first - and also probably the most known - selection method has been introducted by \citep{Tibshirani:1996} under the name of LASSO. Several variants of this original approach has then been proposed such as, recently, a bootstraped LASSO, named BOLASSO, introduced in (Bach, 2009). The proposal of this paper is to combine a wavelet representation of the metabolome spectra (see (Mallat, 1999) and (Antonini, 1992) for a complete introduction to wavelets) with the BOLASSO approach. We compare this methodology to more classical methods using either the original spectra as predictors (instead of the wavelet representation) or the original LASSO to select the model. The following section deals with the methodological description of the approach whereas the next one details the experiments and results

Masculinization of the X Chromosome in the Pea Aphid

International audienceEvolutionary theory predicts that sexually antagonistic mutations accumulate differentially on the X chromosome and autosomes in species with an XY sex-determination system, with effects (masculinization or feminization of the X) depending on the dominance of mutations. Organisms with alternative modes of inheritance of sex chromosomes offer interesting opportunities for studying sexual conflicts and their resolution, because expectations for the preferred genomic location of sexually antagonistic alleles may differ from standard systems. Aphids display an XX/X0 system and combine an unusual inheritance of the X chromosome with the alternation of sexual and asexual reproduction. In this study, we first investigated theoretically the accumulation of sexually antagonistic mutations on the aphid X chromosome. Our results show that i) the X is always more favourable to the spread of male-beneficial alleles than autosomes, and should thus be enriched in sexually antagonistic alleles beneficial for males, ii) sexually antagonistic mutations beneficial for asexual females accumulate preferentially on autosomes, iii) in contrast to predictions for standard systems, these qualitative results are not affected by the dominance of mutations. Under the assumption that sex-biased gene expression evolves to solve conflicts raised by the spread of sexually antagonistic alleles, one expects that male-biased genes should be enriched on the X while asexual female-biased genes should be enriched on autosomes. Using gene expression data (RNA-Seq) in males, sexual females and asexual females of the pea aphid, we confirm these theoretical predictions. Although other mechanisms than the resolution of sexual antagonism may lead to sex-biased gene expression, we argue that they could hardly explain the observed difference between X and autosomes. On top of reporting a strong masculinization of the aphid X chromosome, our study highlights the relevance of organisms displaying an alternative mode of sex chromosome inheritance to understanding the forces shaping chromosome evolution

Spatial and seasonal variation in reproductive indices of the clupeids Limnothrissa miodon and Stolothrissa tanganicae in the Congolese waters of northern Lake Tanganyika

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