French Graduate Seminars, Hilary 2025, Seminar 2

Location: Hovenden Room, All Souls

Speakers: Nicolas Duriau (Wolfson) and Lou Khalfaoui (Leeds)

Nicolas Duriau (Wolfson) - ‘(Un)Voicing Male Prostitution during the First Empire and the Bourbon Restoration: “Riéniste[s]”, “parasite[s]" and “nulliste[s]” characters in Cuisin’s work’

Abstract
According to the conclusions of my doctoral dissertation, which dealt with long-19th-century French literature (1783-1922), there is a significant decline in the number of novels depicting male prostitution from 1800 to 1830. It seems that the then ‘prostitué’ appeared under the guise of less conspicuous figures, such as the ‘greluchon’, the ‘sigisbée’, or the ‘parvenu’ – who would implicitly engage in sexual activity with women, either for money, or for social prestige – to evade the First Empire’s and the Bourbon Restoration’s censorship. By considering little-known novels by J. P. R. Cuisin, a now forgotten writer of the early 19th century, I intend to better understand how the representations of male prostitution evolved from the libertine fiction of the late 18th century to the realist novel of the 1830s. As Andrew Counter (The Amorous Restoration. Love, Sex, and Politics in Early-Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Alain Viala (La Galanterie. Une mythologie française, Seuil, 2019) suggest, extramarital and commercial sex remained ubiquitous in the 1800-1830 literary production, but aligned with a poetics of ‘silence’, or ‘refoulement’. My aim is to demonstrate that the ‘Riéniste[s]’, ‘parasite[s] et ‘nulliste[s]’ who merge into Cuisin’s novels not only embodied the Empire/Restoration style ‘prostitué’, but also allegorised an ideological context in which ‘sexual deviances’ appear through text blanks, or figures of avoidance.

Biography
A former research fellow of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), Nicolas Duriau is now a Postdoctoral Researcher in Languages, Literatures and Translation Studies (specialised in French Literature and Romance Languages) at the University of Oxford/Université libre de Bruxelles. Following on from his PhD thesis, which focused on literary representations of male prostitutions from 1783 to 1922, he is particularly interested in long-19th-century literatures of French expression, studied in light of Gender, Queer and Sex Work History.

Lou Khalfaoui (Leeds) - ‘Franco-Algerian relations: hopes for “reconciliation” in the face of memories of colonialism in official discourses (1999-2005)’

Abstract
In this paper, I aim to explore a period of hope for reconciliation between France and Algerian, which have long been studies as an example of dissonant colonial memories plaguing modern state and cultural relations. In the aftermath of the Algerian civil War and Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s ascension to power in April 1999, French and Algerian officials made clear attempts to redefine bilateral relations through greater cooperation. However, as is well established, relations took a turn for the worse in 2005 when France passed the controversial Repatriates’ law, which included an article about French colonialism’s “positive legacy”. I argue that not only did the incident involving local, national and transnational actors precipitate a significant cool down in diplomatic relations, it fundamentally changed the discursive construction of colonial violence in both French and Algerian official narratives. From 2005, impassioned engagement with colonial violence featured growinly in official Algerian discourse, especially around the Massacres of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, whose anniversary became the National Memory Day in 2020. This both had concrete implications for whom and how episodes of colonial violence were remembered, given growing state control over commemorations, as well as their broader national and international audiencing. On the French side, colonial violence in Algeria was was most frankly alluded to in the direct aftermath of the law with Hubert Colin de Verdière, the French ambassador, describing the repression of May 8th, 1945 as an “inexcusable tragedy”, just as the event was becoming the embodiment of colonial violence in Algerian discourse. I hope to show how discourses about the past have an impact on the viability of memory policies, which profess to help appease and reconcile.

Biography
After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Lou went on to complete a master's program at the University College London (UCL). Before starting a PhD working across the School of History and the School of Languages at the University of Leeds in 2022, she was a research assistant at the Institute of Race Relations, the London-based antiracist think tank. Her current research focuses on the construction of colonial violence in official discourses of the French and Algerian state. Lou analyses speeches and public statements of state actors to highlight the maintenance and disruption of particular

framings, as they serve to contextualise contemporary memory policies seeking ‘reconciliation’. Lou also works with civil society actors, to illustrate the reception of official discourses and their contestation.