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This thesis aims at describing the relations built between the English-speaking minorities of Quebec and France from the end of World War I to the end of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, historiography has emphasized the significance of the “fait français” in the building of Franco-Quebecois ties. Such a narrative, developed during and after the Quiet Revolution, overlooks the existence of numerous connections between Anglo-Quebec and French elites. On the French side, exchanges with the English-speaking business community were encouraged in the name of the intensification of Franco-Canadian trade. On the Anglo-Quebec side, France embodies a civilizational model which knowledge of is an integral part of a legitimate culture – that is clearly distinguished from a folklore-like French-Canadian culture. Based on the study of individual trajectories as well as networks of influence, I intend to qualify French-speaking historiography by bringing to light the official diplomatic and parallel diplomatic ties that unite France and Englishspeaking Quebec. I also aim at showing on which principles and which actions a French influence is built all over an Atlantic space throughout the 20th century.

Political instability in Haiti provided an important backdrop to the election of François Duvalier in September 1957. The new head of state, who soon established an authoritarian dictatorship (notably after 1964) and a hereditary regime (after 1971), justified both his victory and presidency trough a messianic message around the creation of a new Haiti. In the end, the duvalierist regime, stretching close to thirty years, was mostly a period marred by state-sponsored violence. Of the many repercussions of the dictatorship the creation of various Haitian diasporic communities, notably in Montreal, Quebec, during the second half of the 20th century remains one of the most notable. Despite the often critical tone employed by most specialists to make sense of the Duvalier period, Haitians, in Haiti and abroad, have remained divided in their assessment of the authoritarian regime. This doctoral thesis locates the emergence and creation of different collective memory scripts within diasporic communities by focusing on the particular case of the Haitian diaspora in Montreal between 1964 and 2014. By combining an analysis of “traditional” written documents and through the examination oral interviews, this research explores how, at different historical junctures between Quebec and Haiti, this population, marked by its heterogeneity, articulated different visions of the dictatorship in Haiti. This thesis was particularly inspired by the concept of “emblematic memory” advanced by the historian Steve Stern (2004) in his book trilogy which investigated different “memory camps” in post-Pinochet Chile. Our own research contends that the discourses and memories of Duvalierism that were forged within the Haitian diaspora in Quebec did not follow a linear trajectory and fell within a larger project where various conceptualizations of Duvalierist power and its place in Haiti’s national history were contested. It also shows that the very way in which many have understood duvalierism has evolved over time to adapt to new political realities in Haiti and in Quebec. Ultimately, it suggests that any reading of duvalierism, positive or negative, is always located within a broader appreciation (critic) of post-1986 Haiti.

This thesis will consider the sound atmosphere (including cries, speech, noises and moments of silence) and music in the cults of the Great Mother, Dionysus and Demeter in Archaic and Classical Greece and their roles and meanings. Until recently, the audible component of Greek cults has rarely been considered by historical reconstructions. However, it played a fundamental role both in ritual practice and tales. These two expressions of religion – ritual practice and tales – are inextricably linked in ancient storytelling, just as representations inspired by the rituals are rife with imaginary elements. Examining different types of sources – of which the literary works and painted vases are the most numerous and enlightening – and considering the various cultural ingredients (tales and ritual practice, the imaginary and the real) as a coherent whole can provide insight into the phonosphere unique to each god in striking ways. This comprehensive approach leads to a better understanding of the religious experience of the Greeks, including certain phenomena that remain controversial today, such as maenadism and ecstatic ritual. The sources reveal that through their communicative power, music, sounds and silence filled specific functions in the ritual practices and tales. While some sounds and music were intended to please the god and hence gain favour, others bearing the god’s sonic signature held sway over mortals during rituals as a moment of personal contact with the divine. In certain cases, this aural sway could bring healing and a balancing of internal instability. Moreover, the sound vocabulary found in the literature almost invariably carries meaning that makes it possible to recognize the world and divine figures it describes. Cataloguing the sound vocabularies of individual cults/deities helps identify the relationships between certain gods. This in turn can clarify interpretations of certain passages in the literature. Similarly, research on musical instruments reveals tastes and trends, which could be attributed to the significant 5 changes in the religious and political spheres of Athens in the late 5th century BC. For example, the progressive introduction of the tympanum to the Dionysian world starting in the first half of the 5th century BC suggests that Athenians appropriated the cult of the Great Mother and the instrument most commonly associated with it. This observation, based on contemporary accounts, corroborates the distinction Athenians made between an ancestral religion and an “additional” multifaceted one. In that respect, investigating the sound atmosphere in these cults improves our understanding of not only the cults themselves, but also Athenian society as a whole and the milestone events that shaped it. Studying the sounds and their place and function in ritual practice and tales deepens our knowledge of Greek religion and the methods of communication it established between the realms of mortals and the gods. It also allows us to better characterize the social and cultural environments in which it developed

This thesis explores feasting in Norway and Iceland during the 12th and 13th centuries. The subject of this work, often only merely mentioned by historiography, aims to fill this need by painting a general picture of banquets during the chosen time period. We aim to specifically address the topic by garnering exceptional details present in historical documents. This study also wishes to establish the various roles played by banquets by following two main axes. The first one sees the feast serving as a conveyer of social cohesion and friendships and also as a building tool for relationships. Inversely, the second exposes how feasts could serve more hostile purposes, notably distinguishing every attendee and underlining social inequalities among a given group. We also aim to categorize feasts, to identify their uses and their breadth. Through these efforts, we also identify unique traits that define this practice around western Scandinavia, but also the differences it entertains against other European regions. Finally, this study aims to touch on the transmission of customs surrounding feasting from Norway to Iceland incidental to increasing political relationships. To achieve the aforementioned goals, we solicited the use legal texts from both regions, king sagas, contemporary sagas, as well as documents coming from the Norwegian court.

This thesis proposes to study the expression of movement in ancient Greek poetry and particularly the link between death and the physical act of falling in Homeric poetry. The question of movement appears implicitly in all studies concerned with death in ancient Greece and its different representations. Through not only different metaphorical expressions, but also through the fall of bodies on the battlefield, the fall of certain objects and the plunge of different characters, human and divine, the movement illustrates death or its imminence. Far from representing only the plunge of the soul into the Underworld, the falling movement also represents a wide range of emotional states and proves to be an effective way of expressing altered states of consciousness, for example the passage between life and death, sleep, madness and drunkenness, but also emotions of great intensity such as anger, pain and sadness. This use of the movement in Greek poetry is expressed in the poetic imagination, but also in the ritual practices recorded in Homeric poetry. Indeed, in the Iliad, the movement of fall which appears in libation, ritual oath and funeral rites would not only mean death, but in certain cases, death without burial. This discovery allows us to take a new look at the ritual practices of the poem which bring to light the true will of the Achaeans, explicitly shown in the third book (Il. 3. 276- 301), which is not only to kill men and children, and to enslave women, but to abandon the bodies of their enemies to the elements and thus to refusing them burial, which is problematic in the religious context of the ancient Greece. The falling movement, through the gesture of projection, expresses a threat that the Greek audience had to fully understand and is central to the entire plot. It also appears that the movement would possess a "magical efficiency" which would make it possible to trigger and seal an oath. Throughout Antiquity, the meaning of the movement through time became more complex and if it represents death and sadness in Homer, throughout the end of the archaic period until the last days of the Roman Empire, the movement eventually took an erotic connotation. Because of his capacity to represent various altered states of consciousness and its close links with death and mourning, the plunge then becomes the exemplary model of the suffering in love. This thesis thus makes it possible to observe the evolution of a motive which preserves throughout Antiquity its mortiferous dimension, but which, even today, expresses a close poetic link between death and eroticism.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that written Latin of the Merovingian period was read and spoken in such a way as to be understood by the illiterate population and among medievalists it is now communis opinio that the documents of 7th and 8th century Gaul, reflect a formal register of the spoken language. This is particularly consequential for the study of vowel apocope and syncope whereby most unstressed vowels in Classical Latin have disappeared in Old French, either described as direct loss of the vowel (V → ∅) or with a prior reduction to schwa (V → ə → ∅). Despite this paradigm shift, as well as renewed introspection by historical linguists, Merovingian Latin is still omitted from most grammars which describe the evolution of the Latin vowel system to that of Old French. This thesis thus seeks to provide the philological evidence and theoretical pieces necessary to emancipate diachronic phonology from the long shadow of dogmatically acquired tradition, thanks in large part to improved editions, access to digitized manuscripts and great leaps in our understanding of the human language faculty which were unavailable to the founders of our discipline. To address these issues, we have selected a corpus of 48 original charters preserved primarily at Saint Denis north of Paris, dating from the 7th to the early 8th century. Adopting a positivistic philological approach to the data, we first describe the distribution of vowels according to a straightforward method of statistically analysing the type and frequency of vowel variation in recurring lexemes according to stressed and unstressed syllables as well as according to position (initial, final, internal, etc.) within the word. The Merovingian data was then analysed within the phonological frameworks of strict CV and element theory, demonstrating among other processes that vowel reduction was an active part of the synchronic phonology. We conclude that vowel loss in Gallo-Romance proceeded first along a path of contrast-neutralising vowel reduction, which then fed total vowel loss in a typologically regular direction of sound change similar to what can be observed in modern Portuguese or lexicalised in Francoprovençal. Significantly, and counter to all previous account of the diachronic loss of vowels in Proto-French, we argue that there is no evidence in favour of a reduction to schwa in the seventh or eight centuries. Instead, we find a three-way contrast between a front vowel, a back vowel, and a central vowel even in the most reduced unsyncopated syllables. Our conclusions have important consequences for the internal and external history of the French language. On the one hand, so long as final case-bearing vowels were distinguished, Gallo-Romance, despite all its idiosyncrasies and innovations remained an active member of the common Romance diasystem; it likewise retained a generally transparent relation with the written code. On the other hand, Gallo-Romance, like other regional Romance languages, simply remained a rustic variety of a single Latin language, with the “transition” from Latin to Old French occurring in the post-Merovingian period. Merovingian Latin presents itself as the key linguistic hinge needed to understand this transition.

The Council of Troyes, wich opened on January 13, 1129, confirms an initiative born in the East nine years earlier. Knights had then expressed the will to live in a religious way, by making the triple monastic vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, while continuing to practice the profession of arms in order to protect pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land. Recognized by the papacy in Troyes and endowed with a rule, the « Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon » became the first military order in history. The Order of the Hospital, which already existed in Jerusalem and whose missions was to care for the poor sick, gradually became militarized in the middle of the 12th century, drawing inspiration from the example of the Temple. Templars and Hospitallers subsequently inspired all other military orders. A historiographical tradition of the Crusades has long maintained the idea of two enemy orders whose conflicts caused the loss of the Latin States of the East. The study of two centuries of common coexistence between Templars and Hospitallers in the Holy Land allows us to bury this image and see how much these military orders influenced each other. It aslo helps to restore the truth about the relationship between the brothers of the two orders. At the frontiers of comparative history, this study follows the chronological framework of the masters of the Temple and the Hospital, making it possible to highlight the importance of the decisions of these men. Thematic studies on the organization of these two orders, their structures, their rules, the images that they transmit and their role in some great events of the Latin States of the East make it possible to understand the links wich united them, as well as the how they influenced each other. We have too often noted their political rivalry, in a kingdom of Jerusalem where the absence of a strong royal power quickly gave them complete freedom. In the same way, we have too often forgotten the price that Templars and Hospitallers paid together on the battlefields of the Holy Land, behaving like what they were : brothers in arms.

This thesis studies the opposition of the Italian Communist Party (ICP) and the French Communist Party (FCP) to the Atlantic bloc, from the beginning of the Cold War until the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) into NATO. The approach chosen is to integrate the 'national' and 'international' spheres, in order to avoid framing the analysis solely in terms of Cold War opposition. The comprehension of the oppositional strategies of two parties to the Atlantic bloc is very important, as the PCF and the PCI were the two largest communist parties in Western Europe at the time, and favorable to the French and Italian constitutions after World War II. Considering the interaction between national issues and international pressures, the dissertation draws a portrait of the evolution of the CPF/CPI in their opposition to the Atlantic bloc, highlighting similarities and differences. The thesis relies on several primary sources, such as official documents of the two parties and Italian, French, Russian and American diplomatic and ministerial documents, to explain the evolution of the two parties. While the starting conditions, with the exclusion from the national governments of both parties and the increased pressure from the US and the Soviet Union were similar, the long-term development of strategies was different. In general, the PCF was more "dogmatic", in relation to the Atlantic bloc. Consequently, the tendency of the French communists was to focus more on the international situation than on national issues, with a reversal of this tendency only in the mid-1950s, during the campaign against the EDC. For their part, the Italian communists were able, from the start and notwithstanding international pressures, to develop a more balanced opposition taking into account national issues and the international situation. As a result, the PCI's strategy was more effective, as it repeatedly challenged the Italian government on its Atlantic choice.