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Au tournant du XXe siècle, la neurasthénie – ou épuisement nerveux – est devenue une maladie populaire en Occident et jusqu’au Japon en raison de son association avec la modernité. De nombreux rapprochements ont été faits entre ce diagnostic introduit en 1869 aux États-Unis et certaines maladies contemporaines comme la dépression, le syndrome de fatigue chronique, l’épuisement professionnel et toute la panoplie des maladies causées par le stress. Les transformations socioculturelles qu’a connues le Viêt Nam sous colonisation, principalement au cours des décennies 1920 et 1930, ont été propices à la dissémination du langage des nerfs et à l’appropriation du diagnostic de neurasthénie. Ce mémoire de maîtrise en histoire se penche sur les transformations sociales survenues sous le gouvernement colonial français, dont l’urbanisation et l’instruction publique, au milieu desquelles ont émergé les nouvelles classes moyennes urbaines qui ont adopté le diagnostic de neurasthénie. À partir de la presse vietnamienne de la période, ce travail met l’accent sur l’appropriation, les causes et les traitements de la maladie. Utilisant une approche comparant la neurasthénie en Occident, au Japon et en Chine, pour ensuite présenter son entrée au Viêt Nam, il montre que la domination et donc la subalternité ont compliqué l’accès des colonisés au diagnostic de la maladie moderne neurasthénie, de même qu’à la modernité. Il fournit toutefois un éclairage sur les débuts de l’histoire du diagnostic, encore utilisé de nos jours au Viêt Nam, d’une maladie appelée « la maladie de l’époque ».

L’histoire de la médicalisation de la maternité en Chine reste encore mal connue et ce mémoire constitue une amorce pour tenter de défricher ce riche et vaste terrain. Il examine dans quel cadre et dans quelle mesure la prise en charge de la maternité des femmes chinoises a évolué au sein des postes médicaux consulaires français du sud de la Chine (Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan), de l’arrivée des premiers médecins en 1898, jusqu’à la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale en 1938. Il démontre comment a pu se traduire l’œuvre médicale française en matière de prise en charge de la grossesse, de l’accouchement et des soins à donner au nouveau-né dans les établissements de santé consulaires, et tente de voir jusqu’à quel point, pourquoi et dans quels domaines précisément l’offre de soins à l’occidentale proposée par les Français dans ces régions a pu atteindre les futures et nouvelles mères chinoises.

Based on an analysis of the discourse about food contained in the Ling Long magazine (玲珑杂志 1931-1937), this dissertation focuses specifically on the transformations of the Chinese food habits that occurred in Shanghai in the 1930s by contact with nutritional knowledge from the West and under the impetus of Chinese elites who were looking for solutions to strengthen the nation. We show how Ling Long magazine participated in this phenomenon, not only by introducing its readership to the principles and concepts underlying scientific nutrition, but especially by adapting these new food standards and practices to both the local Chinese context and the concerns of its female readers.

La question métisse en Indochine française est un sujet complexe sur lequel plusieurs auteurs ce sont attardés, mais qui constitue encore un riche terrain de recherches et d’analyses pour les historiens de la colonisation. Ce mémoire tente d’explorer les multiples dialogues et interactions entre la sphère publique indochinoise urbaine s’exprimant en langue française et les pouvoirs coloniaux métropolitains en ce qui a trait au traitement des enfants métis franco-vietnamiens considérés comme « abandonnés » lors de l’entre-deux-guerre. Il tend ainsi à démontrer l’utilisation politique faite de la question métisse par les pouvoirs français dans l’optique d’une légitimation coloniale visant à pérenniser leur système de domination. Dans ce processus, plusieurs réflexions journalistiques, témoignages et objets de propagande ont été confrontés au discours gouvernemental officiel afin de dresser un tableau holistique et synthétique des multiples ambiguïtés inhérentes au déploiement de la stratégie coloniale française en Asie du sud-est : la « mission civilisatrice ».

Deprived of his land inheritance like many youngest-born of peasant descent, Martin Bertrand (1915-2008) eventually fled life as a seminarian in the French High-Alps by enlisting in the Mobile Guard and then being stationed in Casablanca, Morocco in 1941. Following the Anglo–American invasion of French North Africa, he was drafted in 1943 to lead a Moroccan colonial recruit unit. With “his” tirailleurs, he took part in the Italian campaign, the Provence landing, the liberation of Alsace, and the occupation of Germany. After the War, he returned to Morocco only to be deployed 3 years later with the same battalion to Tourane, Indochina where the French colonial administration attempted to retake control of the region. During each one of his long absences, Martin Bertrand wrote almost daily to his wife Hélène, descendent of Spanish settlers established in Algeria. By analyzing these letters, this master’s thesis proposes to integrate Martin Bertrand’s experiences, in his functions as a non-commissioned officer in a colonial regiment, into a broader imperial story where France led her armies through her last colonial wars and destabilized the colonial order under which each soldier was governed. Furthermore, this study compares Martin Bertrand’s private letters with more official sources like troop morale reports which allows for an analysis of the complex social and ethnic hierarchies between French non-commissioned officers and “indigenous” troops. At the same time, it explores the deeper questionings of a military intermediary’s self-identity.

Based on a comparative study of the communities that migrated from India to French Indochina and British Burma, this thesis examines the place of Indian migrants in these two colonies during the first half of the 20th century. Indian minorities had a special place in the colonial system because of their various legal status, political and economic influence, and intermediary roles. These dynamics and the interest in studying them are illustrated by three specific case studies: 1. the dispute between Indian police officers and the municipality of Saigon in 1907; 2. Negotiations during the separation of Burma from the British Raj in 1935; 3. the repercussions of the 1929 stock market crash on government discourse on these communities and their place in colonial settings. The interaction of Indian minorities with colonial administrations indicates their understanding of imperial workings. They illustrate their skillful navigation of government structures and their mobilization to defend their interests. The analysis of their position as intermediaries highlights how minority communities have used their relationships to bypass lines of authority and power and sheds light on the plurality of hierarchical axes in colonial situations. These three case studies provide a more holistic conceptualization of colonial Indian minorities and support their complexity, highlighting their ambiguous allegiances and how they define and redefine themselves. The colonial authorities' speeches on those communities highlighted the link between the desirability of Indian minorities and Indian minorities and the need for their presence in the two colonies. This thesis helps deepen our understanding of what an empire is and the complex place that groups deemed homogenous and marginal may have occupied within it.

In 1988, British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield describes a new type of phenomenon. According to his Since 1970, specialists have noticed an upsurged in the amount of diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Quebecois children and children across the world. Once considered “unfortunate souls” suffering from an “unknown illness”, autism is now a disorder the public is now well-aware of, and on which multiple studies were conducted. However, with the publication of a study in 1998 claiming the origins of the disorder is the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR vaccine), the conversation on autism is now polluted by the question of its origins, to the point few people have considered the portrayals of autism and autism in the period leading up to this publication, when the years 1970 to 1990 represent an important period in terms of the evolution of autism’s markers and its treatments, in Quebec in particular. To this end, a series of articles from daily newspapers La Presse and Le Devoir concerning autism over the period 1970-1998 were analyzed in order to highlight three important axes in the present research: the characteristics of autism, the causes of the disorder as well as the care of autistic people, and in particular, young autistic people. From this analysis, we first retain a transformation in the perception of the autistic, where the ‘idiot’ child of the 1970s becomes a misunderstood genius in the 1990s. Simultaneously, we note the appropriation by popular discourses of the role of parents (and mothers especially) on the origins of autism, as well as the popularization of the myth of giftedness in the 1990s. In order to answer these questions, the present dissertation hopes to question the thickness, complexity and temporality of these representations, and do so by trying to observe if those representations interact or are independent from each other during this period, and if we see through the press tensions between discourses used by both communities, or a mixture of mutual appropriations.