Chapter 9 investigates the unprecedented flooding of the Seine and Marne rivers in June 2016. Focussing on the core of Île-de-France, managed by SIAAP, the chapter assesses the flood’s impact on the sanitation system and subsequent effects on the quality of the Seine and Marne rivers. Drawing data from sanitation departments and SIAAP, it details the hydrographic network, rainfall and hydrological situations. The study evaluates the sanitation system’s operation, discharged volumes, sewage treatment plants and environmental impacts, emphasising water quality parameters such as nitrogen, orthophosphates, dissolved oxygen and bacteriology. Despite challenges, the assessment highlights effective management, treatment system performance and the importance of real-time control systems, providing insights for future flood response and urban sanitation planning.

Farrenc worked within a network of musicians devoted to chamber music, including a dozen or more women pianists who specialized in the Classical repertoire. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, violinists like Pierre Baillot and Jean-Delphin Alard established chamber music concerts that created a culture of enthusiasm for string quartets and quintets, piano trios, and large ensemble music. Pianists like Farrenc, Thérèse Wartel, Sophie Pierson-Bodin, and Clara Loveday specialized in the performance of chamber music in the 1830s–50s, which allowed them to establish professional careers within a social environment that placed strict limits on “respectable” women and their activities in public spaces. Wartel established the Society for Classical Music, which presented septets, octets, and nonets for winds and strings to the Paris public for the first time. Farrenc composed her Nonet for the members of this group of virtuoso wind and string players, who performed it together in her solo concert in 1850.

Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.

Foreignness is generally viewed as a liability for the multinational enterprise, negatively affecting strategic fit and the successful transfer of firm assets abroad. Using semiotics – the study of how language systems convey meaning – and the Walt Disney Company’s experiences in internationalization, this chapter provides an illustrative example of a focal transcultural ethnography which develops the notion of semantic fit as a necessary complement to strategic fit and formalizes a conceptual model of recontextualization – the process by which firm assets take on new meanings in distinct cultural environments.

This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.

In this introduction, we first describe the contents of the Summa Logicae in some detail, situating the work in the larger context of medieval logical texts of the thirteen and fourteenth centuries and explaining why it occupies pride of place in Ockham’s philosophical project. Second, we argue that the Summa Logicae was most likely composed in Avignon between 1324 and 1328 contrary to the accepted view that Ockham wrote it in London over the summer of 1323. Third, we trace the legacy of the Summa Logicae from its first reception in Oxford and Paris in the 1330s, into the Parisian controversies of the 1330s and 1340s, and its dissemination further into Europe over the course of the next century or so. We end this history by noting the 1974 publication of the modern critical edition of the Summa Logicae, which was an enormously significant landmark in Ockham studies.

This essay details selected experiences from Fornés’s early life that were formative to her philosophy of life and art in order to highlight how her theatremaking relates to and extends from Havana’s vanguard movements of the 1920s–1940s. Considering Fornés’s migration alongside the trajectories of transnational movement of artists like director Francisco Morín and composer Mario Bauzá, Mayer-García evinces how this experience disposed her to approaching the world through “errant thinking” wherein one comes to know oneself through an immersion in foreign lands and cultures. By highlighting connections with some of Cuba’s most notable artists, the author argues that shared mobility, portable affects of place, and errant thinking all implicate Fornés as a displaced artist from Havana’s avant-garde circles.

Elaine Romero – an accomplished playwright, teacher, and yogi who studied all three practices with María Irene Fornés – uses the tools of dramatic writing to develop a historically informed theatrical exploration of Fornés’s time in Paris in 1954 with her then romantic partner, Harriet Sohmers (an artist, model, and writer who later published memoirs of this period using the surname Zwerling). Here, Romero’s short play – set in the summer of 1954 that the two women spent together in Paris – ruminates on how Fornés’s artistic beginnings stirred during this intimate time with Sohmers. The playscript is prefaced by a brief critical reflection by Romero that details how her own experiences with Fornés inflect her playwriting process and the playwriting exercise Romero offers as conclusion to her play.

Considering the life and influence of María Irene Fornés’s mother on her development, education, and theatrical career. This chapter follows the life of Cuban teacher, mother, and widow, Carmen Collado Fornés, who moved with her two daughters, María Irene and Margarita, to New York City in 1945, and lived with María Irene until her death in 1996. Key aspects of this chapter include Carmen Fornés’s vocation as a teacher, her influence on her daughter, and how María Irene’s role as caretaker informed her work as a theater artist and teacher.

George Benjamin recalls his friendship with Pierre Boulez which lasted over thirty-five years. He pays homage to Boulez’s quite extraordinary musical abilities and remembers the exceptional lucidity and brilliance of his mind.

The history of the relationship between Sean O’Casey and the French stage is closely linked to the history of décentralisation, the state-implemented policy of creating a network of subsidised theatres outside Paris initiated after World War II during the Fourth Republic. His plays were staged regularly in French public theatres until the early 1980s, when the generation of theatre practitioners who had implemented décentralisation began to retire. This chapter starts by giving some contextual elements about décentralisation; it then moves on to give a brief account of some particularly significant O’Casey productions, in chronological order.

This chapter focuses on Poland and France to discuss examples of the emergence of Jewish armed resistance. It stresses different forms of resistance over time and the shift it took when Jewish activists became aware of mass murder. In the east, the creation of ghettos and the mass shootings and deportations of Jews to extermination camps led the Jewish underground and many individual Jews to engage in armed resistance. In the west, armed resistance emerged in response to mass roundups. Jewish resistance in both eastern and western contexts relied, in part, on longstanding personal networks within Jewish organizations and communities, which transcended linguistic, political, and intra-communal divides.

This chapter explores broader cultural European trends following the First World War, including the consequences of currency dynamics and market speculation. These postwar changes culminated in a heightened financialisation of the culture of the art market, reflecting broader shifts in capitalist economies towards financial forms of revenue and profit. The saturation of financial language that accompanies financialisation processes was also a characteristic of this period: the aftermath of the war saw debates revolving around themes of profit, money-making, and an inflation of art production. This chapter parallels previous chapters by examining how cultural and artistic changes were linked to socio-economic developments. The war had acted as a catalyst and accelerator, inflaming cultural tensions within the art markets. It continued to shape market discourses, embedding wartime mentalities into post-war cultural landscapes.

This chapter explores the major auction landscapes before 1914 and also describes the defining elements of the fin-de-siècle European market: integration, free trade, and cosmopolitanism. Examining societies’ approaches to artwork acquisition unveils contradictions and frictions within a milieu united by an international collecting class. France contended with an international, yet conservative, nationalist art world, while Germany’s bourgeoisie tried to control the world of luxury and consumption. In contrast, Britain grappled with questions about free trade and the preservation of art that challenged its laissez-faire tradition. It is precisely these tensions, which directly reflect the challenges posed by the commercialisation of art, that provide a framework for analysing the impact of the war. By emphasising the shared features of an integrated trade sphere, this chapter paints a balanced portrayal of a European market, where art mirrored the complex integration of both socioeconomic and cultural frameworks.

Chapter 7 tracks the transformation of the position of Paris induced by the neoliberal turn. The marketplace of intermediaries between resource-rich African states and French businesses has long been derided as an outgrowth of the Françafrique, the interpersonal shadow networks linking France to its African pré carré. The neoliberal turn fostered the prominence of corporate lawyers as key intermediaries between the state and the market. It was also deployed within the system of the Françafrique. Due to the historical distancing of the Paris bar from business, French corporate law pioneers contributed to the expansion of a French corporate bar under the double thrust of the European Common Market and the model of the Wall Street corporate law firm. It is also as intermediaries of US multinational corporate law firms that they entered the former French pré carré in Africa qua a legal market.

On his journey to the Franciscan General Council in 1259, Bonaventure, having recently been elected minister general of the Order, stopped off to make a spiritual retreat on Mt. Alverna, the place where St. Francis had seen a vision of a six-winged Seraph with an image of the crucified Christ at its center from which he received the stigmata. It was here that Bonaventure was inspired to write a six-stage ascent of the mind into God, associating each stage of the ascent with one of the six wings of the Searph. By creatively adapting contemporary preaching techniques of the so-called “modern sermon” or sermo modernus style, Bonaventure was able to craft a work of which Bernard McGinn would say: “Perhaps no other treatise of comparable size in the history of Western mysticism packs so much into one seamless whole.” I also broach an issue that has divided commentators on Bonaventure’s leadership of the Franciscan Order since the moment he took office as minister general. In helping to foster the Franciscans presence at the University of Paris and other leading universities, did Bonaventure lead the Order in a direction contrary to the spirit of St. Francis?

Debussy’s creative world was deeply enmeshed in the cultural field of the French capital. Steeped in a post-Enlightenment worldview centred on exploration, accumulation of knowledge, and scientific discovery, no aspect of human experience and its habitats was deemed out of bounds in this path to creative accretion. Like many of his contemporaries, Debussy became fascinated by a wealth of new ideas about the world and the human condition that exploded onto the scene during his lifetime. Mysticism and occultism expanded the horizon within which to understand the mind and its creative potential; archaeological discoveries from Greece and Rome brought alive a past that belied the bland classicism so revered only decades earlier; and a rich smorgasbord of historical research – one that encompassed music and its practice – provided new materials from the foreign worlds of medieval, if not mythical, pasts. Over the course of Debussy’s life, these currents were woven together into the conceptual framework that sustained his creative world and that he claimed continually to renew rather than reproduce.