Journal articles on the topic 'Communist parties – France'

The postwar ascendancy of the French and Italian Communist Parties (PCF and PCI) as the strongest ones in the emerging Western alliance was an unexpected challenge for the USA. The US response during this time period (1944–7) was tentative, and relatively moderate, reflecting the still transitional phase from wartime Grand Alliance politics to Cold War. US anti-communism in Western Europe remained guarded for diplomatic and political reasons, but it never mirrored the ambivalence of anti-Americanism among French and especially Italian Communist leaders and intellectuals. US prejudicial opposition to a share of communist power in the French and Italian provisional governments was consistently strong. A relatively decentralized approach by the State Department, however, gave considerable discretion to moderate, circumspect US officials on the ground in France and Italy. The subsequent US turn toward an absolute struggle with Western European communism was only in small part a reaction to direct provocations from Moscow, or the PCI and PCF. The two parties and their powerful propaganda appeared likely to undermine Western cohesion; this was the first depiction, by the USA and its political allies in Europe, of possible domino effects in the Cold War.

This article examines the political transformations experienced by the Communist Party and the evolution of the radical left in France in the twenty-five years after 1989. Interpreting the Communist Party and Left Front as anti-establishment, that is, opposed to the political elite, but pro-system parties that are not interested in changing the nature of democratic governance. The peculiarities of French communism and its political philosophy are illustrated. Finally, this study considers the constituent process of the Front. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Front plays the role of a political federation to the left of the Socialist Party with positive electoral results.

This article dwells on the topic little studied in Russian and foreign historiography, namely, the intelligence work of foreigners in European countries in favour of the Communist International. The research involved documents from the Historical Service of the French Ministry of Defence and the French National Archives, in particular, the court cases of three French activists (J. Sadoul, A. Guilbeaux and R. Petit). The materials of the court cases were formed on the basis of the information gathered by the French intelligence about the activities of these people in European countries. The author of the paper, having analysed the above court cases, determined the chronological framework of this activity (1921–1925) and identified six areas of the Bolshevik agents’ work aimed to promote the communist movement in European countries. These areas included campaigning through organization and distribution of the Soviet press abroad; restoration of the cultural ties between the countries of Western Europe and Soviet Russia; propaganda measures in the occupied territories of Germany; establishment of additional contacts with representatives of the French Communist Party; attempts to revitalize the communist movement in Czechoslovakia and Turkey; and establishment of a link between the Comintern and the Italian and Swiss communists. The author comes to the conclusion that the agents’ activities in these areas had positive results. This example of cooperation between the European communists and leaders of the Comintern through French agents is a new page in the history of communism. It demonstrates the collaboration between the Bolsheviks and representatives of the opposition parties in France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, actively mediated by French citizens, and personifies this aspect of the development of the world communist movement.

The Poznań uprising of June 1956, coming just a few months after Nikita Khrushchev's landmark “secret speech” at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress, constituted the first real test of de-Stalinization. The uprising was a turning point in postwar Polish history and the precursor to subsequent bouts of unrest in Poland. Yet, the episode itself and its repercussions that year were overshadowed by more pressing and dramatic developments, especially the revolution in Hungary four months later. The responses of the leaders of the two largest non-ruling Communist parties to the Poznań rebellion have been well documented, but much less is known about how ordinary Communist Party members in Italy and France viewed the unrest. This article draws for the first time on the personal testimonies of more than fifty people who in 1956 were rank-and-file Communists from the federations of Var and Gorizia. The article looks in detail at the contemporary reactions to the anti-Communist rebellion. In so doing, it reveals much about ordinary Communists’ priorities, degrees of critical detachment, and level of commitment to the Soviet Union and the Communist cause.

This article examines the nature and significance of the activities carried out in France and Italy by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an international organization that was secretly funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to support anti-Communist intellectuals, including those on the left end of the political spectrum. These two West European countries, with their large and politically influential Communist parties, were central to the CCF's work in Europe. The organization's task was complicated by domestic concerns and traditions that forced local intellectuals to stress their autonomy from the CCF International Secretariat and its U.S. patrons. The article uses the cultural Cold War and the competing interpretations of anti-Communism and cultural freedom within the CCF as a lens to explore the limits of U.S. influence and persuasion among the intellectual classes of Europe. By repeatedly asserting their independence and agency, the French and Italian members of the CCF helped redefine the character and limits of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of the emergence and development of a new pan-European political Party of the European left in the political arena. Its forerunner was a Forum of the new European left, formed in 1991, close to the Communist and workers’ parties and the group «European United Left – Nordic Green Left» in the European Parliament, which emerged in 1995 through the merger of «Confederal Group of the European United Left» faction of environmentalists «Left-wing Green of the North». Many experts viewed these parties as a vestige of a bipolar world, and believed that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they should finally disappear from the political arena of Europe, giving up the left flank to the socialists and social Democrats. However, European Communists and left-wing radicals demonstrated incredible political vitality and in the tenth years of the twentieth century in a number of EU countries (Greece, France, the Czech Republic) managed to bypass their opponents on the left flank. In 2004 a pan-European party of the European left was created, which is characterized by a commitment to unorthodox Communist and environmental values and a moderately eurosceptic view of the EU’s development prospects. In the last European elections in 2019, this party lost some ground, but nevertheless managed to maintain its small faction in the European Parliament. So today it is difficult to speak about prospects of the European left, although the strength of parties in Germany, Greece, Spain, France and other countries, as well as the weakening of the party of European socialists, gives us reasonable confidence in the fact that the radical left will be able to maintain its presence on the political stage of Europe in the next 10-15 years. The author of the article tried to identify the causes of this political force and its future prospects.

The article examines the results of the parliamentary elections in France held on June 12 and 19, 2022. The results of the leading political parties in the elections of 2017 and 2022 are compared, and all these parties that were represented in parliament in the period from 2017 to 2022 are characterized. The results of the activities of the French government, formed by President and Leader of party Republic on the March! E. Macron following the results of the 2018 elections. The reasons for maintaining the rating of this government and its influence on the course of the election campaign are revealed. It is considered how the coronavirus pandemic and the government's actions to overcome its consequences affected the course and results of the election campaign. The assessment of the activities of the main opposition parties of this country is given. The course of the election campaign and its main topics, as well as the positions of political parties and coalitions that were elected to parliament following these elections are considered: the coalition Together (For a President Majority), led by the Chairman of the National Assembly R.Ferrand, uniting the Renaissance, Democratic Movement and Horizon parties, the New People's Ecological and Social Union coalition (NPESU) led by the leader of the Unconquered France party J.-L.Melenchon, which also united the socialist and communist parties, and the Europe, Ecology, Greens party, the National Unification Party of Marine Le Pen, which was headed on the eve of the elections by MEP J.Bordella, and the coalition of the Union of the Right and Centrists led by the leader of the Republicans Party, C.Jacob, which also included the Union of Democrats and Independents party. The positions of these parties are presented. The state of Russian-French relations is analyzed and a forecast is given of how the election results will affect relations between RF and France.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

The article is devoted to the unification of the leading left parties of France: Socialist (SP), Communist (FCP), Europe Ecology – The Greens (EEG), France Unbowed (FU) – on the eve of the parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19, 2022, into a single alliance, called New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NESPU). It is analyzed to what extent the efforts made by the leaders of the leading left political forces corresponded to the aspirations of the left electorate. Particular attention is paid to the theoretical provisions of the program adopted by the NESPU, it was educed to what extent the strategy adopted by the Union corresponded to the individual programmes of the parties and what the coalition participants failed to agree on. The socio-cultural section of the NESPU electorate is considered separately. The results of the parliamentary elections for the NESPU are analyzed, the speeches of the deputies of the parties belonging to the Union in parliament on the most important issues of the financial policy of the government of E. Macron for 2023 are shown, and the fault lines between the participants of the NESPU are marked. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that the newly created coalition of leftist political parties as a whole, despite the considerable differences in political courses, still manages to maintain unity, following the chosen strategy of free voting.

AbstractAlthough it is now recognized that the Stalin-Tito dispute was sparked off by Tito's desire to intervene decisively in the Greek civil war, the ideological context of that decision has never been fully explored. This article suggests that, since the early days of the Second World War, Tito had been committed to establishing a popular front ‘from below’, i.e. under clear communist control. He did this not only in Yugoslavia, but used his position in the war-time Comintern to persuade other communist parties to do the same. As a result he was dissatisfied with the all-party coalition governments established with Stalin's consent throughout Europe in 1945. Tito favoured a communist offensive, while Stalin, aware of the international position of the Soviet Union, favoured a more cautious approach. When Stalin summoned the first meeting of the Cominform in September 1947 and made Tito its de Facto leader, Tito mistakenly assumed he was to head a new international committed to a revolutionary offensive not only in Eastern Europe but in Greece and even Italy and France.

The concept of agonistic democracy put forward by Ch. Mouffe opposes both the understanding of political conflict as antagonistic, the parties of which regard each other as implacable enemies, and the actual denial of the conflict in the consensus theories of democracy. This concept, in which a political conflict is seen as a struggle between two opponents, each of which recognizes the legitimacy of the other, has found its implementation in the activities of new left-wing radical parties that have appeared in Western Europe over the past 10–15 years. Their appearance was a reaction to the crisis and the decline of most of the «old» left-wing radical parties that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. The «new» left-wing radicals seek to develop their own identity, which is different from the communist and socialdemocratic ones, which is also manifested in the new emblematic symbols they invent, which are not like the sickle, hammer, and five-pointed star of the «old» left-wing radicals, and in the new discursive strategies. On the example of the Podemos party (Spain), as well as the Left Party of France and the Party «Unconquered France», it is examined how the «new» left radicals construct the subject of political action – «people», «popular majority» or simply «We», opposed «Those above», «caste», «oligarchy». But with all the harshness of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal rhetoric, the conflict of «new» left-wing radicals with the system is more agonistic than antagonistic: they want not to destroy the old institutions, but to win them back from the opposite side, not to replace democracy with the dictatorship of the advanced class, but to «return» its people and expand it.

The purpose of this issue is to explore the possible political futures of parties and movements of the “democratic left” in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Poland, and Russia. The task could not proceed without clear definition, or definitions, of the “democratic left” because of national variations. There is “liberalism” or “progressivism” in the United States of many hues, but with no “social democracy” or politically viable socialism to the left. Socialism, in the old sense, of ownership of the means of production, has died in Britain, and the present government of “New Labour” refers to itself as the “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. But there is much controversy at home whether “social democracy” has been also jettisoned in favor of a kind of “neoliberalism” that has embraced markets and trimmed social security. The large, democratic parties of the left in France and Germany derive from traditions of “social democracy” that have challenged many capitalist values and institutions, whether from Marxist or non-Marxist perspectives, and sought to establish a state and society organized around principles of social justice. These parties may win national elections but are torn between old left politics and the need to form larger coalitions in order to win. One might ask, Why include Poland and Russia? The purpose was to ask if new democratic forms of “social democracy” could be discerned in the ashes of defunct communist systems that might bear some resemblance to the politics of Western Europe.

The dynamics of Euroscepticism intensity of some French parties is analysed in the given article with the use of Attitude to European integration index. The degree of criticism of the EU is evaluated quantitatively (1-13 points) based on the following data extracted from 2010-2017 party manifestos: attitude to the principal idea of European integration, affective and instrumental support or discontent of the EU, the perception of the EU as an (un-) accountable institution. The elaborated method was proven to be instrumental and reliable for Euroscepticism studies by finding correspondence between the quantitative values of the Index and Russian scholars’ qualitative estimates. This standardized approach to measurement allowed not only to reveal the general attitude of a particular party towards European integration, but also to compare the obtained estimates with indicators for past years, for other parties, and also in other countries. The developed scale let ascertain some strengthening of National Front’s and J.-L. Melenchon’s supporters’ (nowadays – from “Unbowed France”) Euroscepticism and weakening criticism of the EU by gaullists from the “Union for the Popular Movement” and the “Republicans”. Relatively stronger Euroscepticism of the French Communist Party in comparison to the Socialist Party has been confirmed.

This essay examines how two French individuals in the third generation of Holocaust victims/survivors, Christophe Boltanski and Ivan Jablonka, research and present their grandparents and how they challenge contemporary memory culture. Their works differ in their ambitions and the strategies used to achieve them, but both Boltanski and Jablonka take the most disrespected of historical genres, the history of the author’s family, and reveal its potential in an arena where the duty to remember what was done to Jews as a group can obscure the complex individuals who were victims. These forgotten selves and what they reveal about the societies in which they lived are the subject of Boltanski’s and Jablonka’s work. Particular attention is devoted to the Communist parties in Poland and France and the relations of their grandparents to them.

The British and French communist movements have rarely been an object of comparison, partly because of the huge difference in fortunes enjoyed by the two parties. However, one important similarity between these neighbours was the size and importance of the countries' coal industries, as well as the militancy of their mining communities, where communism took root as a serious political and cultural force. This article examines acts of solidarity by British and French Communists during the most important miners' strikes of their parties' existence: the General Strike and Lockout of 1926, the French miners' action of 1948, and the British miners' last great struggle of 1984-1985. Through the study of archival documents, the press and other sources, we explore how these disputes constitute important moments in the history of British and French communism, as well as of their countries' respective labour movements. The dispute of 1984-1985 marks a culminating point that confirms the strengths and weaknesses of British and French communism's relationship with the miners.

The article analyzes approaches of France’s leading left forces towards Russia (USSR) from beginning of the 20th century to the present. At beginning of the twentieth century, almost all parts of the French left expressed hatred of the Russian monarchy and, at the same time, solidarity with the struggle of democratic and socialist forces in Russia for freedom and a republic. The question of the attitude to Soviet Russia played a central role in the historic split of the SFIO in 1920 and in the future for decades to come; “the Soviet question” was the line of the watershed between the two leading French left-wing parties, SFIO (SP) and FCP. If the communists from the very creation of the Party took a position of total solidarity with Soviet internal and foreign policy, the socialists, speaking for the development of equal and friendly relations with the Soviet Union, criticized domestic political realities of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s foreign policy. The collapse of the USSR led to serious changes in the perception of Russia in French leftist circles of France. The French left was characterized by an ambiguous attitude towards Boris Yeltsin’s policies. As before, the French left is expressing its sympathy for the Russian people. However, in general, most of the French left movement at present negatively evaluates the socio-economic and domestic political evolution of Russia, as well as Moscow’s foreign policy in the first two decades of the 21st century. First, this applies to positions of the socialists and the Greens. The Communist Party opposes the dignity to the insulating pressure on Moscow. For their part, politicians and power related to left populist and left patriotic direction see Russia as a strategic ally in the struggle for more equitable international relations.

Between 1934 and 1938, several million workers took part in the elections, strikes, and protests that made the popular front a pivotal moment in the recent history of France. Giant street demonstrations, the General Strike of November 1938, and above all the massive sit-down strikes of June 1936 made most workers at least momentary actors in the drama of national political life. Yet, for all that has been written about these events, little is known about how labor conflict during the popular front actually affected workers' views. The problem has been in large part one of sources: the speeches, newspapers, leaflets, and memoirs of the period reveal more about trade union leaders and local militants than about the ordinary men and women who made popular protest possible but whose opinions rarely found their way into print. As a result, a number of questions remain largely unanswered: How much of the ethos of the popular front, and how much of the ideology of the Socialist and Communist parties, did rank-and-file workers come to embrace? Which slogans spoke most poignantly to lathe operators at Renault, textile workers in Lille, or sales clerks at the Galeries Lafayette? Were the euphoria of June 1936 and the crushing defeat of the General Strike in November 1938 as important in the lives of these people as they were for labor leaders? How popular, in short, was the political experience of the popular front?

Between 1934 and 1938, several million workers took part in the elections, strikes, and protests that made the popular front a pivotal moment in the recent history of France. Giant street demonstrations, the General Strike of November 1938, and above all the massive sit-down strikes of June 1936 made most workers at least momentary actors in the drama of national political life. Yet, for all that has been written about these events, little is known about how labor conflict during the popular front actually affected workers' views. The problem has been in large part one of sources: the speeches, newspapers, leaflets, and memoirs of the period reveal more about trade union leaders and local militants than about the ordinary men and women who made popular protest possible but whose opinions rarely found their way into print. As a result, a number of questions remain largely unanswered: How much of the ethos of the popular front, and how much of the ideology of the Socialist and Communist parties, did rank-and-file workers come to embrace? Which slogans spoke most poignantly to lathe operators at Renault, textile workers in Lille, or sales clerks at the Galeries Lafayette? Were the euphoria of June 1936 and the crushing defeat of the General Strike in November 1938 as important in the lives of these people as they were for labor leaders? How popular, in short, was the political experience of the popular front?

The article dwells upon the book “The Modern Czecho-Slovakia” by Pavel N. Mostovenko — the Soviet representative in Prague from June, 1921 till February, 1923. The author of the article supposes that Mostovenko began to work on this book immediately after his return from Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1923 following his fresh impressions and having all the necessary materials. All the chapters of this book embraced a wide range of problems: a brief history of Czechia, the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic, its social and economic development, the financial system, the constitution of 1920 and the functioning of the state machinery, the leading political parties, the relations among different ethnic groups, home and foreign policy. In the USSR Mostovenko’s book was the first attempt at interpreting the history of the Czechoslovak Republic from the point of view of the communist ideology. At the same time, the author of the article states that in Mostovenko’s book quite a few aspects of the development of Czechoslovakia at the beginning of 1920s are interpreted in a way different from the documents of Comintern and the Soviet press of that period. The author of the article proves that Mostovenko on the basis of the analysis of the international relations in Central Europe after World War I predicted that in case of an essential breach of the balances of powers in the Versailles system of international relations, Czechoslovakia would became its first victim and neither France nor the allies in the Little Entente would help it. Exactly this happened in 1938.

In the period post Franco were created more favorable conditions for left parties, first of all for Communist party. However, «eurocommunists» leadership of the Communist party of Spain (KPI) led her to a deep crisis. The creation in January 1984 of the new Communist party of the people of Spain (PCPE), despite the difficulties of institutional development, the complicated financial situation, lack of personnel, became a significant factor in the national political field. After many years of political and ideological disarmament of the left forces in Spain appeared a party, acting with genuine class positions. At the same time, PCPE played the role of catalyst of processes oriented to shift to the left axis of the political life of the country. However, the current situation in the Spanish communist movement, the whole objective situation in Spain dictated the need for the unification of the communists. That goal was answered by the creation of a left electoral coalition «United left».

Au lendemain de la deuxième guerre mondiale, personne n'était en France prêt à envisager une perspective d'indépendance: ni l'opinion publique, ni les partis (pas même le parti communiste), ni le gouvernement. C'est une différence majeure d'avec la Grande-Bretagne: celle-ci avait été de longue date préparée à organiser l'indépendance de ses colonies – à la différence de la France vis-à-vis de l'Algérie. Depuis un demi-siècle elle négociait celle de l'Inde qui aboutit en 1947.

The article presents an analysis of the origin of the policy of non-intervention in the civil war in Spain in 1936. The archival materials of the Foreign Office’s fund (National Archives, London) make it pos-sible to widen greatly our knowledge about genesis and character of that policy, to argue the version about Great Britain as an initiator of non-intervention. Many factors influenced this process: interests of British monopolies, strategic and political considerations, such as anti-Communism of the elite of British society, their sympathy towards the rebels of Franco, wish of official London to make it possible for the left parties in France, neighbouring to Spain, not to acquire stronger positions. Non-intervention turned against the Spanish Republic, made it easier for Germany and Italy under cover of it to carry massive intervention on side of the rebels which ensured Franco’s victory in the civil war. On the basis of unknown documents of the Foreign Office the author gives an analysis of complicated diplomatic struggle of the Powers in the beginning of the civil war in Spain.

Tue 2022 legislative elections in France saw a new political player: NUPES, who won about a fourth of the National Assembly seats. Tuis ad hoc alliance of the four main parties of the left-wing political spectrum (socialists, greens, communists, radical left) faced considerable hurdles in nominating candidates. When analyzing the extent to which these were overcome, a number of less well-known factors of the French political system are explained, and the possible effects the electoral alliance might have on the party system are explored. Based on the LEGIS-2022 dataset on candidates in the parliamentary elections, we can show that the party financing rules and the local anchoring of the parties had an impact on the internal balance of power within the Left Alliance. Although electoral successes were hardly predictable not only due to the lack of safe constituencies but also to resistances exercised within their own ranks in the form of counter-candidacies, all four left-leaning parties were able to form their own parliamentary group after the election. In this respect, the electoral alliance functioned as a useful vehicle for maximizing votes in a highly fragmented party system.

In December 1938 an alliance of the Radical, Communist and Socialist parties took office in Chile, the first Popular Front to come to power in Latin America. A few months later, in Spain, the Nationalist forces under Generalísimo Franco occupied Madrid, bringing an end to the civil war. Shortly after, a serious diplomatic conflict developed between Spain and Chile, in which most of Latin America gradually became embroiled. It concerned the fate of 17 Spanish republicans who had sought asylum in the Chilean embassy in the last days of the seige of Madrid, and culminated in July 1940 when the Nationalist government broke off relations with Chile. Initially, the issue at the heart of the episode was the right to political asylum and the established practice of Latin American diplomatic legations of offering protection to individuals seeking asylum (asilados). The causes of the conflict, however, became increasingly obscured as time went on. The principles at stake became confused by mutual Spanish– Chilean distrust, the Nationalists' ideological crusade both within Spain and outside and the Chilean government's deep hostility to the Franco regime, which it saw as a manifestation of fascism. The ideological gulf widened with the onset of the Second World War. This article concentrates primarily, although not exclusively, on the first part of the dispute, April 1939–January 1940. In this period asylum, which is our main interest, was uppermost in Spanish–Chilean diplomatic correspondence.

RESUMEN Tras la victoria del general Franco en la Guerra Civil, la paz no llegó por completo a todos los rincones de la geografía española. La falta de una política de reconciliación nacional, junto al mantenimiento de una intensa actividad represora, hicieron que algunos republicanos se refugiasen en la sierra, sin otro objetivo que el de salvar la vida. Con el tiempo, y en paralelo a la evolución de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el Partido Comunista de España consiguió dotar de objetivos políticos a estos huidos y crear agrupaciones guerrilleras, lo que contribuyó a agravar la violencia rural. En este artículo, con documentación de archivos militares, de partidos políticos y de las fuerzas de orden público, y mediante el uso de la historia oral, abordamos la permanencia de la violencia en el mundo rural: asesinatos, ejecuciones extrajudiciales, fusilamientos públicos, ley de fugas, robos, secuestros, agresiones sexuales, así como otras formas de excesos y coacciones que fueron algo normal en el medio rural durante la década de los años cuarenta del siglo XX. PALABRAS CLAVE: violencia, represión franquista, huidos, guerrillero, ejecuciones extrajudiciales ABSTRACT After the victory of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, complete peace did not come to all corners of Spain. The lack of a policy of national reconciliation, together with the maintenance of strong repressive activity, led some Republicans to take refuge in the mountains with no other purpose than to save their lives. Over time, and in parallel with the evolution of World War II, the Communist Party of Spain managed to provide these fugitives with political objectives and create guerrilla groups, which contributed to the aggravation of rural violence. In this article, using documentation from military archives, political parties and the security forces, as well as oral history, we address the persistence of violence in rural areas: killings, extrajudicial executions, public executions, ley de fugas, robbery, kidnapping, sexual assault and other forms of excesses and oppression that were normal in rural areas during the 1940s. KEY WORDS: violence, Francoist repression, escapees, guerrilla fighters, extrajudicial executions

In de tweede helft van 1936 beleefde België een periode van politieke destabilisering. Dat was het gevolg van de verkiezingen van 24 mei die een nederlaag betekenden voor de katholieke partij en een overwinning voor Rex van Léon Degrelle, die dictatoriale ambities koesterde en steun vond bij Hitler en Mussolini. Ook het Vlaams Nationaal Verbond, dat eveneens in fascistische richting was geëvolueerd, en de communisten boekten winst. De socialisten waren nu de grootste partij, maar accepteerden een regering van nationale unie met katholieken en liberalen onder de technocraat Paul Van Zeeland. Die regering kwam onmiddellijk onder vuur te liggen van links en rechts en werd geconfronteerd met afvalligheid in eigen rangen. Het nationaalsocialisme in Duitsland, het linkse Volksfront in Frankrijk en de burgeroorlog in Spanje vormden het referentiekader voor een periode van sterke polarisatie en felle agitatie, waarin partijen en politici streefden naar een herschikking, een “concentratie” van politieke krachten. Rechtse politici probeerden de regering omver te werpen en een coalitie zonder socialisten (die zij beschouwden als cryptocommunisten) op de been te brengen. Sommige katholieken probeerden de politieke eendracht onder geloofsgenoten te herstellen door een vorm van samenwerking met Rex en VNV, en nog andere katholieken probeerden met de Vlaams-nationalisten in Vlaanderen een Vlaamse Concentratie tot stand te brengen. De bakens werden verzet toen Rex en VNV op 6 oktober een alliantie sloten en daarmee een krachtig oppositiefront vormden. Op 25 oktober verijdelde de regering-Van Zeeland een rexistische “mars op Brussel”. Om dit nieuwe front de wind uit de zeilen te halen probeerden de Vlaamse katholieken, die zich hergroepeerden in de Katholieke Vlaamse Volkspartij, alsnog samenwerking te realiseren met de Vlaams-nationalisten. Dat leidde op 8 december 1936 tot het akkoord KVV-VNV, dat evenwel meteen van beide kanten werd gedesavoueerd. De tegenstelling tussen aanhangers van de bestaande orde en van de nieuwe orde, tussen voorstanders en tegenstanders van de regering, was te groot. De christendemocratische strekking in de katholieke partij haalde de bovenhand toen de bisschoppen op het einde van 1936 in een publieke brief niet alleen het communisme, maar ook alle strevingen naar een rechtse dictatuur veroordeelden. De destabilisering van de Belgische politiek verdween pas na de nederlaag van Degrelle in zijn verkiezingsduel met premier Van Zeeland op 11 april 1937. De democratiekritiek die de beweging naar “concentratie” ondersteunde bleef echter voortleven.________The unsuccesful formatiob of a Flemish and right-wing front. The history of the 1936 concentrationBelgium experienced a period of political destabilization in the second half of 1936. That was the result of the 24 May elections, the defeat of the catholic party and the victory of Rex, a movement led by Léon Degrelle, who had dictatorial ambitions and would soon be supported by Hitler and Mussolini. The Flemish Nationalists (VNV), also oriented towards fascism, and the Communists had made progress too. The socialists, who ended up being the largest party, accepted a cabinet of national union with the Catholics and the liberals under the leadership of a technocrat, Paul Van Zeeland. The Van Zeeland cabinet immediately came under fire from left and right and was confronted with deserters in its own ranks. National Socialism in Germany, the Front populaire in France and the civil war in Spain formed the horizon for a period of strong polarization and agitation in which politicians and parties aimed at redesigning political forces, “concentration” being the keyword. Politicians from the right attempted to establish a cabinet without socialists whom they considered crypto communists. Catholics tried to restore political union among the faithful through forms of cooperation with Rex and VNV, and some among them tried to install a “Flemish Concentration” through collaboration with the Flemish Nationalists. A decisive fact occurred on 0ctober 6 when Rex and VNV formed an alliance creating a strong opposition front. On October 25 the government foiled a rexist mass rally in Brussels. To regain control Flemish Catholics, who regrouped in the Katholieke Vlaamse Volkspartij (KVV), attempted to realize a form of collaboration with the Flemish Nationalists. It resulted in the December 8 KVV-VNV agreement, which was, however, immediately denounced from both sides. The antagonism between supporters of the existing order and those of a new order, between the partisans of the government and its opponents, was too strong. The Christian democrats in the catholic party finally gained the upper hand when the Belgian bishops, at the end of December 1936, issued a pastoral letter not only condemning communism but also a dictatorship of the right. The destabilization of Belgian politics disappeared after the defeat of Degrelle in his electoral duel with Prime Minister Van Zeeland on April 11, 1937. However, the fundamental criticism of democracy underlying the “concentration” movement did not.

The defeat of the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum on 12 June 2008 has sent shock waves throughout the European Union (EU). It is still premature to attempt to evaluate the full consequences of this referendum defeat. Whatever the legal and political merits of the Treaty itself, it is clear that Ireland’s standing within the EU has been diminished. Nor, as a matter of political reality, is Ireland in the position of either France or the Netherlands following the defeat of the European Constitution in those jurisdictions in the summer of 2005. For a start, the Lisbon Treaty was a further compromise – even if it did contain much of what had hitherto been in the ill-fated European Constitution – and the appetite for a wearisome further round of institutional reflection on the part of the Member States had diminished further. Just as critically, even if many voters in Ireland were in denial on this point, there is a difference in terms of realpolitik between a negative decision on the part of two key founder Member States on the one hand and a rejection in a small, peripheral country such as Ireland on the other. Again, irrespective of what one thinks of the merits of the Lisbon Treaty, in practical terms, it is hard to see how one small Member State can refuse to ratify a Treaty deemed essential by the other twenty-six Member States, at least without jeopardizing huge reserves of goodwill. Ireland has, of course, been in this situation before following the first (negative) referendum vote on the Nice Treaty in June 2001. That defeat was highly embarrassing for both the Government and the country. We were the only country to hold a referendum on an innocuous treaty designed to facilitate the accession of new entrants, most of whom had suffered the yoke of communism and Soviet domination. The referendum did not engage the public; the quality of debate was poor and the turnout – 34% – unimpressive. A combination of domestic and EU pressures saw a successful second referendum in the Autumn of 2002. On that occasion, the Government campaign was much better, as was the quality of the political debate. The second referendum passed comfortably with a significantly higher turnout. So far as the Lisbon referendum was concerned, many were of the view that that turnout would prove to be the key. On this occasion, the turnout at 54% was sufficiently high so as to remove the question of turnout as a factor in the defeat of the referendum. And yet despite an active – if at times uninspiring – campaign on the part of the Government and the main opposition parties, the referendum was defeated by 53% to 47%.

Bankruptcy is defined as the legal situation in which an individual, a company or an institution cannot meet outstanding liabilities, which are superior in value compared to available assets. Personal bankruptcy refers to the situation described above in the case of individuals. This highly important legal and economic institution was long ago settled in the United States of America, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and recently in former communist countries such as Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, existing throughout the EU, except for Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. In December 2015, in Romania, the Personal Bankruptcy Law is to come into force and this article focuses on the main aspects of the three steps procedure comprised in it as well as on the advantages and disadvantages from all involved parts perspective, that is: individual debtors, Banks as creditors and state institutions as third parties highlighting the main changes that are to happen both for individuals as well as for the society as a whole.

International audience La valorisation en France entre 1945 et 1956 de la musique soviétique s'opère à travers les événements ou les articles de presse consacrés aux virtuoses soviétiques. La musique est valorisée par des arts ou des pratiques connexes, néanmoins parties intégrantes de la musique : l'enseignement soviétique, la danse, le cinéma… La période stalinienne d'après-guerre élargie à l'immédiat après Staline représente l'acmé de la dictature stalinienne et reste encore aujourd'hui la plus mystérieuse de l'histoire soviétique. Cette période correspond par ailleurs, en URSS, à un moment d'exacerbation de la politique culturelle dite du « réalisme socialiste » dans le domaine des arts, et spécialement de la musique. Cela exigeait de l'artiste une représentation véridique, historiquement concrète de la réalité dans son développement révolutionnaire, son devoir étant de participer à la lutte idéologique et à l'éducation des masses dans l'esprit du socialisme. Limiter la question de la réception de la musique soviétique aux réactions et aux discussions que cette musique suscitait dans les revues savantes serait ne pas prendre en compte la manière dont elle a interrogé, en tant que modèle, la sphère de la consommation musicale française en général. Il s'agit ici de ne pas interpréter la réception de la musique soviétique en France à travers celle d'un compositeur ou d'une oeuvre. Les virtuoses sont ainsi valorisés comme des intermédiaires. La force d'un tel travail réside en la masse d'informations recueillies et organisées à partir de toutes les publications nationales assimilées communistes de l'époque, chambres d'écho de ce qui se passait alors en URSS et riches en informations sur les carrières et les représentations des virtuoses.

Под общим заголовком публикуются три очерка, написанные пятью французскими учеными и писателями. В них на основе сочетания социал-демократических и умеренных коммунистических идей представлены теоретическое и фактическое обоснование французской версии еврокоммунизма, краткое описание истории Советского государства и общества, сравнение опыта и перспектив развития СССР и КПСС по сравнению с другими государствами, а также действующими в этих государствах политическими партиями. Особенностью публикуемых очерков является междисциплинарность, обусловленная их одновременной принадлежностью к типологическим жанрам политической историографии, социально-научного исследования и философского эссе. Under a common title published are three essays written by French scientists and writers. Based on ideas of Social Democracy and Communism presented is a theoretical and practical foundation for the French version of Eurocommunism. Short description of Soviet Union and it’s society is given, as well as comparison of the experience and development perspectives of USSR and CPSU with other countries, and with acting political parties. The texts have a peculiar multidisciplinary character, they combine Political Historiography, Social Science Research and Philosophical Essay. Cognition and usage of the texts are essential for objective perception of development of Sovietology in France, it’s methodological and conceptual specifics.

Ajzenstat, Janet, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles and William D. Gairdner, eds. Canada's Founding Debates. By Alan Cairns 847Lazar, Harvey, ed. Canada: The State of the Federation 1999/2000: Toward a New Mission Statement for Canadian Fiscal Federalism. By Hugh Mellon 848Mouchon, Jean. La politique sous l'influence des médias; Monière, Denis. Démocratie médiatique et représentation politique: analyse comparative de quatre journaux télévisés : Radio-Canada, France 2, RTBF (Belgique) et TSR (Suisse); et Gingras, Anne-Marie. Médias et démocratie. Le grand malentendu. Par Maud Vuillardot 850Livingstone, D. W., D. Hart and L. E. Davie. Public Attitudes towards Education in Ontario 1998: The Twelfth OISE/UT Survey; and O'Sullivan, Edmund. Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21st Century. By Benjamin Levin 853Perrier, Yvan et Raymond Robert. Savoir Plus : outils et méthodes de travail intellectuel. Par Veronique Bell 855Salazar, Debra J. and Donald K. Alper, eds. Sustaining the Forests of the Pacific Coast: Forging Truces in the War in the Woods. By Jeremy Rayner 856DeLuca, Kevin Michael. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. By Michael Howlett 857Beem, Christopher. The Necessity of Politics: Reclaiming American Public Life. By Loralea Michaelis 858Kennedy, Moorhead, R. Gordon Hoxie and Brenda Repland, eds. The Moral Authority of Government: Essays to Commemorate the Centennial of the National Institute of Social Sciences. By Joseph M. Knippenberg 860Atkinson, Hugh and Stuart Wilks-Heeg. Local Government from Thatcher to Blair: The Politics of Creative Autonomy. By G. W. Jones 862Geoghegan, Patrick M. The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics, 1798-1801. By Gary Owens 863Sabetti, Filippo. The Search for Good Government: Understanding the Paradox of Italian Democracy. By Grant Amyot 864Stein, Eric. Thoughts from a Bridge: A Retrospective of Writings on New Europe and American Federalism. By Manuel Mertin 866Janos, Andrew C. East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Post-Communism. By Paul G. Lewis 869Higley, John and Gyorgy Lengyel, eds. Elites after State Socialism: Theories and Analysis. By Marta Dyczok 870Lomnitz, Larissa Adler and Ana Melnick. Chile's Political Culture and Parties: An Anthropological Explanation. By Ken Roberts 872Itzigsohn, José. Developing Poverty: The State, Labor Market Deregulation, and the Informal Economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. By Andrew Schrank 873Davenport, Rodney and Christopher Saunders. South Africa: A Modern History. By Hermann Giliomee 875Matthes, Melissa M. The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics. By Lori J. Marso 877Gorham, Eric B. The Theater of Politics: Hannah Arendt, Political Science, and Higher Education. By Herman van Gunsteren 878Dodd, Nigel. Social Theory and Modernity. By J. C. Myers 879Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. By Paul Safier 881Sztompka, Piotr. Trust: A Sociological Theory. By Fiona M. Kay 882 Laugier, Sandra. Recommencer la philosphie. La philosophie américaine aujourd'hui. Par Dalie Giroux 884Bishop, John Douglas, ed. Ethics and Capitalism. By Raino Malnes 886Orend, Brian. War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective. By Howard Williams 888Buchanan, Allen, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler. From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. By Travis D. Smith 889Young, Iris Marion. Inclusion and Democracy. By Jeff Spinner-Halev 891Shapiro, Ian and Stephen Macedo, eds. Designing Democratic Institutions. By John S. Dryzek 893O'Brien, Robert, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams. Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements. By Stephen McBride 894Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. By Trevor Salmon 896Haglund, David G., ed. Pondering NATO's Nuclear Options: Gambits for a Post-Westphalian World. By T.V. Paul 897Bertsch, Gary K. and William C. Potter, eds. Dangerous Weapons, Desperate States: Russia, Belarus, Kazakstan, and Ukraine. By Benjamin E. Goldsmith 898Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. By Salim Mansur 900Aldecoa, Francisco and Michael Keating, eds. Paradiplomacy in Action: The Foreign Relations of Subnational Governments. By Hans J. Michelmann 901Davis, James W. Threats and Promises: The Pursuit of International Influence. By David Rousseau 903Lavoy, Peter R., Scott D. Sagan and James J. Wirtz, eds. Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons. By Greg Dinsmore 905

Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields (1920). Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (1944). Chicago: Black Swan P, 1983. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1996. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993. Gascoyne, David. “Introduction.” The Magnetic Fields (1920) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Howell, Catherine. “City of Night: Parisian Explorations.” Public: Civic Spectacle 45 (2012): 64–77. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in André Breton’s Nadja and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles, CA: ICI P, 2007. 360–87. Matthews, J.H. Surrealism and the Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1996. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27.3 (2004): 365–87. Read, Peter. “Poets out of Uniform.” Book Review. The Times Literary Supplement. 15 Mar. 2002: 22. Shattuck, Roger. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” The History of Surrealism. Ed. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 11–34. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights of Paris (1928). Trans. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Exact Change, 1992. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003): 1–11. 20 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1›.

Introduction The decline of marriage in the West has been extensively researched over the last three decades (Carmichael and Whittaker; de Vaus; Coontz; Beck-Gernshein). Indeed, it was fears that the institution would be further eroded by the legalisation of same sex unions internationally that provided the impetus for the Australian government to amend the Marriage Act (1961). These amendments in 2004 sought to strengthen marriage by explicitly defining, for the first time, marriage as a legal partnership between one man and one woman. The subsequent heated debates over the discriminatory nature of this definition have been illuminating, particularly in the way they have highlighted the ongoing social significance of marriage, even at a time it is seen to be in decline. Demographic research about partnering practices (Carmichael and Whittaker; Simons; Parker; Penman) indicates that contemporary marriages are more temporary, fragile and uncertain than in previous generations. Modern marriages are now less about a permanent and “inescapable” union between a dominant man and a submissive female for the purposes of authorised sex, legal progeny and financial security, and more about a commitment between two social equals for the mutual exchange of affection and companionship (Croome). Less research is available, however, about how couples themselves reconcile the inherited constructions of romantic love as selfless and unending, with trends that clearly indicate that romantic love is not forever, ideal or exclusive. Civil marriage ceremonies provide one source of data about representations of love. Civil unions constituted almost 70 per cent of all marriages in Australia in 2010, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The civil marriage ceremony has both a legal and symbolic role. It is a legal contract insofar as it prescribes a legal arrangement with certain rights and responsibilities between two consenting adults and outlines an expectation that marriage is voluntarily entered into for life. The ceremony is also a public ritual that requires couples to take what are usually private feelings for each other and turn them into a public performance as a way of legitimating their relationship. Consistent with the conventions of performance, couples generally customise the rest of the ceremony by telling the story of their courtship, and in so doing they often draw upon the language and imagery of the Western Romantic tradition to convey the personal meaning and social significance of their decision. This paper explores how couples construct the idea of love in their relationship, first by examining the western history of romantic love and then by looking at how this discourse is invoked by Australians in the course of developing civil marriage ceremonies in collaboration with the author. A History of Romantic Love There are many definitions of romantic love, but all share similar elements including an intense emotional and physical attraction, an idealisation of each other, and a desire for an enduring and unending commitment that can overcome all obstacles (Gottschall and Nordlund; Janowiak and Fischer). Romantic love has historically been associated with heightened passions and intense almost irrational or adolescent feelings. Charles Lindholm’s list of clichés that accompany the idea of romantic love include: “love is blind, love overwhelms, a life without love is not worth living, marriage should be for love alone and anything less is worthless and a sham” (5). These elements, which invoke love as sacred, unending and unique, perpetuate past cultural associations of the term. Romantic love was first documented in Ancient Rome where intense feelings were seen as highly suspect and a threat to the stability of the family, which was the primary economic, social and political unit. Roman historian Plutarch viewed romantic love based upon strong personal attraction as disruptive to the family, and he expressed a fear that romantic love would become the norm for Romans (Lantz 352). During the Middle Ages romantic love emerged as courtly love and, once again, the conventions that shaped its expression grew out of an effort to control excessive emotions and sublimate sexual desire, which were seen as threats to social stability. Courtly love, according to Marilyn Yalom, was seen as an “irresistible and inexhaustible passion; a fatal love that overcomes suffering and even death” (66). Feudal social structures had grounded marriage in property, while the Catholic Church had declared marriage a sacrament and a ceremony through which God’s grace could be obtained. In this context courtly love emerged as a way of dealing with the conflict between the individual and family choices over the martial partner. Courtly love is about a pure ideal of love in which the knight serves his unattainable lady, and, by carrying out feats in her honour, reaches spiritual perfection. The focus on the aesthetic ideal was a way to fulfil male and female emotional needs outside of marriage, while avoiding adultery. Romantic love re-appeared again in the mid-eighteenth century, but this time it was associated with marriage. Intellectuals and writers led the trend normalising romantic love in marriage as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s valorisation of reason, science and materialism over emotion. Romantics objected to the pragmatism and functionality induced by industrialisation, which they felt destroyed the idea of the mysterious and transcendental nature of love, which could operate as a form of secular salvation. Love could not be bought or sold, argued the Romantics, “it is mysterious, true and deep, spontaneous and compelling” (Lindholm 5). Romantic love also emerged as an expression of the personal autonomy and individualisation that accompanied the rise of industrial society. As Lanz suggests, romantic love was part of the critical reflexivity of the Enlightenment and a growing belief that individuals could find self actualisation through the expression and expansion of their “emotional and intellectual capacities in union with another” (354). Thus it was romantic love, which privileges the feelings and wishes of an individual in mate selection, that came to be seen as a bid for freedom by the offspring of the growing middle classes coerced into marriage for financial or property reasons. Throughout the 19th century romantic love was seen as a solution to the dehumanising forces of industrialisation and urbanisation. The growth of the competitive workplace—which required men to operate in a restrained and rational manner—saw an increase in the search for emotional support and intimacy within the domestic domain. It has been argued that “love was the central preoccupation of middle class men from the 1830s until the end of the 19th century” (Stearns and Knapp 771). However, the idealisation of the aesthetic and purity of love impacted marriage relations by casting the wife as pure and marital sex as a duty. As a result, husbands pursued sexual and romantic relationships outside marriage. It should be noted that even though love became cemented as the basis for marriage in the 19th century, romantic love was still viewed suspiciously by religious groups who saw strong affection between couples as an erosion of the fundamental role of the husband in disciplining his wife. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries romantic love was further impacted by urbanisation and migration, which undermined the emotional support provided by extended families. According to Stephanie Coontz, it was the growing independence and mobility of couples that saw romantic love in marriage consolidated as the place in which an individual’s emotional and social needs could be fully satisfied. Coontz says that the idea that women could only be fulfilled through marriage, and that men needed women to organise their social life, reached its heights in the 1950s (25-30). Changes occurred to the structure of marriage in the 1960s when control over fertility meant that sex was available outside of marriage. Education, equality and feminism also saw women reject marriage as their only option for fulfilment. Changes to Family Law Acts in western jurisdictions in the 1970s provided for no-fault divorce, and as divorce lost its stigma it became acceptable for women to leave failing marriages. These social shifts removed institutional controls on marriage and uncoupled the original sexual, emotional and financial benefits packaged into marriage. The resulting individualisation of personal lifestyle choices for men and women disrupted romantic conventions, and according to James Dowd romantic love came to be seen as an “investment” in the “future” that must be “approached carefully and rationally” (552). It therefore became increasingly difficult to sustain the idea of love as a powerful, mysterious and divine force beyond reason. Methodology In seeking to understand how contemporary partnering practices are reconstituting romantic love, I draw upon anecdotal data gathered over a nine-year period from my experiences as a marriage celebrant. In the course of personalising marriage ceremonies, I pose a series of questions designed to assist couples to explain the significance of their relationship. I generally ask brides and grooms why they love their fiancé, why they want to legalise their relationship, what they most treasure about their partner, and how their lives have been changed by their relationship. These questions help couples to reflexively interrogate their own relationship, and by talking about their commitment in concrete terms, they produce the images and descriptions that can be used to describe for guests the internal motivations and sentiments that have led to their decision to marry. I have had couples, when prompted to explain how they know the other person loves them say, in effect: “I know that he loves me because he brings me a cup of coffee every morning” or “I know that she loves me because she takes care of me so well.” These responses are grounded in a realism that helps to convey a sense of sincerity and authenticity about the relationship to the couple’s guests. This realism also helps to address the cynicism about the plausibility of enduring love. The brides and grooms in this sample of 300 couples were a socially, culturally and economically diverse group, and they provided a wide variety of responses ranging from deeply nuanced insights into the nature of their relationship, to admissions that their feelings were so private and deeply felt that words were insufficient to convey their significance. Reoccurring themes, however, emerged across the cases, and it is evident that even as marriage partnerships may be entered into for a variety of reasons, romantic love remains the mechanism by which couples talk of their feelings for each other. Australian Love and Marriage Australians' attitudes to romantic love and marriage have, understandably, been shaped by western understandings of romantic love. It is evident, however, that the demands of late modern capitalist society, with its increased literacy, economic independence and sexual equality between men and women, have produced marriage as a negotiable contract between social equals. For some, like Carol Pateman, this sense of equality within marriage may be illusory. Nonetheless, the drive for individual self-fulfilment by both the bride and groom produces a raft of challenges to traditional ideas of marriage as couples struggle to find a balance between independence and intimacy; between family and career; and between pursuing personal goals and the goals of their partners. This shift in the nature of marriage has implications for the “quest for undying romantic love,” which according to Anthony Giddens has been replaced by other forms of relationship, "each entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it” (qtd. in Lindholm 6). The impact of these social changes on the nature of romantic love in marriage is evident in how couples talk about their relationship in the course of preparing a ceremony. Many couples describe the person they are marrying as their best friend, and friendship is central to their commitment. This description supports research by V.K. Oppenheimer which indicates that many contemporary couples have a more “egalitarian collaborative approach to marriage” (qtd. in Carmichael and Whittaker 25). It is also standard for couples to note in ceremonies that they make each other happy and contented, with many commenting upon how their partners have helped to bring focus and perspective to their work-oriented lives. These comments tend to invoke marriage as a refuge from the isolation, competition, and dehumanising elements of workplaces. Since emotional support is central to the marriage contract, it is not surprising that care for each other is another reoccurring theme in ceremonies. Many brides and grooms not only explicitly say they are well taken care of by their partner, but also express admiration for their partner’s treatment of their families and friends. This behaviour appears to be seen as an indicator of the individual’s capacity for support and commitment to family values. Many couples admire partner’s kindness, generosity and level of personal self-sacrifice in maintaining the relationship. It is also not uncommon for brides and grooms to say they have been changed by their love: become kinder, more considerate and more tolerant. Honesty, communication skills and persistence are also attributes that are valued. Brides and grooms who have strong communication skills are also praised. This may refer to interpersonal competency and the willingness to acquire the skills necessary to negotiate the endless compromises in contemporary marriage now that individualisation has undermined established rules, rituals and roles. Persistence and the ability not to be discouraged by setbacks is also a reoccurring theme, and this connects with the idea that marriage is work. Many couples promise to grow together in their marriage and to both take responsibility for the health of their relationship. This promise implies awareness that marriage is not the fantasy of happily ever after produced in romantic popular culture, but rather an arrangement that requires hard work and conscious commitment, particularly in building a union amidst many competing options and distractions. Many couples talk about their relationship in terms of companionship and shared interests, values and goals. It is also not uncommon for couples to say that they admire their partner for supporting them to achieve their life goals or for exposing them to a wider array of lifestyle choices and options like travel or study. These examples of interdependence appear to make explicit that couples still see marriage as a vehicle for personal freedom and self-realisation. The death of love is also alluded to in marriage ceremonies. Couples talk of failed past relationships, but these are produced positively as a mechanism that enables the couple to know that they have now found an enduring relationship. It is also evident that for many couples the decision to marry is seen as the formalisation of a preexisting commitment rather than the gateway to a new life. This is consistent with figures that show that 72 per cent of Australian couples chose to cohabit before marriage (Simons 48), and that cohabitation has become the “normative pathway to marriage” (Penman 26). References to children also feature in marriage ceremonies, and for the couples I have worked with marriage is generally seen as the pre-requisite for children. Couples also often talk about “being ready” for marriage. This seems to refer to being financially prepared. Robyn Parker citing the research of K. Edin concludes that for many modern couples “rushing into marriage before being ‘set’ is irresponsible—marrying well (in the sense of being well prepared) is the way to avoid divorce” (qtd. in Parker 81). From this overview of reoccurring themes in the production of Australian ceremonies it is clear that romantic love continues to be associated with marriage. However, couples describe a more grounded and companionable attachment. These more practical and personalised sentiments serve to meet both the public expectation that romantic love is a precondition for marriage, while also avoiding the production of romantic love in the ceremony as an empty cliché. Grounded descriptions of love reveal that attraction does not have to be overwhelming and unconquerable. Indeed, couples who have lived together and are intimately acquainted with each other’s habits and disposition, appear to be most comfortable expressing their commitment to each other in more temperate, but no less deeply felt, terms. Conclusion This paper has considered how brides and grooms constitute romantic love within the shifting partnering practices of contemporary Australia. It is evident “in the midst of significant social and economic change and at a time when individual rights and freedom of choice are important cultural values” marriage remains socially significant (Simons 50). This significance is partially conveyed through the language of romantic love, which, while freighted with an array of cultural and historical associations, remains the lingua franca of marriage, perhaps because as Roberto Unger observes, romantic love is “the most influential mode of moral vision in our culture” (qtd. in Lindholm 5). It is thus possible to conclude, that while marriage may be declining and becoming more fragile and impermanent, the institution remains important to couples in contemporary Australia. Moreover, the language and imagery of romantic love, which publicly conveys this importance, remains the primary mode of expressing care, affection and hope for a partnership, even though the changed partnering practices of late modern capitalist society have exposed the utopian quality of romantic love and produced a cynicism about the viability of its longevity. It is evident in the marriage ceremonies prepared by the author that while the language of romantic love has come to signify a broader range of more practical associations consistent with the individualised nature of modern marriage and demystification of romantic love, it also remains the best way to express what Dowd and Pallotta describe as a fundamental human “yearning for communion with and acceptance by another human being” (571). 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