This article deals with the three discursive strategies which were used by French intellectuals for establishing their attitudes towards the political sphere on the basis of different ‘truth speeches’. This paper states that the notion of truth, which represents a certain relation between reality and the knowledge, played a special role in the debates between French intellectuals over their social and political vocation in the 20th century — from the Dreyfus Affair to contemporary media debates.

The private correspondence between Françoise de Graffigny and Antoine-François Devaux allows us to trace the genesis of the epistolary novel Lettres d'une Péruvienne and the five-act play Cénie, two works considered best-sellers of the 18th century. These letters help us understand her working methods (self- censorship, her conception of the female author, her relationship with her main characters, her surrounding environment, etc.) as well as the motivations behind her writing (primarily the need for money), to the extent that they can be considered drafts of both works. The interplay between Françoise de Graffigny’s biography and her fictional female characters is evident from the start, and the reconstruction of the genesis of these works demonstrates how literary creation becomes a means of self- reflection and the creation of a feminine self. This contribution will seek to demonstrate how, in her two most well-known works, Graffigny uses the figure of the stranger, in all its senses, to highlight the difficulties women faced in 18th-century society, showing through the cases of Zilia and Cénie that women were considered ‘like’ foreigners in their own country, in their own homes.

We document an upper upper Albian ( Mortoniceras rostratum Zone) cephalopod assemblage from Clansayes (Drôme, south-eastern France). Although fossils are rare in local exposures and in the single sampled level, a decade of intensive fossil collecting yielded 290 ammonite and 5 nautilid specimens. In total, we describe 1 species of nautilid and 24 species (within 17 genera) of ammonites, including 13 heteromorphs. Only two of these ammonite taxa were previously recorded from the upper upper Albian at Clansayes, which demonstrates the value of this fauna with regard to taxonomy, palaeobiology and palaeobiogeography. Based on morphological and biometric analyses performed on an extensive material (104 specimens), we discriminate two species for the heteromorphic ammonite genus Mariella Nowak, 1916 within the Mortoniceras rostratum Zone. In addition, we investigate shell chirality patterns in Mariella from the late Albian of southern France. Upon comparison of the Clansayes material with older material from the immediately underlying upper Albian Mortoniceras fallax Zone at the neighbouring Salazac locality, we identify an increase in the proportion of sinistral specimens. This observed increase in the frequency of sinistral Mariella specimens may hypothetically be part of a global evolutionary pattern, considering that nearly all documented younger Cenomanian Mariella (and more generally Cenomanian turrilitids) are sinistral.

The article offers a critical insight into the social history of ideas as a research trend that has been dynamically developing within French academic circles since 2010. Methodologically, the social history of ideas attempts to apply sociological tools to study the diffusion and embedding of political ideas within specific groups. After presenting the general directions of this trend's development, the author focuses on its critics, offering their own reflections on the difficulties one might encounter when applying its principles to research on Central‑Eastern Europe. To tackle this task, the author provides a methodological exercise to verify the extent to which the principles of social history of ideas can be applied to the study of (semi)peripheral ideas. In conclusion, the author emphasises the invigorating nature and critical tasks that social history of ideas can fulfill within Polish historiography as well.

The article is an attempt to present and discuss – based on the struggle against Barbary pirates and corsairs waged in the Mediterranean Sea – dynamic and complex political and economic processes as well as diplomatic efforts that contributed to the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. The first three decades of the 19th century were among the most turbulent periods in the history of the French nation. Defeated and humiliated by the enemy coalition in 1815, France did not give up on her “imperial dream”, this time trying to make it come true in a non-distant Maghreb. The way to achieve this goal was, however, quite bumpy. At that time, the western part of the Mediterranean Sea was an arena of competition, mainly between the United States and Great Britain. After all, this turned out to be very favourable to France. Wishing to introduce an extra element into the game, eliminate rivals for overseas supremacy, as well as win Russia – that was gradually strengthening her influence in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea – as an ally, at the end of the 1820’s Great Britain became an advocate of her neighbour across the English Channel. Gradually regaining her economic potential and international importance, France reached for Algiers by entering the armed conflict. However, the French stronghold in Maghreb would soon pose a major challenge to the British colonialism in Africa. Expressing their major concern over the security of so-called “imperial route” leading via the Mediterranean sea, British politicians and statesmen adopted a new political stance toward the declining Ottoman Empire. Owing to their “independence and integrity” doctrine (formulated in 1830’s), the rich Ottoman heritage managed to “survive” by the outbreak of World War II.

In this interview, Professor Edoardo Tortarolo discusses his intellectual trajectory and reflections on historiographical practice. Influenced by historians Franco Venturi and Reinhart Koselleck, Tortarolo shares his fascination with the philosophical approach to history. He explores the shifting paradigms in historiography, from nation‑state‑centred perspectives to embracing global history and the evolving relationship between history and other sciences. Looking ahead, Tor-tarolo envisions a changing landscape for historical studies, influenced by gamification, evol-ving mass media, and the merging of factual and fictional historical accounts. Despite the emergence of diverse narratives, he stresses the significance of traditional, veracious historical accounts. Expressing optimism, he believes the past holds a future with new possibilities.

Giorgio Maria Ciaceri was a Jesuit missionary from Sicily who spent about ten years in North Africa during the mid Nineteenth century. From his Jesuit center located near Algiers, he travelled all over Algeria and arrived until Tunis where he spent the last period of his journey. His travelogue, published in 1885–86, is almost unknown to scholarly research and is a very rich source for anthropological, ethnographical, historical, social, religious and linguistic information about the countries and the cultures he visited. The present article deals with his travelogue and attempts to draw the attention to some aspects of his work and in particular to the linguistic issues that it contains.

A novel stratigraphical scheme within the Folge Concept is described for the Cenomanian Chalk of England that is particularly suitable for investigating the regional changes in the lithofacies, diagenesis, geochemistry, and mineralogy of the sediments of the Chalk Sea leading up to the Cenomanian–Turonian Oceanic Anoxic Event. It is based on “isochronous” marker bands defined largely by calcitic macrofossil assemblages, and it avoids problems caused by the poor or non-preservation of ammonite assemblages and lateral changes in chalk lithofacies. Eight folgen are based on one, two, or more marker bands. Their sequences, lithologies and calcitic macrofossil assemblages are described from 33 exposures in the Northern Chalk Province of England. The folgen are named, in ascending order, the Belchford, Stenigot, Dalby, Bigby, Candlesby, Nettleton, Louth and Flixton, after villages in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, England. The folgen are traced throughout the Transitional and Southern Chalk provinces of England. They are present in the Cenomanian chalk of northern Germany and northwest France. Regionally, an individual folge may display considerable vertical and lateral variation in general lithology and lithofacies whilst still maintaining their defining marker bands. The possibility of further refinement to the scheme is discussed.

The history of “Études de théologie, de philosophie et d’histoire” is connected with the Work of Saints Cyril and Methodius (L’OEuvre des Saints Cyrille et Méthode), which was founded in 1855. The purpose of the Work was prayer as well as refl ection and discussion on the union of the Catholic and Orthodox Church. The founder of the Work, Ivan Gagarin, once Russian Orthodox and from 1842 a Catholic in France, gathered for this purpose a vast library in order to document the history of ecumenism and the ecclesiastical history of the Slavic countries. With time, the Slavonic Library became one of the most abundant book collections on these subjects in Western Europe. Gagarin believed that the West knew too little about the Orthodox Russia, which was an impediment to the union of the Churches. To bring his motherland closer to Western Catholics and to present problems to be faced by those who strove for the unity of the Christian East and West, Gagarin decided to start to publish a magazine “Études de théologie, de philosophie et d’histoire”, for which he needed approval of the superiors of the Jesuit Order. Due to Gagarin’s prolonged negotiations with his superiors, the magazine did not start to be published until 1857. This paper deals with the history of “Études de théologie, de philosophie et d’histoire”.

Although in recent decades Count Władysław Zamoyski has been attracting a lot of interest on the part of historians, which resulted in numerous papers and popular science works, he has not yet been the subject of an exhaustive scientific monograph. Its preparation is, however, going to be a difficult task for its future author. The many dispersed source materials and the Count’s more than 40 years long social, economic, and to a smaller extent political activity under the Prussian partition, in Galicia, among the Polish emigrants in France and during the first years of the Second Polish Republic – need to be described in the historical context, and, what follows, call for broad knowledge extending beyond these sources. Zamoyski’s path leading to his establishment in 1924 of the foundation ”Zakłady Kórnickie” – his life’s grandest work – should constitute the narrative axis weaving through all the chapters of his biography. It would be desirable to present extensively not only the Count’s activity in Galicia, Zakopane and his role in the famous dispute on Morskie Oko, but also his less researched and less known participation in the Polish-German fight for land in the Prussian partition in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This article takes a look at the development women’s press in the first half of the 19th century. A comparison of the press market in the Romantic Age in France, Poland and the United States shows that usually women were eager to take up journalism as a sideline to their literary careers. The article discusses the journalistic work of three women writers — Delphine de Girardin, Wanda Malecka and Margaret Fuller. While each of them was inspired by Romantic and Preromantic writers, their journalism was for the most part a continuation of the Enlightenment models of journalism.

Tomasz Olizarowski (1811–1879) is a largely forgotten author, prolific poet and playwright, known only to a small group of specialists, who have recently started work on restoring his reputation. To do him justice is not easy task as we possess neither a complete list of his publications with basic textual and bibliographic data nor a reliable picture of the critical response they met with. While the body of materials on Olizarowski that have already been identified needs to be ordered and re-examined, the burden of work is growing as new items, also in bad need of verification, continue to surface both in Poland and abroad. This is a progress report of sorts with a number of updates, corrections and clarifications by the author of this article herself.