2005

        Michelle Cheyne’s well-written and carefully structured paper tracks a pedestrian opera manuscript as it moves through the censorship mill in Restoration-era France. She explains why this opera was found unacceptable in its original form and was subsequently transformed in such a way that it was drained of ideological and emotional content comprehensible to its intended audience. The opera, "Pyracmond, ou les Créoles," closed after only a few performances.

        Cheyne takes the surviving version of the libretto, together with the comments of censors and references in the press, and from these sources teases out an analysis of French unease over questions of empire and colony, monarchy and republic and troubled French assumptions about hierarchy, in particular, racial hierarchy. By replacing a black, colonial protagonist with an Arab one and by shifting the scene of action from the Antilles to Madagascar, the libretto's revision avoided any encouragement for the audience to think about the metropolitan/colonial, white/black dichotomies that existed in Restoration France and instead found a villain for the piece outside the confines of the French cultural/imperial sphere in the person of an Arab, savage but also outlandish, irrelevant, and unchallenging. The documentary materials here analyzed are for Cheyne the pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle with many gaps, which this historian has fitted together with great intellectual dexterity in this tour de force of historical investigation and explanation.

2004

         There were actually two prizes for 2004, awarded to Benoît Grenier (Department of History, Université Laval) and Ibra Sene (Department of History, Michigan State University). These two papers, though very different in geographical focus, time period, and method, shared an interesting focus on the importance of the local. They were also both characterized by and a precision and concision that promises fine future work.

            Grenier’s paper, “‘Nulle terre sans seigneur?’ Une étude comparative de la présence seigneuriale (France-Canada), XVIIe-XIXe siècle” explored the practice of seigneurial residence comparatively in Canada and France, finding that although both were characterized by significant absenteeism (contradicting received wisdom about Canadian seigneuries), in France such seigneurial residence as there was waned over the period, while in Canada there was a slight increase in seigneurial residence toward the end of the period as the general population grew. Grenier made creative use of the demographic methods for which Laval is so well-known to develop these generalizations on the basis of solid local evidence.

            Sene worked on a twentieth-century topic for his paper “Colonisation française et main-d’oeuvre carcérale au Sénégal: De l’emploi des détenus des camps penaux sur les chantiers des travaux routiers (1927-1940).” He investigated the reorganization of the French colonial prison system in Senegal during the 1920s and government use of itinerant prison labor camps in the construction of a highway system between the major market towns, which he found to have been vital to the resulting economic development of the country. He made detailed use of correspondence to trace the activities of these camps and the influence of local government officials, as well as the unrecognized influence of prisoner behaviors on their conditions of detention and work.