Title: Mapping the geographies of French identity
Description: This dissertation explores the geographical shift that took place in French society during the first four decades of France's Third Republic government. Rather than focusing on the overt manifestations of geographic activity, this work deals with expressions of a more nuanced geographic sensibility. In the first chapter, my reading of the work of geographers Paul Vidal de la Blache and Elisée Reclus reveals a reliance on organicist and embodied metaphors that serve as a conceptual basis for abstract notions like la Patrie . These metaphors root such abstract notions in the familiar 'space' of the body, drawing on cognitive metaphors of orientation and biological theories of development to explain ideas of organic harmony and order in the social sphere. In chapter two, I use Reclus' formulation of the earth as "une organisme terrestre" to read Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre as a journey to the center of the individual self, which provides a rich and complicated reading of a what others view as a "children's tale." In chapter three, I trace the geographic narrative of G. Bruno's Tour de la France par deux enfants , in particular the way that Bruno's work incorporates the geographic thought of Vidal de la Blache, to discover the organic ties that bind the readers together through the shared experience of reading the text.