Mark Meyers

Mark Meyers,  “‘Your brain is no longer you own!’: Mass Media, Secular Religion, and Cultural Crisis in Third Republic France”

Mark Meyers’ cogently argued article “‘Your brain is no longer your own!’: Mass Media, Secular Religion, and Cultural Crisis in Third Republic France,” is a sophisticated and complex study of interwar French culture. While much literature has focused on the political, economic, and social challenges to the Republic, few have delved into the cultural challenges mounted by sectarian changes as represented by technological and scientific ‘advances’. In the paper Meyers studies a startling array of links between collective behaviour, hypnotic suggestion, and ‘religiosity’ and does so in an imaginative way.  In doing so, the connections between the present and the past are underscored to reveal the ambiguity of terms often used by historians to delineate this period.