« La cour d’assises semble être devenue une succursale de l’Académie française ». Figurations de l’éloquence judiciaire dans l’œuvre de Courier et de Béranger

in Romantisme (2023), 199(1), 16-25

In 1821 Paul-Louis Courier, accused of outrages to public morality because of his Simple discours (1821) and Pierre-Jean de Béranger, prosecuted for having outraged, with his Chansons (1821), public and ... [more ▼]

In 1821 Paul-Louis Courier, accused of outrages to public morality because of his Simple discours (1821) and Pierre-Jean de Béranger, prosecuted for having outraged, with his Chansons (1821), public and religious morality and social mores, and insulted the king, appeared before the Assizes court of the Seine. These two famous trials inspired both Courier and Béranger to write respectively the Procès de Paul-Louis Courier (The Trial of Paul-Louis Courier) and the Procès fait aux chansons de P.-J. de Béranger (The Trial against the Songs of P.-J. de Béranger). This paper aims to study through the lens of these texts the manner in which Courier and Béranger understand and appropriate, within texts that need to be considered as both aesthetic declarations and political professions of faith, the judicial eloquence manifested during their respective trials. [less ▲]

Making Next Generation EU a permanent tool

Report (2023)

The policy study assesses the possible scope and the technical and legal difficulties in implementing a "permanent Next-Generation EU (NGEU)", a central fiscal capacity for the EU, without ever losing ... [more ▼]

The policy study assesses the possible scope and the technical and legal difficulties in implementing a "permanent Next-Generation EU (NGEU)", a central fiscal capacity for the EU, without ever losing sight of the democratic requirement. The implementation of NGEU has raised coordination issues between the member states as to the allocation of funds across structural priorities (e.g. ecological transition vs digitalisation) and across countries. To these coordination difficulties, Section 2 adds the issue of the democratic legitimacy of EU policies when supranational priorities constrain the autonomy of national parliaments. The problem of accountability is not new when one thinks that supranational rules, such as the Stability and Growth Pact, impose limits on the power of parliaments to "tax and spend"; in fact, the intrinsic logic of coordination is to force (political) discretionary power to comply with (macroeconomic) functional imperatives; this inevitably produces a form of depoliticisation of fiscal policy. Throughout this policy study, we constantly keep in mind that transforming NGEU into a permanent programme offers an opportunity to fix this depoliticisation of EU policies and open a window for a breakthrough to a "political Europe". [less ▲]

Energy-Efficient RIS-Enabled NOMA Communication for 6G LEO Satellite Networks

E-print/Working paper (2023)

Reconfigurable Intelligent surfaces (RIS) have the potential to significantly improve the performance of future 6G LEO satellite networks. In particular, RIS can improve the signal quality of ground ... [more ▼]

Reconfigurable Intelligent surfaces (RIS) have the potential to significantly improve the performance of future 6G LEO satellite networks. In particular, RIS can improve the signal quality of ground terminal, reduce power consumption of satellite and increase spectral efficiency of overall network. This paper proposes an energy-efficient RIS-enabled NOMA communication for LEO satellite networks. The proposed framework simultaneously optimizes the transmit power of ground terminals at LEO satellite and passive beamforming at RIS while ensuring the quality of services. Due to the nature of the considered system and optimization variables, the problem of energy efficiency maximization is formulated as non-convex. In practice, it is very challenging to obtain the optimal solution for such problems. Therefore, we adopt alternating optimization methods to handle the joint optimization in two steps. In step 1, for any given phase shift vector, we calculate efficient power for ground terminals at satellite using Lagrangian dual method. Then, in step 2, given the transmit power, we design passive beamforming for RIS by solving the semi-definite programming. To validate the proposed solution, numerical results are also provided to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed optimization framework. [less ▲]

Moral Hazard, central bankers, and Banking Union: professional dissensus and the politics of European financial system stability

in Journal of European Integration (2023), 45(1), 15-41

Banking Union was a major policy response to the financial crisis that began in 2007 and the subsequent Eurozone crisis. Moral hazard has frequently been presented as a major cause of these crises ... [more ▼]

Banking Union was a major policy response to the financial crisis that began in 2007 and the subsequent Eurozone crisis. Moral hazard has frequently been presented as a major cause of these crises. Therefore, Banking Union can be understood as a response to moral hazard in relation to banks and sovereigns. Yet, moral hazard was an acknowledged and supposedly managed problem prior to these events. Paradoxically, moral hazard has been used to justify contradictory policy options to safeguard European financial system stability, such as decentralized institutional arrangements for banking supervision but also a centralized system coordinated by the European Central Bank (ECB). To address this paradox, this paper investigates moral hazard as a political concept. Based on a comparison of how central bankers from the Bundesbank and the ECB understand and use the moral hazard concept, this paper argues that moral hazard is closer to the realm of politics than expertise. [less ▲]

Methods and Concepts of the Construction of Territories on Maps of the 16th century in the West of the Holy Roman Empire.

Scientific Conference (2023, March)

At the beginning of the early modern period, the west of the Holy Roman Empire was a territorially fragmented landscape: Besides a few larger principalities, a multitude of smaller and smallest largely ... [more ▼]

At the beginning of the early modern period, the west of the Holy Roman Empire was a territorially fragmented landscape: Besides a few larger principalities, a multitude of smaller and smallest largely independent territories existed. But in the regional context, the relationships proved to be even more complex; they were characterised by overlapping feudal rights and high court districts, by joint dominions of two, three or more seigneurs, by disputed territories and many other forms of dependencies. A cartographic recording of these complex and multidimensional spatial structures was not possible by the means of the time. The rise of an increasingly scientific cartography from the mid-15th century onwards allowed the princes of larger territories to use cartographic representations as instruments of power: on the one hand, as a basis for the political and administrative development of their territories, on the other hand, as a medium for the dissemination of territorial claims and for the representation of dominion. The analysis of selected maps shows the various strategies used to construct the fragmentary possessions as closed territories. For this purpose, borders in the form of lines were defined on maps from the middle of the 16th century onwards, although linear frontiers between two territories mostly did not exist at that time. [less ▲]

Spaceborne GNSS reflectometry for land remote sensing studies

Doctoral thesis (2023)

Understanding, quantifying and monitoring soil moisture is important for many applications, e.g., agriculture, weather forecasting, occurrence of heatwaves, droughts and floods, and human health. At a ... [more ▼]

Understanding, quantifying and monitoring soil moisture is important for many applications, e.g., agriculture, weather forecasting, occurrence of heatwaves, droughts and floods, and human health. At a large scale, satellite microwave remote sensing has been used to retrieve soil moisture information. Surface water has also been detected and monitored through remote sensing orbital platforms equipped with passive microwave, radar, and optical sensors. The use of reflected L-band Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals represents an emerging remote sensing concept to retrieve geophysical parameters. In GNSS Reflectometry (GNSS-R) these signals are repurposed to infer properties of the surface from which they reflect as they are sensitive to variations in biogeophysical parameters. NASA's Cyclone GNSS (CYGNSS) is the first mission fully dedicated to spaceborne GNSS-R. The eight-satellite constellation measures Global Positioning System (GPS) reflected L1 (1575.42 MHz) signals. Spire Global, Inc. has also started developing their GNSS-R mission, with four satellites currently in orbit. In this thesis we propose and validate a method to retrieve large-scale near-surface soil moisture and a method to map and monitor inundations using spaceborne GNSS-R. Our soil moisture model is based on the assumption that variations in surface reflectivity are linearly related to variations in soil moisture and uses a new method to normalize the observations with respect to the angle of incidence. The normalization method accounts for the spatially varying effects of coherent and incoherent scattering. We found a median unbiased root-mean-square error (ubRMSE) of 0.042 cm3 cm-3 when comparing our method to two years of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) data and a median ubRMSE of 0.059 cm3 cm-3 compared to the observations of 207 in-situ stations. Our results also showed an improved temporal resolution compared to sensors traditionally used for this purpose. Assessing Spire and CYGNSS data over a region in south east Australia, we observed a similar behavior in terms of surface reflectivity and sensitivity to soil moisture. As Spire satellites collect data from multiple GNSS constellations, we found that it is important to differentiate the observations when calibrating a soil moisture model. The inundation mapping method that we propose is based on a track-wise approach. When classifying the reflections track by track the influence of the angle of incidence and the GNSS transmitted power are minimized or eliminated. With CYGNSS data we produced more than four years of monthly surface water maps over the Amazon River basin and the Pantanal wetlands complex with a spatial resolution of 4.5 km. With GNSS-R we could overcome some of the limitations of optical and microwave remote sensing methods for inundation mapping. We used a set of metrics commonly used to evaluate classification performance to assess our product and discussed the differences and similarities with other products. [less ▲]

Les Italiens dans le Luxembourg des migrations (4e partie)

Article for general public (2023)

Figures de l'intime et de l'extime : réflexions à partir du jeu de Marina Hands et d'Éric Ruf face à Phèdre de Jean Racine et à Partage de midi de Paul Claudel

Doctoral thesis (2023)

Entitled “The Figures of intimacy and extimacy: a Reflection on Marina Hands and Eric Ruf’s acting in Jean Racine's Phèdre and Paul Claudel's Partage de midi”, this PhD dissertation addresses the concepts ... [more ▼]

Entitled “The Figures of intimacy and extimacy: a Reflection on Marina Hands and Eric Ruf’s acting in Jean Racine's Phèdre and Paul Claudel's Partage de midi”, this PhD dissertation addresses the concepts of “intimacy” and “extimacy” as witnessed through Marina Hands and Eric Ruf’s vocal and scenic acting in Patrice Chereau and Yves Beaunesne’s respective productions of Racine's and Claudel's works. In the frame of these two shows both actors manage to suggest “extimacy” with their body language, and to render “intimacy” thanks to their “singing” diction of Racine’s alexandrine and Claudel’s free verse. Throughout our development, we will display perpetual links between Racine and Claudel, as suggested by the singular acting of these two performers. The problematic axis of this dissertation is thus the following: “how does the combination of the “extimacy” of Marina Hands and Éric Ruf’s body-language and the “intimacy” of their “singing” diction reveal the musicality of Racine’s and Claudel’s languages?”. We shall see that “intimacy” turns out to be “extimacy” on stage, and that the two concepts are nothing but two sides of the same coin. “Intimacy” is the constant object of both Patrice Chereau's and Yves Beaunesne's research, to the extent that it constitutes the essence of their artistic creations. In order to become “extimacy”, “intimacy” has to be mediated by actors’ bodies if it means to serve the text actually heard on stage. The union between body and text is therefore a central issue. [less ▲]

Choosing Women in Postwar Elections: Exposure to War Violence, Ideology, and Voters’ Gender Bias

in Politics and Gender (2023), First View

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing ... [more ▼]

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies. [less ▲]

Les Italiens dans le Luxembourg des migrations (3e partie)

Article for general public (2023)