2025 American Historical Association George L. Mosse Prize Recipient
The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France
Catherine Tatiana Dunlop (Montana State University, Bozeman)
Chaired by Professor Emma Kuby (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
An in-depth look at the hidden power of the mistral wind and its effect on modern French history.
Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area’s regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries.
This force of nature is the focus of Catherine Dunlop’s The Mistral, a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community.
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History
University of Wisconsin-Madison European Studies
With the support of the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the United States through the Center for Interdisciplinary French Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
My research explores historical conflicts over the meaning and use of natural landscapes in modern Europe. My first book, Cartophilia, examined the role of mapmakers in the French-German border dispute over Alsace-Lorraine. My second book, The Mistral, focused on the environmental history of Provence’s violent and uncontrollable mistral wind. The Mistral was awarded the J. Russell Major Prize in French History and the George L. Mosse Prize in European Intellectual and Cultural History from the American Historical Association in 2025. I am currently at work on a new research project that investigates the role of environmental knowledge in the planning, execution, and aftermath of the D-Day landings in Normandy.
I am an intellectual, political and cultural historian of modern France and its empire. To date, my research has focused on the legacies of World War II’s violence during the era of decolonization. My first book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945, examined a French-led activist campaign by Nazi camp survivors to expose ongoing crimes against humanity in the postwar USSR, Francoist Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. It showed that the project championed by these non-state actors — centered not on genocide but on concentration camps as sites of political repression — helped foster a universalist paradigm for defending human rights but foundered on the limits of members’ own memory politics, the ideological pressures of the Cold War, and an inability to adapt to new forms of European violence in the context of decolonizing warfare. The book received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Council for European Studies Book Award.
