Title: Publishing and cultural politics in revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 
Author: Hesse, Carla
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Print Media | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1789 French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the most basic elements of French literary civilization - authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas.Historians and literary critics have traditionally viewed the French Revolution as a catastrophe for French literary culture. Combing through extensive new archival sources, Hesse finds instead that revolutionaries intentionally dismantled the elite literary civilization of the Old Regime to create unprecedented access to the printed word. Exploring the uncharted terrains of popular fiction, authors' rights, and literary life under the Terror, Carla Hesse offers a new perspective on the relationship between democratic revolutions and modern cultural life.   [brief]
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Title: The royal image: illustrations of the Grandes chroniques de France, 1274-1422 
Author: Hedeman, Anne Dawson
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Art | Art History | Medieval Studies | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: The Grandes Chroniques de France is a vernacular, frequently illustrated history of the medieval French monarchs. Originally describing the lives of the kings from their origins in Troy in 1274 to the reign of Philip Augustus, it was updated in several stages to the life of Charles VI. Copied and amended for a variety of royal and courtly patrons, approximately 130 of these manuscripts exist today. Anne Hedeman provides the first critical and comprehensive study of the chronicle's illustrations.Hedeman concentrates on the illustrations in twenty manuscripts, analyzing their artistic and cultural significance and offering new methods for studying illustrated manuscripts. She discusses the chronicle in relation to the political ideology of Louis IX, vernacular history, and the Latin chronicle tradition at Saint-Denis. Looking at the manuscripts of various periods, the author compares their representations of historical events, kingship, and individuals in and around the royal court. She also contrasts the styles of several authors and illustrators of the chronicle. The Royal Image includes a catalogue of over seventy-five illustrated manuscripts, and an appendix listing the artists. An additional appendix lists surviving manuscripts.   [brief]
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Title: The French Revolution as blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's paintings of the massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792
Author: Pressly, William L 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Art | Art History | European History | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792 , and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers , both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution.Pressly places both paintings in their historical context - a time of heightened anti-French hysteria - and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format.Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.   [brief]
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Title: Aristocratic experience and the origins of modern culture: France, 1570-1715 
Author: Dewald, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations.Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Modern French culture, Dewald argues, emerged from this conflict between tradition and the individual's inner life.   [brief]
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Title: The family romance of the French Revolution
Author: Hunt, Lynn Avery
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | French  Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a multidisciplinary investigation of the foundations of modern politics. "Family Romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and joining one of higher social standing. Lynn Hunt uses the term broadly to describe the images of the familial order underlying revolutionary politics. In a wide-ranging account using novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that politics were experienced through the grid of the family romance.   [brief]
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Title: Boundaries: the making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees
Author: Sahlins, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | Anthropology | European History | Geography | French  Studies
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Title: Peasants and protest: agricultural workers, politics, and unions in the Aude, 1850-1914 
Author: Frader, Laura Levine 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: In the first decade of the twentieth century, the sleepy vineyard towns of the Aude department of southern France exploded with strikes and protests. Agricultural workers joined labor unions, the Socialist party established a base among peasant vinegrowers, and the largest peasant uprising of twentieth-century France, the great vinegrowers' revolt of 1907, shook the entire south with massive demonstrations. In this study, Laura Levine Frader explains how left-wing politics and labor radicalism in the Aude emerged from the economic and social transformation of rural society between 1850 and 1914. She describes the formation of an agricultural wage-earning class, and discusses how socialism and a revolutionary syndicalist labor movement together forged working-class identity.Frader's focus on the making of the rural proletariat takes the study of class formation out of the towns and cities and into the countryside. Frader emphasizes the complexity of social structure and political life in the Aude, describing the interaction of productive relations, the gender division of labor, community solidarities, and class alliances. Her analysis raises questions about the applicability of an urban, industrial model of class formation to rural society. This study will be of interest to French social historians, agricultural historians, and those interested in the relationship between capitalism, class formation, and labor militancy.   [brief]
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Title: The French worker: autobiographies from the early industrial era
Author: Traugott, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Sociology | European History | Gender Studies | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: This anthology, drawn from the autobiographies of seven men and women whose lives span the nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse of the everyday lives of workers in the age of early industrialization in France. Appearing for the first time in English, these stories vividly convey the ambitions, hardships, and reversals of ordinary people struggling to gain a measure of respectability.The workers' livelihoods are diverse: chair-maker, embroiderer, joiner, mason, silk weaver, machinist, seamstress. Their stories of daily activities, work life, and popular politics are filled with lively, often poignant moments. We learn of dismal, unsanitary housing; of disease; workplace accidents; and terrible hardship, especially for the children of the poor. We read of exploitation and injustice, of courtship and marriage, and of the sociability of the wine-merchant's shop and the boardinghouse.Traugott's analytic introduction discusses the many shifts in French society during the nineteenth century. Used in combination with other sources, these autobiographies illuminate the relationship between changes in working conditions and in the forms of political participation and protest occurring as the century came to a close.   [brief]
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Title: The rise of the Paris red belt 
Author: Stovall, Tyler Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Social Science | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: From 1920 until the present, the working-class suburbs of Paris, known as the Red Belt, have constituted the heart of French Communism, providing the Party not only with its most solid electoral base but with much of its cultural identity as well. Focusing on the northeastern suburb of Bobigny, Stovall explores the nature of working-class life and politicization as he skillfully documents how this unique region and political culture came into being. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt reveals that the very process of urban development in metropolitan Paris and the suburbs provided the most important opportunities for the local establishment of Communist influence.The rapid increase in Paris' suburban population during the early twentieth century outstripped the development of the local urban infrastructure. Consequently, many of these suburbs, often represented to their new residents as charming country villages, soon degenerated into suburban slums. Stovall argues that Communists forged a powerful political block by mobilizing the disillusionment and by improving some of the worst aspects of suburban life.As a social history of twentieth-century France, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt calls into question traditional assumptions about the history of both French Communism and the French working-class. It suggests that those interested in working-class politics, especially in the twentieth century, should consider the significance of residential and consumer issues as well as those relating to the workplace. It also suggests that urban history and urban development should not be considered autonomous phenomena, but rather expressions of class relations. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt brings to life a world whose citizens, though often overlooked, are nonetheless the history of modern France.   [brief]
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Title: The making of revolutionary Paris
Author: Garrioch, David
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: The sights, sounds, and smells of life on the streets and in the houses of eighteenth-century Paris rise from the pages of this marvelously anecdotal chronicle of a perpetually alluring city during one hundred years of extraordinary social and cultural change. An excellent general history as well as an innovative synthesis of new research, The Making of Revolutionary Paris combines vivid portraits of individual lives, accounts of social trends, and analyses of significant events as it explores the evolution of Parisian society during the eighteenth century and reveals the city's pivotal role in shaping the French Revolution. David Garrioch rewrites the origins of the Parisian Revolution as the story of an urban metamorphosis stimulated by factors such as the spread of the Enlightenment, the growth of consumerism, and new ideas about urban space. With an eye on the broad social trends emerging during the century, he focuses his narrative on such humble but fascinating aspects of daily life as traffic congestion, a controversy over the renumbering of houses, and the ever-present dilemma of where to bury the dead. He describes changes in family life and women's social status, in religion, in the literary imagination, and in politics. Paris played a significant role in sparking the French Revolution, and in turn, the Revolution changed the city, not only its political structures but also its social organization, gender ideologies, and cultural practices. This book is the first to look comprehensively at the effect of the Revolution on city life. Based on the author's own research in Paris and on the most current scholarship, this absorbing book takes French history in new directions, providing a new understanding of the Parisian and the European past.   [brief]
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Title: Montaigne's unruly brood: textual engendering and the challenge to paternal authority 
Author: Regosin, Richard L 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: Perhaps as old as writing itself, the metaphor of the book as child has depicted textuality as an only son conceived to represent its father uniformly and to assure the integrity of his name. Richard L. Regosin demonstrates how Montaigne's Essais both departs from and challenges this conventional figure of textuality. He argues that Montaigne's writing is best described as a corpus of siblings with multiple faces and competing voices, a hybrid textuality inclined both to truth and dissimulation, to faithfulness and betrayal, to form and deformation. And he analyzes how this unruly, mixed brood also discloses a sexuality and gender dynamic in the Essais that is more conflicted than the traditional metaphor of literary paternity allows.Regosin challenges traditional critics by showing how the "logic" of a faithful filial text is disrupted and how the writing self displaces the author's desire for mastery and totalization. He approaches the Essais from diverse critical and theoretical perspectives that provide new ground for understanding both Montaigne's complex textuality and the obtrusive reading that it simultaneously invites and resists. His analysis is informed by poststructuralist criticism, by reception theory, and by gender and feminist studies, yet at the same time he treats the Essais as a child of sixteenth-century Humanism and late Renaissance France. Regosin also examines Montaigne's self-proclaimed taste for Ovid and the role played by the seminal texts of self-representation and aesthetic conception (Narcissus and Pygmalion) and the myth of sexual metamorphosis (Iphis).   [brief]
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Title: One king, one faith: the Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century 
Author: Roelker, Nancy L. (Nancy Lyman)
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | European History | Christianity | European Studies | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: This book, the culmination of a lifelong career in French history, tackles head-on the central question of the French Religious Wars: Why did France prove so consistently hostile and resistant to Protestantism? Distinguished scholar Nancy Lyman Roelker claims that what ultimately motivated the passion and violence of the civil wars was religion. She demonstrates that not only the body politic but also the body social was defined by Gallican Catholicism.Roelker underscores the role the Parlement played in shaping and safeguarding the social, as well as the political, order. Her study is based on extensive research in the correspondence, memoirs, and tracts of mainstream Catholic magistrates as well as dissenters. It creates an overview of the mentalitè s of the Parlement, analyzes religious attitudes toward major events of the period, and examines the Parlement's role in the triumph of Henri IV. Along the way, it sheds light on the inner workings of the Parlement and other political institutions, on social structures, and on collective ideas. And above all, this distinguished work brilliantly illuminates the role of religion in society and the state. It will be the definitive work on the subject for many years to come.   [brief]
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Title: Rebel and saint: Muslim notables, populist protest, colonial encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) 
Author: Clancy-Smith, Julia A
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Postcolonial Studies | French  Studies | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Julia Clancy-Smith's unprecedented study brings us a remarkable view of North African history from the perspective of the North Africans themselves. Focusing on the religious beliefs and political actions of Muslim elites and their followers in Algeria and Tunisia, she provides a richly detailed analysis of resistance and accommodation to colonial rule.Clancy-Smith demonstrates the continuities between the eras of Turkish and French rule as well as the importance of regional ties among elite families in defining Saharan political cultures. She rejects the position that Algerians and Tunisians were invariably victims of western colonial aggression, arguing instead that Muslim notables understood the outside world and were quite capable of manipulating the massive changes occurring around them.   [brief]
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Title: Workers against work: labor in Paris and Barcelona during the popular fronts 
Author: Seidman, Michael (Michael M.)
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Social Science | French  Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Why did a revolution occur in Spain and not in France in 1936? This is the key question Michael Seidman explores in his important new study of the relations between industrial capitalists and working-class movements in the early part of this century. In a comparative analysis of Paris during the Popular Front and Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution, Seidman examines the strengths and weaknesses of the bourgeoisie in these two cities and traces workers' resistance to, and acceptance of, work. His emphasis on the continuing refusal to work challenges the dominant views of labor historiography and contributes to a general theory of revolutionary workers' control.Seidman illuminates three crucial issues that have broad implications for the history of the twentieth century. His comparative approach delineates the nature of class confrontation in societies with different kinds of bourgeoisies or capitalist elites. He also shows how the differences between these elites affected the labor movements in France and Spain, and he demonstrates how rank-and-file workers actually responded to the revolutionary situation in Barcelona and to the advent of the reformist government in Paris.A social history of acceptance and rejection of work, this book offers a new conceptualization of wage earners and a critique of work itself.   [brief]
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Title: Luminous debris: reflecting on vestige in Provence and Languedoc 
Author: Sobin, Gustaf
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Literature | Cultural Anthropology | European Studies | Ancient History | Philosophy | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: Interpreting vestige with the eloquence of a poet and the knowledge of a field archaeologist, Gustaf Sobin explores his elected terrain: the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc. Drawing on prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, the twenty-six essays in this book focus on a particular place or artifact for the relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival curiosities for Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation on existence itself: Artifacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons.As much travel writing as meditative discourse, Luminous Debris is enhanced by a prose that tracks, questions, and reflects on the materials invoked. Sobin engages the reader with precise descriptions of those very materials and the messages to be gleaned from their examination, be they existential, ethical, or political.An American expatriate living in Provence for the past thirty-five years, Gustaf Sobin shares his enthusiasm for his adopted landscape and for a vertical interpretation of its strata. In Luminous Debris he creates meaning out of matter and celebrates instances of reality, past and present.   [brief]
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Title: Crafting the culture and history of French chocolate
Author: Terrio, Susan J. (Susan Jane) 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | European Studies | French  Studies | Food and Cooking | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This absorbing narrative follows the craft community of French chocolatiers - members of a tiny group experiencing intensive international competition - as they struggle to ensure the survival of their businesses. Susan J. Terrio moves easily among ethnography, history, theory, and vignette, telling a story that challenges conventional views of craft work, associational forms, and training models in late capitalism. She enters the world of Parisian craft leaders and local artisanal families there and in southwest France to relate how they work and how they confront the representatives and structures of power, from taste makers, CEOs, and advertising executives to the technocrats of Paris and Brussels. Looking at craft culture and community from a cross-disciplinary perspective, Terrio finds that the chocolatiers affirm their collective identity and their place in the present by commemorating selectively their role in history. In addition to joining a distinguished tradition of American anthropological writing on the role of food, her study of the social production of taste in the invention of vintage, grand cru chocolates lends specificity and weight to theories of consumption by Pierre Bourdieu and others. The book will appeal to anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and anyone curious about life in contemporary France.   [brief]
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Title: Obstinate Hebrews: representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815
Author: Schechter, Ronald
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | European History | Jewish Studies | Intellectual History | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: Enlightenment writers, revolutionaries, and even Napoleon discussed and wrote about France's tiny Jewish population at great length. Why was there so much thinking about Jews when they were a minority of less than one percent and had little economic and virtually no political power? In this unusually wide-ranging study of representations of Jews in eighteenth-century France - both by Gentiles and Jews themselves - Ronald Schechteroffers fresh perspectives on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, on Jewish history, and on the nature of racism and intolerance. Informed by the latest historical scholarship and by the insights of cultural theory, Obstinate Hebrews is a fascinating tale of cultural appropriation cast in the light of modern society's preoccupation with the "other." Schechter argues that the French paid attention to the Jews because thinking about the Jews helped them reflect on general issues of the day. These included the role of tradition in religion, the perfectibility of human nature, national identity, and the nature of citizenship. In a conclusion comparing and contrasting the "Jewish question" in France with discourses about women, blacks, and Native Americans, Schechter provocatively widens his inquiry, calling for a more historically precise approach to these important questions of difference.   [brief]
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Title: Broken tablets: the cult of the law in French art from David to Delacroix 
Author: Ribner, Jonathan P
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Art | Art History | French  Studies | European Literature | European History | Law
Publisher's Description: In this first study of art, law, and the legislator, Jonathan Ribner provides a revealing look at French art from 1789 to 1848, the period in which constitutional law was established in France. Drawing on several disciplines, he discusses how each of the early constitutional regimes in France used imagery suggesting the divine origin and sacred character of its laws.Primarily a study of art and politics, Broken Tablets discusses painting, sculpture, prints, and medals (many reproduced here for the first time), as well as contemporary literature, including the poetry of Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo. Ribner assesses the ways in which legislation imagery became an instrument of political propaganda, and he clearly illuminates the cult of the law as it became personalized under Napoleon, monarchist under the Restoration, and defensive under Louis-Phillipe.   [brief]
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Title: State capitalism and working-class radicalism in the French aircraft industry 
Author: Chapman, Herrick
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Politics | Technology and Society | French  Studies
Publisher's Description: In the 1950s and 1960s France experienced an economic miracle. As the state's role expanded with efforts to create a more modern economy, however, labor relations remained more volatile and workers more radical than elsewhere in western Europe. Herrick Chapman argues in this important new book that state capitalism and working-class radicalism went hand-in-hand and that both have antecedents in the tumultuous events of the 1930s and 1940s.The author focuses on a key industry - aviation - which held center stage in France from the Great Depression to the Cold War. While manufacturers and state officials struggled to modernize, the aviation industry became a bastion of the Communist Party and an arena of combat where workers, employers, and officials promoted competing visions of industrial reform. This gave rise to a new environment where state intervention and working-class radicalism became mutually reinforcing, and by the postwar era a peculiarly contentious form of industrial politics had become firmly entrenched.Using local and national archives, the author analyzes not only how an industry transformed but also how people reacted to the Popular Front, the defeat of 1940, the Nazi Occupation, and the onset of the Cold War. He also sheds light on such central themes in modern French history as the style of entrepreneurship, the sources of state interventionism, the response of workers to technological change and the nature of the Communist movement.   [brief]
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Title: Marianne in the market: envisioning consumer society in fin-de-siècle France
Author: Tiersten, Lisa 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: European Studies | European History | Consumerism | French  Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In the late nineteenth century, controversy over the social ramifications of the emerging consumer marketplace beset the industrialized nations of the West. In France, various commentators expressed concern that rampant commercialization threatened the republican ideal of civic-mindedness as well as the French reputation for good taste. The female bourgeois consumer was a particularly charged figure because she represented consumption run amok. Critics feared that the marketplace compromised her morality and aesthetic discernment, with dire repercussions for domestic life and public order. Marianne in the Market traces debates about the woman consumer to examine the complex encounter between the market and the republic in nineteenth-century France. It explores how agents of capitalism - advertisers, department store managers, fashion journalists, self-styled taste experts - addressed fears of consumerism through the forging of an aesthetics of the marketplace: a "marketplace modernism." In so doing, they constructed an image of the bourgeois woman as the solution to the problem of unrestrained, individualized, and irrational consumption. Commercial professionals used taste to civilize the market and to produce consumers who would preserve the French aesthetic patrimony. Tasteful consumption legitimized women's presence in the urban public and reconciled their roles as consumers with their domestic and civic responsibilities. A fascinating case study, Marianne in the Market builds on a wide range of sources such as the feminine press, decorating handbooks, exposition reports, advertising materials, novels, and etiquette books. Lisa Tiersten draws on these materials to make the compelling argument that market professionals used the allure of aesthetically informed consumerism to promote new models of the female consumer and the market in keeping with Republican ideals.   [brief]
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