Acknowledgments

Undoubtedly, all books should be considered a form of collective action. Certainly, every author depends on a vast network of people and institutions, and I am happy to acknowledge the institutions that supplied the time to work on Paris as Revolution and the individuals who kept me at it.

A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities combined with a sabbatical leave from the University of Illinois in 1988 afforded time to start the project. Work in Paris was greatly enhanced by time spent at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at Pierre Bourdieu's Centre de Sociologie Européenne. A month at the incomparable Bellagio Study Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in the summer of 1992 enabled me to write chapter 5 far more expeditiously than would have otherwise been possible and in surroundings that approximated Rabelais' Abbaye de Thélème. A leave from Columbia University gave me the needed time to finish the manuscript.

In this work so strongly driven by place, I should like to record my appreciation of two special places. The glorious painted beams of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris in the Hôtel Lamoignon encouraged a sense of history that the very helpful staff assisted with unfailing courtesy. Finally, as the Bibliothèque Nationale turns into the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, it is fitting to acknowledge the privilege of working rue de Richelieu. I will find the unparalleled collections in the new library across the Seine, but I will not find the reading room with its wonderful vaulted ceiling that tempted me to speculate about the many generations who worked there before me, including many of the writers whom I write about.

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Literature and Social Practice, edited by Philippe Desan, myself, and Wendy Griswold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Aspects of chapter 3 have also been published in Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century

France, edited by Suzanne Nash (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); and in Cultural Participation: Trends since the Middle Ages, edited by Ann Rigney and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993). I am grateful for permission to use this material.

Of the many colleagues, students, and friends who have helped me test my ideas, refine my discussion, and polish the prose, I owe a particular debt to Suzanne Nash and Henri Mitterand and especially to the two exceptional readers for the University of California Press, Jonathan Beecher and Catherine Nesci. Susan Suleiman saw what the title should be. For the second time, Doris Kretschmer shepherded a manuscript of mine through the University of California Press. Every author should be so well served.

My greatest debt, once again, is to Robert A. Ferguson. If, like the ship on the seal of Paris, this book rides the waves, it is surely because of his navigational skills, his enthusiasm for the project, and above all his certitude that the boat was really sailing.