This book is the first fully comprehensive study of Baudelaire's actions, reactions, and writings from the Revolution of February 1848 to the Bonapartist coup d'etat of December 1851. From the biographical, textual, and contextual evidence presented, a picture emerges of Baudelaire as a consistent radical republican. A book which traces in detail the links between literary texts and socio-political contexts, Baudelaire and the Second Revolution will appeal to students and scholars of Baudelaire and of mid-nineteenth-century French politics and society.
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The Terror of 1793-94, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Dreyfus Affair explosions of violence punctuated French history from the start of the Revolution until the Liberation at the close of World War II. The distinguished scholar Richard D. E. Burton here offers a stunningly original account of these outbursts, concluding that recourse to political violence was not occasional and abnormal, but rather the usual pattern, in French history. Instead of adhering to conventional chronological lines, Blood in the City is structured topologically around a number of major Parisian "sites of memory,"...

In Holy Tears, Holy Blood, Richard D. E. Burton continues his investigation of Catholic France from Revolution to Liberation. From his focus in Blood in the City on public demonstrations of the cultural power of Catholicism, he now turns to more private rituals, those codes of conduct that shaped the interior lives of French Catholic women and determined their artistic and social presentation. "Here there is rather less blood, and considerably more weeping," Burton says. In portraits of eleven women, including Simone Weil and Sainte Therese, he traces the lasting power of particular...

This wide-ranging book explores the origins, development, and character of Afro-Caribbean cultures from the slave period to the present day. Richard D. E. Burton focuses on ways in which African traditions including those in religion, music, food, dress, and family structure were transformed by interaction with European and indigenous forces to create the particular cultures of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. He demonstrates how the resulting Afro-Creole cultures have both challenged and reinforced the social, political, and economic status quo in these countries.Jamaican slaves opposed slavery...

This book is an intensive study of what was by far the most productive year in Baudelaire's literary career. It combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis in order to locate the sources of the extraordinary 'explosion' (Baudelaires' own word) of poetic creativity that he experienced during that year, and which resulted, amongst other things, in the writing of his greatest 'Paris poems'. Baudelaire in 1859 differs from 'synchronic' approaches in stressing the need for a reappraisal of his development as man and poet. To this end, Dr Burton devotes a large part of the...

The book provides a "flaneur's eye view" of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century: dress, cafes and restaurants, but also shops and passages, the omnibus, bals publics and carnival. The author provides general conclusions about the private and public spheres in "le vieux Paris." Like the flaneur, the author concentrates less on factual information for its own sake--which may be found in the secondary works cited in the text and footnotes--than on the "semiological" or anthropological significance of the cultural forms in question. Links are drawn between cultural...

The 20th century French composer Olivier Messiaen was a devout Roman Catholic and notably claimed that his music was an expression of his faith. Unsurprisingly, many performers and listeners consider Messiaen's strong religiosity central to their appreciation of the composer's music. Music scholars have devoted much energy to exploring how Messiaen's music was an extension of his religious beliefs. Yet, these works tend to discuss Messiaen's Catholicism solely in terms of personal religious identity and ignore the composer's broader connections to the cultural landscape of Roman Catholicism...