This volumes offers a comprehensive and critical overview of ideas of how virilite has been imagined in France from the Eighteenth century. Incorporating insights of cultural and social historians, this collection approaches masculinities in a complex and interdisciplinary manner that will appeal to a wide range of readers.

The early years of democracy in France were marked by a society divided by civil war, class war and violent conflict. Citizenship and Wars explores the concept of citizenship in a time of social and political upheaval, and considers what the conflict meant for citizen-soldiers, women, children and the elderly. This highly original argument based on primary research brings new life to debates about the making of French identity in the 19th century.
Putting the latest theoretical thinking into empirical use, the author assesses how the function of the state and its citizens changed...

The early years of democracy in France were marked by a society divided by civil war, class war and violent conflict. Citizenship and Wars explores the concept of citizenship in a time of social and political upheaval, and considers what the conflict meant for citizen-soldiers, women, children and the elderly. This highly original argument based on primary research brings new life to debates about the making of French identity in the 19th century.
Putting the latest theoretical thinking into empirical use, the author assesses how the function of the state and its citizens changed...

Defeated flesh is a compelling study of the French defeat of 1870 and the socialist uprising of the Commune of Paris. By looking at the history of the body and medicine, Taithe considers how the French people mobilised for the war effort and how their ultimate defeat had cultural and social consequences which led to the fin-de-siecle spirit. Looking at the siege of Paris, the war suffering and rationing in an exceptionally harsh period of French history it revises the current debates on citizenship, centralisation and modern warfare. The range of material and the approach will cast a new...

The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece, is a brilliant but maddening book. Benjamin's Arcades: an unGuided Tour looks for the method behind the madness, carefully reconstructing the intellectual and political context of the work and unpacking its numerous analogies, metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by three literary scholars and one historian, this text is both a reading companion and a vigorous interpretation of one of the most important humanistic texts of the twentieth century. Benjamin's Arcades is composed of 16 entries and a specially designed...

Evil and barbarism continue to be associated with the totalitarian 'extremes' of twentieth-century Europe. Addressing domestic and imperial conflicts in modern Britain and beyond, as well as varied forms of representation, this volume explores the inter-relations of evil, atrocity and civilizational prejudice within liberal cultures of governance.