Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - France

In this innovative study of the press during the French Revolutionary crisis of the early 1830s, Jeremy Popkin shows that newspapers played a crucial role in defining a new repertoire of identities--for workers, women, and members of the middle classes--that redefined Europe's public sphere.

Nowhere was this process more visible than in Lyon, the great manufacturing center where the aftershocks of the July Revolution of 1830 were strongest. In July 1830 Lyon's population had rallied around its liberal newspaper and opposed the conservative Restoration government. In less than two...

One of the central questions of the French Revolution is what happened to the country from the time the monarchy collapsed in the summer of 1792, when the prospects for popular democracy seemed brightest, to the Terror of 1793-94, when the Committee of Public Safety ruled by fiat and repression. A key moment during this interim period was the so-called Federalist Revolt, when four provincial cities--Caen, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille--rebelled against the more radical revolutionaries in Paris, threatening to plunge France into civil war. Over the years some very good work has been...

One of the most important results of the French Revolution was the destruction of the old feudal order, which for centuries had kept the common people of the countryside subject to the lords. In this book, John Markoff addresses the ways in which insurrectionary peasants and revolutionary legislators joined in bringing "the time of the lords" to an end and how, in that ending, seigneurial rights came to be central to the very sense of the Revolution. He traces the interaction of peasants and legislators, showing how they confronted, challenged, and implicitly negotiated with one another...

By the eighteenth century Paris was one of the great wonders of Europe, renowned for its magnificent royal monuments and as a center for science, literature, and the arts. More so than any other European city, Paris reflected the spirit of an age--an age that reached its zenith with the reign of France's Sun King, Louis XIV. No book better captures that spirit than Orest Ranum's Paris in the Age of Absolutism, first published in 1968 and now reissued in a revised and expanded edition.

Ranum's tour of Paris begins in the late 1500s with a French capital city exhausted by the...

"Vichy will not go away. As I write, France is in the throes of the Paul Touvier affair. . . . The Touvier affair is just the most recent expression of what Henry Rousso has called the Vichy syndrome." So begins Robert Zaretsky's timely study of everyday life in France during the "dark years" of Vichy. While many studies of Vichy France have either focused on specific lives or ideas or covered the period in broad and synthetic terms, local studies such as this promise to nuance our understanding of wartime France. By concentrating on the city of Nimes and the department of the Gard,...

This volume brings together eight essays (all but one previously unpublished) that offer innovative strategies for studying society and culture in eighteenth-century France. Divided into three sections, the chapters map out current research paths in social, cultural, and political history. The authors engage the most heated subjects of debate in the field today, including the changing nature of political life in the age of Enlightenment, the role of public opinion in undermining absolutism, and the impact of gender on social relationships and political language in the late eighteenth...

It is often said that there are two Frances--Catholic and secular. This notion dates back to the 1790s, when the revolutionary government sought to divorce Catholic Christianity from national life. While Napoleon formally reconciled his regime to France's millions of Catholics, church-state relations have remained a source of conflict and debate throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Catholic and French Forever Joseph Byrnes recounts the fights and reconciliations between French citizens who found Catholicism integral to their traditional French identity and...

Winner of the Leo Gershoy Prize from the American Historical Association, 1998, for the best book in Early Modern European History.

Timothy Tackett's Becoming a Revolutionary revisits one of the most controversial moments in history: the beginning of the French Revolution. How did it arise? Why did French men and women become revolutionaries? To answer these questions, Tackett focuses on the experiences of the 1200 members of the first French National Assembly. Drawing upon on a wide range of sources, including contemporary letters and diaries, Tackett shows that the...

Today's interest in social history and private life is often seen as a twentieth-century innovation. Most often Lucien Febvre and the Annales school in France are credited with making social history a widely accepted way for historians to approach the past. In Lost Worlds historian Jonathan Dewald shows that we need to look back further in time, into the nineteenth century, when numerous French intellectuals developed many of the key concepts that historians employ today.

According to Dewald, we need to view Febvre and other Annales historians as participants in an ongoing...

Historians have long been fascinated by the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. What difference did nobles make in French society? What role did they play in the coming of the Revolution? In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France's past.

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century appears some thirty years after the publication of the most sweeping and influential "revisionist" assessment of the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret's La noblesse au dix-huitieme siecle. The...

If the Fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, marks the symbolic beginning of the French Revolution, then August 4 is the day the Old Regime ended, for it was on that day (or, more precisely, that night) that the National Assembly met and undertook sweeping reforms that ultimately led to a complete reconstruction of the French polity. What began as a prearranged meeting with limited objectives suddenly took on a frenzied atmosphere during which dozens of noble deputies renounced their traditional privileges and dues. By the end of the night, the Assembly had instituted more meaningful...

The Affair of the Poisons was the greatest court scandal of the seventeenth century. From 1679 to 1682 the French crown investigated more than 400 people--including Louis XIV's official mistress and members of the highest-ranking circles at court--for sensational crimes. In Strange Revelations, Lynn Mollenauer brings this bizarre story to life, exposing a criminal magical underworld thriving in the heart of the Sun King's capital.

The macabre details of the Affair of the Poisons read like a gothic novel. In the fall of 1678, Nicolas de la Reynie, head of the Paris police,...

The Affair of the Poisons was the greatest court scandal of the seventeenth century. From 1679 to 1682 the French crown investigated more than 400 people--including Louis XIV's official mistress and members of the highest-ranking circles at court--for sensational crimes. In Strange Revelations, Lynn Mollenauer brings this bizarre story to life, exposing a criminal magical underworld thriving in the heart of the Sun King's capital.

The macabre details of the Affair of the Poisons read like a gothic novel. In the fall of 1678, Nicolas de la Reynie, head of the Paris police,...

The Lamothes were an ordinary family in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. Well-to-do and well respected by their neighbors, they were local notables whose private and public lives suggest the importance of family, kin, and friendship networks, professional activities and cultural interests, as well as a desire to serve the public good. In this portrait of the Lamothes, Christine Adams explores the development of middle-class identity among urban professionals and reconsiders the role of this social group in the coming French Revolution.

The most striking feature of this family history is...

Mahoney provides a comprehensive study of the thought and action of Charles de Gaulle. This volume is neither a biography nor a historical narrative, although it addresses important aspects of de Gaulle's life and political career. Mahoney asserts that de Gaulle is systematically misunderstood, especially in the Anglo-American world. He is sometimes dismissed as a narrow or quixotic nationalist, pigeon-holed as an irrational anti-American, and often labelled with various anti-democratic appellations such as Bonapartist or Nietzschean. In responding to this wide-spread misunderstanding,...

For more than five centuries France has been both a European and a global power. French explorers, traders, settlers, soldiers and missionaries journeyed to the world's farthest reaches establishing colonies, bringing millions of people under French influence and claiming vast expanses of forests, jungles, deserts, and rich mineral and maritime resources. Through continued wars with rival powers, including Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and Germany, France lost large portions of its empire and gained others. Century-long conflict with some of its most valued possessions, such as Vietnam...