Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - France

This unique guide to the French Fourth and Fifth Republics is a comprehensive reference work that includes over 250 entries on a variety of topics--ranging from politics and economics to foreign and defense policy to social and cultural history. It is an interdisciplinary work that will serve as a handy reference tool for those seeking information on contemporary France.

The contributors represent a number of fields, including history, political science, literature, and language. Entries are on both specific events or people and broad thematic topics, such as political, economic,...

Will French mainstream political parties and republican institutions survive extreme religious and racist movements on the right and left in the future? This short political history of France since the 1960s examines the impact of student revolts, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Algerian fundamentalists, and demographic and generational changes to define critical issues at the center of political debate in France today. Political scientists, historians, scholars in French studies, business people concerned with France, and general readers will benefit from this analysis of the contemporary...

The essays in this collection, drawn from a Hofstra University bicentennial conference on the French Revolution, seek to come to terms, often from conflicting points of view, with the complex relationship between events and their representations. The question 'How did the lived experience that eventually became known as the French Revolution come to be organized?' provides a common thread for the collection. Individual chapters examine the Revolution from the vantage points of theology and philosophy, theater and literature, as well as politics and history.

As the contributors...

This book treats two basic subjects: (1) royalist explanations of the causes of the French Revolution, and (2) royalist defenses of royalist political positions. The royalists began with a simplistic conspiracy theory of history--the Old Regime was right. But then they came up with increasingly sophisticated explanations, thereby making an important contribution to historical explanation. In political thought, they eventually offered a tempered defense of the Old Regime, a call for political elitism in the face of the chaos unleashed by the Revolution, and an early explanation of the...

Miskimin's work considers the religious feuding, hostility, and occasional cooperation of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in 17th-century Metz. In a series of pointed chapters, she shows how the French Crown benefited from religious disagreement in the town by using that discord to push through its centralizing political agenda. Despite the disapproval of local leaders and the lack of any ideological commitment to coexistence, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews increasingly developed daily contacts in the city as the century progressed. Though these contacts were often hostile, they...

England's capture of Canada in 1760 was the culmination of the French and Indian War and of a century and a half of conflict between Britain and France for control of the North American continent. During that long period, there were several English military efforts to evict the French, but all failed. Therefore, at the war's start, few among the English entertained serious thoughts of totally evicting France from all of Canada. Nor did the French consider such a result a serious possibility. Drawing heavily on primary sources, Brecher tells the dramatic story of why the war's outcome...

Midway through his reign, in the critical decade of the 1680s, the lusty image of Louis XIV paled and was replaced by that of a straitlaced monarch committed to locking up blasphemers, debtors, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that dispensed ample doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue. The author demonstrates how this attack on sin expressed the punitive social policy of the French Catholic Reformation and how Louis's actions clarified the legal and moral distinctions between crime and sin.

As a hot-blooded young prince, Louis XIV paid little attention to...

Hegel called him an idea on horseback, a description that suggests Napoleon Bonaparte's complexity, as well as the extent to which he changed France, Europe, and the world. Napoleon has been called a visionary, a pragmatist, a cynical opportunist, an ogre, and a demigod. Here, he is described in his own words and the words of his contemporaries: from his clannishness to his knack for being at the right place at the right time, and from his genius to his obsession with detail.

Napoleon brought order out of the chaos of the French Revolution, pressed for revolutionary equality of...

The French Revolution has often been perceived as the dawn of the modern era, the divide between the ancien regime and the contemporary world. It is an undeniably crucial event in the history of Western Civilization. Yet it is also a confusing and oft-misunderstood event. This comprehensive examination of the Revolution provides students with a narrative historical overview, essays on major aspects of the event, lengthy biographical profiles of key persons, the text of important primary documents contemporary to the time, a timeline, a glossary, and an annotated bibliography of...

The French Revolution sought to change daily life itself. This book looks at the thirteen years between 1789-1802 that experienced the Terror, banning of the aristocracy, and the rearrangement of the calendar. No part of French life was left untouched during this incredible period of turmoil and warfare, from women's role in the family to men's role in the state. Art and theater were invigorated and harnessed for political purposes. Subtleties in one's dress could mean the difference between life and death. The first modern mass army was created. Chapters include the physical make-up of...