The State in Early Modern France

The State in Early Modern France

Author: James B. Collins

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-09-28

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521387248

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A major new textbook examining the nature of the state and the monarchy in early modern France.


Sans-Culottes

Sans-Culottes

Author: Michael Sonenscher

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0691180806

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This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, Sans-Culottes examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, Michael Sonenscher opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.


The Smile Revolution

The Smile Revolution

Author: Colin Jones CBE

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0191024848

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You could be forgiven for thinking that the smile has no history; it has always been the same. However, just as different cultures in our own day have different rules about smiling, so did different societies in the past. In fact, amazing as it might seem, it was only in late eighteenth century France that western civilization discovered the art of the smile. In the 'Old Regime of Teeth' which prevailed in western Europe until then, smiling was quite literally frowned upon. Individuals were fatalistic about tooth loss, and their open mouths would often have been visually repulsive. Rules of conduct dating back to Antiquity disapproved of the opening of the mouth to express feelings in most social situations. Open and unrestrained smiling was associated with the impolite lower orders. In late eighteenth-century Paris, however, these age-old conventions changed, reflecting broader transformations in the way people expressed their feelings. This allowed the emergence of the modern smile par excellence: the open-mouthed smile which, while highlighting physical beauty and expressing individual identity, revealed white teeth. It was a transformation linked to changing patterns of politeness, new ideals of sensibility, shifts in styles of self-presentation - and, not least, the emergence of scientific dentistry. These changes seemed to usher in a revolution, a revolution in smiling. Yet if the French revolutionaries initially went about their business with a smile on their faces, the Reign of Terror soon wiped it off. Only in the twentieth century would the white-tooth smile re-emerge as an accepted model of self-presentation. In this entertaining, absorbing, and highly original work of cultural history, Colin Jones ranges from the history of art, literature, and culture to the history of science, medicine, and dentistry, to tell a unique and untold story about a facial expression at the heart of western civilization.


Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France

Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France

Author: Leonard N. Rosenband

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-05-22

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0801876796

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Eight years before the French Revolution, the paper mill at Vidalon-le-Haut was the setting for a bitter strike and successful lockout. This labor dispute, resulting from conflicts between master papermakers and skilled journeymen, ultimately benefitted the mill's owners and administrators—the Montgolfier family. They converted the 1781 lockout into an opportunity to train a new kind of worker, a malleable employee, and to fashion a new sort of workplace, a theater of technological experiment. Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761-1805, gives us history from the workshop up, offering the most comprehensive exploration available of the historical experience of papermaking. Leonard N. Rosenband explains how paper was made, depicting the tools, techniques, raw materials, and seasonable flows of the craft, and explores the many conflicts and compromises between masters and men. Rosenband provides a compelling account of how technological change affected the papermaking industry, transforming an elaborate, established system of production. The Montgolfier archives are a rich source of information, providing records of daily output and procedures, including complex rules ranging from the precise hours of meals and prayer to matters of propriety and personal sanitation. They also provide insight into the attitudes of the Montgolfier family and their workers—what they made of their trade, their labor, and one another. This case study of the Montgolfier mill, adding details about technological innovation and shopfloor relations during a time of social unrest, enriches the current debate about the nature and impact of capitalism in France during the years leading up to the French Revolution.


Popular science and public opinion in eighteenth-century France

Popular science and public opinion in eighteenth-century France

Author: Michael Lynn

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-02-28

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1526130459

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In this book, Michael R. Lynn analyses the popularisation of science in Enlightenment France. He examines the content of popular science, the methods of dissemination, the status of the popularisers and the audience, and the settings for dissemination and appropriation. Lynn introduces individuals like Jean-Antoine Nollet, who made a career out of applying electric shocks to people, and Perrin, who used his talented dog to lure customers to his physics show. He also examines scientifically oriented clubs like Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier’s Musée de Monsieur which provided locations for people interested in science. Phenomena such as divining rods, used to find water and ores as well as to solve crimes; and balloons, the most spectacular of all types of popular science, demonstrate how people made use of their new knowledge. Lynn’s study provides a clearer understanding of the role played by science in the Republic of Letters and the participation of the general population in the formation of public opinion on scientific matters.


Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France

Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France

Author: Daryl M. Hafter

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2015-01-12

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 080715833X

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In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments-from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses-although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the "family economy," in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end prostitutes managed their own households; female weavers, tailors, and merchants increasingly appeared on eighteenth-century tax rolls and guild membership lists; and female members of the nobility possessed and wielded the same legal power as their male counterparts. Examining female workers within and outside of the context of family, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France challenges current scholarly assumptions about gender and labor. This stimulating and important collection of essays broadens our understanding of the diversity, vitality, and crucial importance of women's work in the eighteenth-century economy.


Eighteenth Century Europe, 1700-1789

Eighteenth Century Europe, 1700-1789

Author: Jeremy Black

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1999-10-04

Total Pages: 619

ISBN-13: 1349277681

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This new edition of this highly successful and influential work includes two entirely new chapters - on Europe and the wider world and on the Revolutionary crisis - and is extensively revised throughout. It offers a wide-ranging thematic account of the century, that explores social, cultural and economic topics, as well as giving a clear analysis of the political events. Filled with fascinating detail and unusual examples, this absorbing history of eighteenth-century Europe will bring the period alive to students and teachers alike.


A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France

Author: William Beik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-14

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0521883091

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A magisterial history of French society between the end of the middle ages and the Revolution by one of the world's leading authorities on early modern France. Using colorful examples and incorporating the latest scholarship, William Beik conveys the distinctiveness of early modern society and identifies the cultural practices that defined the lives of people at all levels of society. Painting a vivid picture of the realities of everyday life, he reveals how society functioned and how the different classes interacted. In addition to chapters on nobles, peasants, city people, and the court, the book sheds new light on the Catholic church, the army, popular protest, the culture of violence, gendered relations, and sociability. This is a major new work that restores the ancien régime as a key epoch in its own right and not simply as the prelude to the coming Revolution.


Women's Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany

Women's Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany

Author: Nancy Locklin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1134781229

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Based on a solid foundation of archival research that ranges from tax rolls to notarial records, this study adds an important chapter to our understanding of women in pre-industrial Europe. Through a rigorous examination of primary documents peculiar to eighteenth-century Brittany, the author demonstrates the difficulties engendered in broad generalities about European women, and makes a strong case for the necessity for historians to account for regional differences in women's experiences. In particular, Nancy Locklin makes a compelling argument for the need to incorporate a broader basis upon which women attained their identity. Indeed, Locklin rightly contends that most women in pre-industrial European societies were recognized (and perhaps saw themselves) through a variety of identities over the course of their lives, depending on their age, familial connections, marital status, and the type of work they performed, and that often these identities overlapped. Locklin also shows the extent to which legal and ideological prescriptions painted a relatively negative picture of women's status, but that a close examination of women's participation in family, community, and commercial affairs reveals a much more complex and divergent reality.