The Shaping of French National Identity


Book Description

The Shaping of French National Identity casts new light on the intellectual origins of the dominant and 'official' French nineteenth-century national narrative. Focussing on the historical debates taking place throughout the eighteenth century and during the Restoration, Matthew D'Auria evokes a time when the nation's origins were being questioned and discussed and when they acquired the meaning later enshrined in the official rhetoric of the Third Republic. He examines how French writers and scholars reshaped the myths, symbols, and memories of pre-modern communities. Engaging with the myth of 'our ancestors the Gauls' and its ideological triumph over the competing myth of 'our ancestors the Franks', this study explores the ways in which the struggle developed, and the values that the two discourses enshrined, the collective actors they portrayed, and the memories they evoked. D'Auria draws attention to the continuity between ethnic discourses and national narratives and to the competition between various groups in their claims to represent the nation and to define their past as the 'true' history of France.




The Writing Public


Book Description

Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Elizabeth Andrews Bond scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years, shining a light on the letters to the editor. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers. Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment. Thanks to generous funding from The Ohio State University Libraries and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.




Ensemblance


Book Description

Esprit de corps has played a significant role in the cultural and political history of the last 300 years. Through several historical case studies, Luis de Miranda shows how this phrase acts as a combat concept with a clear societal impact. He also reveals how interconnected, yet distinct, French, English and American modern intellectual and political thought is. In the end, this is a cautionary analysis of past and current ideologies of ultra-unified human ensembles, a recurrent historical and theoretical fabulation the author calls 'ensemblance'.




The Bastille


Book Description

This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime. Lüsebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols’ functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups. To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.




Suffering Scholars


Book Description

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of the concept that answers the question "Who, or what, am I?" Gerald Izenberg contends that our most important identities, while historically conditioned, are rooted in permanent categories of human existence, such as sexuality, sociality, and labor. Book jacket.




The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask


Book Description

The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask triumphantly solves an enduring puzzle that has stumped historians for centuries and seduced novelists and filmmakers to this day. Who was the man who was rumored to have been kept in prison and treated royally during much of the reign of Louis XIV while being forced to wear an iron mask? Could he possibly have been the twin brother of the Sun King? Like every other serious scholar, intrepid historian Paul Sonnino discounts this theory, instead taking the reader along on his adventures to uncover the truth behind this ancient enigma. Exploring the hidden, squalid side of the lavish court of France, the author uncovers the full spectrum of French society, from humble servants to wealthy merchants to kings and queens. All had self-interested reasons to hold their secrets close until one humble valet named Eustache Dauger was arrested and jailed for decades, simply because he knew too much and opened his mouth at the wrong time. Presenting his dramatic solution to the mystery, Sonnino convincingly shows that no one will be able to tell the story of the man in the iron mask without taking into account the staggering array of evidence he has uncovered over the course of decades.







Piety and Politics


Book Description

"This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Louis XIV's magnificent final chapel at Versailles, completed in 1710 near the end of his long reign (1643-1715). Construction, begun in 1699 on foundations of 1689, spanned the offices of two premiers architects du roi, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Robert de Cotte. Eight painters and over 100 sculptors participated in the monumental undertaking, which remains almost unchanged today. An unusually large number of archival documents, drawings, and early texts about the chapel allow a detailed reconstruction of its history and meaning. Given Louis XIV's renown as one of the great kings and art patrons of all history and the universal definitions of his power in terms of divine kingship, the story of his palace chapel interests all historians of the ancien regime."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved