The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie

The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie PDF Author: Sarah Maza
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity. In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed. Despite the large numbers of respectable middling town-dwellers, no group identified themselves as bourgeois. Drawing on political and economic theory and history, personal and polemical writings, and works of fiction, Maza argues that the bourgeoisie was never the social norm. In fact, it functioned as a critical counter-norm, an imagined and threatening embodiment of materialism, self-interest, commercialism, and mass culture, which defined all that the French rejected. A challenge to conventional wisdom about modern French history, this book poses broader questions about the role of anti-bourgeois sentiment in French culture, by suggesting parallels between the figures of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the American in the French social imaginary. It is a brilliant and timely foray into our beliefs and fantasies about the social world and our definition of a social class.

The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie

The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie PDF Author: Sarah Maza
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity. In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed. Despite the large numbers of respectable middling town-dwellers, no group identified themselves as bourgeois. Drawing on political and economic theory and history, personal and polemical writings, and works of fiction, Maza argues that the bourgeoisie was never the social norm. In fact, it functioned as a critical counter-norm, an imagined and threatening embodiment of materialism, self-interest, commercialism, and mass culture, which defined all that the French rejected. A challenge to conventional wisdom about modern French history, this book poses broader questions about the role of anti-bourgeois sentiment in French culture, by suggesting parallels between the figures of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the American in the French social imaginary. It is a brilliant and timely foray into our beliefs and fantasies about the social world and our definition of a social class.

The Myth of the French Revolution

The Myth of the French Revolution PDF Author: Alfred Cobban
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description


Becoming a Revolutionary

Becoming a Revolutionary PDF Author: Timothy Tackett
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271028882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
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 deputies were a group of practical men, whose ideas were governed more by concrete subjects than by abstract philosophy. Though it may seem surprising now, most of the deputies were actually in support of the king. Instead of being initiated as a result of a specific ideology founded on Enlightenment principles, the ideas that eventually led to the French Revolution were, instead, a direct result of the actual process of the Assembly. First published in 1996 and hailed as an &“exemplary product of the historian&’s craft,&” Becoming a Revolutionary is now available in paperback for the first time.

Mythologies

Mythologies PDF Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809071940
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
"This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution PDF Author: David Andress
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191009911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for future research directions. Placing core dimensions of the history of the French Revolution in their transnational and global contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class, gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security, and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and reflection. This Handbook covers the structural and political contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of the 'origins of revolution'; the different dimensions of personal and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789 itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short- and long-term legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for France, and for global politics.

The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution

The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution PDF Author: Alfred Cobban
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description


The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie

The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie PDF Author: Sarah C. Maza
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description


The Civil War in France

The Civil War in France PDF Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
The Civil War in France is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx. It presents a convincing declaration of the General Council of the International, pertaining to the character and importance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune at the time.

Fashioning the Bourgeoisie

Fashioning the Bourgeoisie PDF Author: Philippe Perrot
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691000817
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
By the middle of the century, men were prompted to disdain the decadent and gaudy colors of the pre-Revolutionary period and wear unrelievedly black frock coats suitable to the manly and serious world of commerce. Their wives and daughters, on the other hand, adorned themselves in bright colors and often uncomfortable and impractical laces and petticoats, to signal the status of their family.

Twilight of the Elites

Twilight of the Elites PDF Author: Christophe Guilluy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
A passionate account of how the gulf between France’s metropolitan elites and its working classes are tearing the country apart Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an “American society”—one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on “the periphery.” As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.