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Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, installing himself as First Consul of Revolutionary France. One of his first acts was to seek peace with Great Britain. After setbacks and tortuous negotiations a preliminary peace was agreed in October 1801, sealed by a definitive treaty at Amiens the following year: an event welcomed by people on both sides of the Channel. But the peace was tragically brief and its rupture in 1803 ignited a conflagration that raged until Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This is the story of that brief interlude of peace - how it came about, what it allowed, and how it ended. The diplomatic relationship between Britain and France is explored, and the internal politics of the two countries described. A colourful cast of characters promenades through the book, bringing to life a period that, while ostensibly peaceful, had its share of drama.
In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution ...
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional ...
This volume continues to explore the life and works of Auguste Comte during his so-called second career. It covers the period from the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon in late 1851 to Comte's death in 1857. During these early years of the Second Empire, Comte became increasingly conservative and anxious to control his disciples. This study offers the first study of the tensions within his movement. Focusing on his second masterpiece, the Système de politique positive, and other important books, such as the Synthèse subjective, Mary Pickering not only sheds light on Comte's intellectual development but also traces the dissemination of positivism and the Religion of Humanity throughout many parts of the world.
This book analyzes the negotiation of socio-political concepts, such as citizenship, republicanism, and representation, between “ordinary” French citizens and their representatives in parliament during the early twentieth century. By examining the letters written to French Deputies of the Chamber (députés) at a tumultuous time in French political history, the author sheds light on the role that politically unorganized citizens played in the process of democratization. Central to the investigation are the aspirations, wishes and demands of individuals acting on their own or as spokespersons for informal communities. The way that they formulated personal requests in their letters to dép...
In the late nineteenth century, controversy over the social ramifications of the emerging consumer marketplace beset the industrialized nations of the West. In France, various commentators expressed concern that rampant commercialization threatened the republican ideal of civic-mindedness as well as the French reputation for good taste. The female bourgeois consumer was a particularly charged figure because she represented consumption run amok. Critics feared that the marketplace compromised her morality and aesthetic discernment, with dire repercussions for domestic life and public order. Marianne in the Market traces debates about the woman consumer to examine the complex encounter between...
Arguing about Empire analyses the most divisive arguments about empire between Europe's two leading colonial powers from the age of high imperialism to the post-war era of decolonization. Focusing on the domestic contexts underlying imperial rhetoric, Arguing about Empire adopts a case-study approach, treating key imperial debates as historical episodes to be investigated in depth. The episodes in question have been selected both for their chronological range, their variety, and, above all, their vitriol. Some were straightforward disputes; others involved cooperation in tense circumstances. These include the Tunisian and Egyptian crises of 1881-2, which saw France and Britain establish new ...
Smith explains how France abandoned merchant capitalism for the corporate enterprise that would come to dominate its economy and project influence around the globe. Opposing the view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, he presents a story of considerable achievement.
The changing demographic landscape which Europe is facing today and in the next decades reflects the past. These changes constitute important challenges to European populations and societies. Shifts in fertility and family formation, in health, morbidity and mortality, in internal and international migration as well as changes in age structures, in households, in labour forces, and in population growth and decline, will influence the living conditions and well-being of Europe's population directly or indirectly. The demographic challenge also concerns the environment, local, regional and national developments, education, production and consumption patterns, economic competitiveness, social security, housing, employment and transport, and health and social care provisions. These issues, their mechanisms, determinants and consequences also challenge the scientific study of population. As a major forum and 'market place' for scientific demographic debate, the 1999 European Population Conference (EPC99) was organized to take up this challenge. On the threshold of the third millennium, European populations are united in diversity and face major demographic issues.
Since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s book, Centuries of Childhood, in the early 1960s, there has been great interest among historians in the history of the family and the household. A central aspect of the debate relates the story of the family to implicit notions of modernization, with the rise of the nuclear family in the West as part of its economic and political success. During the past decade, however, that synthesis has begun to break down. Historians have begun to examine kinship - the way individual families are connected to each other through marriage and descent - finding that during the most dynamic period in European industrial development, class formation, and state reorganization, Europe became a “kinship hot” society. The essays in this volume explore two major transitions in kinship patterns - at the end of the Middle Ages and at the end of the eighteenth century - in an effort to reset the agenda in family history.