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French Salons
Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.
Citizen Emperor
In this second volume of Philip Dwyer’s authoritative biography on one of history’s most enthralling leaders, Napoleon, now 30, takes his position as head of the French state after the 1799 coup. Dwyer explores the young leader’s reign, complete with mistakes, wrong turns, and pitfalls, and reveals the great lengths to which Napoleon goes in the effort to fashion his image as legitimate and patriarchal ruler of the new nation. Concealing his defeats, exaggerating his victories, never hesitating to blame others for his own failings, Napoleon is ruthless in his ambition for power. Following Napoleon from Paris to his successful campaigns in Italy and Austria, to the disastrous invasion o...
Mother of the Church
Sofia Petrovna Svechina (1782–1857), better known as Madame Sophie Swetchine, was the hostess of a famous nineteenth-century Parisian salon. A Russian émigré, Svechina moved to France with her husband in 1816. She had recently converted to Roman Catholicism, and the salon she opened acquired a distinctly religious character. It quickly became one of the most popular salons in Paris and was a meeting place for the French intellectual Catholic elite and members of the Liberal Catholic movement. As a salonniére, Svechina developed close friendships with some of the most noted public figures in the Liberal Catholic movement. Her involvement with her guests went deeper than the typical salon...
Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920
A magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the heated debates around the 'woman question' during the French Third Republic.
A Jewish Woman of Distinction
Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953) was the eldest daughter of Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, one of the three brothers known as the Russian Rothschilds. They were moguls who dominated Russian finance and business and built almost a quarter of the railroad lines in Imperial Russia. For more than seventy-five years, Poliakova kept detailed diaries of her world, giving us a rare look into the exclusive world of Jewish elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These rare documents reveal how Jews successfully integrated into Russian aristocratic society through their intimate friendships and patronage of the arts and philanthropy. And they did it all without converting—in fact, while staunchly demonstra...
Royalists, Radicals, and les Misérables
The year of 1832 marked a turning point in France as the country struggled to find its way in the wake of the French Revolution. Following the Revolution of 1830, Legitimists, supporters of the recently ousted Bourbon dynasty’s claim to the throne, continued to plot against King Louis-Philippe and his “July Monarchy.” In early 1832, after failing to launch a coup in Southern France, Legitimists plotted an unsuccessful uprising in the Vendée, a region in Western France that had supported the royalist cause during the French Revolution. The Duchesse de Berry led the rebellion in the hopes of placing her son, the Bourbon heir, on the French throne. The revolt marked the last attempt by t...
The Emerging Female Citizen
Eighteenth-century Spanish women were not idle bystanders during one of Europe's most dynamic eras. As Theresa Ann Smith skillfully demonstrates in this lively and absorbing book, Spanish intellectuals, calling for Spain to modernize its political, social, and economic institutions, brought the question of women's place to the forefront, as did women themselves. In explaining how both discourse and women's actions worked together to define women's roles in the nation, The Emerging Female Citizen not only illustrates the rising visibility of women, but also reveals the complex processes that led to women's relatively swift exit from most public institutions in the early 1800s. As artists, writers, and reformers, Spanish women took up pens, joined academies and economic societies, formed tertulias—similar to French salons—and became active in the burgeoning public discourse of Enlightenment. In analyzing the meaning of women's presence in diverse centers of Enlightenment, Smith offers a new interpretation of the dynamics among political discourse, social action, and gender ideologies.
Geneviève Straus: A Parisian Life
Geneviève Straus: a Parisian Life is the first biography in English of Geneviève Straus (1849-1926), a Parisian salon hostess and political activist. Joyce Block Lazarus explores myths surrounding Straus and offers an account of her life and accomplishments. Making use of historical materials, including previously unpublished letters, Lazarus shows that Straus was a female intellectual during an era when women were non-citizens. Scholars have well documented the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), but have overlooked archival documents which spotlight Straus’s role as a political activist in the affair. In Geneviève Straus: a Parisian Life, Lazarus highlights Straus’s thirty-four-year friendship with Marcel Proust and examines her influence on Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time, finding echoes of Straus and her family in his masterpiece.
The Pride of Place
Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and mi...
The Invention of International Order
The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious ar...
