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My France focuses on some of the most intriguing aspects of French life: politics, myths, personalities, public problems, actions, and conflicts. The topics Weber treats range from sports to religion, and include comments on folklore, national socialism, antisemitism, and famous Frenchmen.
For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. "Children of the Revolution" follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789.
Describes the negotiation of French national identity during the nineteenth century in terms of the relationship between the French and their rural cultures.
The unprecedented scope and intensity of the First World War has prompted an enormous body of retrospective scholarship. However, efforts to provide a coherent synthesis about the war's impact and significance have remained circumscribed, tending to focus either on the operational outlines of military strategy and tactics or on the cultural legacy of the conflict as transmitted bythe war's most articulate observers. This volume departs from traditional accounts on several scores: by exploring issues barely touched upon in previous works, by deviating from the widespread tendency to treat the experiences of front and homefront isolation, and by employing a thematic treatment that, by considering the construction of authority and identity between 1914 and 1918, illuminates the fundamental question of how individuals, whether in uniform or not, endured the war's intrusion into so many aspects of their public and private lives.
Family and Farm is the history of the communautes, the large patriarchal households of central France, from the close of the medieval era to the nineteenth century. These households were unique in that they often included as many as twenty members, holding property in common. Far from having roots in any cultural bias or folkloric tradition, the communautes were organized to enable individual families to meet the demands imposed by the social, economic, and physical environments in which they lived. The book examines household composition, the role of kinship, inheritance and successive strategies, and the nature of interpersonal relations. The period covered by the study includes the collapse of feudalism, the rise of the modern state, the French revolution, and the emergence of agrarian capitalism. Each crisis posed fundamental problems of survival for peasant families, and the organization of households constituted a crucial means by which that survival was ensured.
This series of bibliographical references is one of the most important tools for research in modern and contemporary French literature. No other bibliography represents the scholarly activities and publications of these fields as completely.
France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.
Exploring autobiographical texts written by European urban craftsmen from the 15th to the 18th centuries, this book studies memoirs, diaries, family chronicles, travel narratives, and other forms of personal writings from Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and England. In the process, it reveals the significance of written self-expression in early modern popular culture.
Between about 1830 and the outbreak of the First World War, print culture, reading, and writing transformed cultural life in Western Europe in many significant ways. Book production and consumption increased dramatically, and practices such as letter- and diary-writing were widespread. This study demonstrates the importance of the nineteenth century in French cultural change and illustrates the changing priorities and concerns of l'histoire du livre since the 1970s. From the 1830s on, book production experienced an industrial revolution which led to the emergence of a mass literary culture by the close of the century. At the same time, the western world acquired mass literacy. New categories...