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Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780271058672
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France's past. The contributors to this volume incorporate the important lessons of Chaussinand-Nogaret's revisionism but also reexamine the assumptions on which that revisionism was based.
Author: Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1985-05-16
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780521275903
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Contrary to their traditional image as a caste of intransigent reactionaries and parasites, this analysis maintains that pre-revolutionary nobility actually were in the forefront of French economic and intellectual life, and until 1789, at the head of the movement for reform of the old regime.
Author: Chad Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-12-01
Total Pages: 181
ISBN-13: 1498537278
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination, from the unending fascination with the Marquis de Sade to the successes of the film Ridicule. Drawing on memoirs, letters, popular songs and pamphlets, and political treatises, The Enlightened and Depraved: Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility traces the origins of this powerful stereotype from between the reign of Louis XIV and the Terror of the French Revolution. The decadent and enlightened noble of early modern France, the libertine, was born in a push to transform the nobility from a warrior caste into an intelligentsia. Education itself had become a power through which the privileged could set themselves free from old social and religious restraints. However, by the late eighteenth century, the libertine noble was already falling under attack by changing attitudes toward gender, an emphasis on economic utility over courtly service, and ironically the very revolutionary forces that the enlightened nobility of the court and Paris helped awaken. In the end, the libertine nobility would not survive the French Revolution, but the basic idea of knowledge as a liberating force would endure in modernity, divorced from a single class.
Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-05-31
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 1501717987
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The mature nationalism that fueled the French Revolution grew from patriotic sensibilities fostered over the course of a century or more. Jay M. Smith proposes that the French thought their way to nationhood through a process of psychic adjustment premised on the reimagining of nobility, a social category and moral concept that had long dominated the cultural horizons of the old regime. Nobility Reimagined follows the elaboration of French patriotism across the eighteenth century and highlights the accentuation of key, and conflicting, features of patriotic thought at defining moments in the history of the monarchy. By enabling the articulation of different futures for nobility and nation, the patriotic awakening that marked the old regime helped to create both the quest for patriotic unity and the fierce constitutional battles that flowered at the time of the Revolution. Smith argues that the attempt to redefine and restore French nobility brought forth competing visions of patriotism with correlating models of the social and political order. Although the terms of public debate have changed, the same basic challenge continues to animate contemporary politics: how to reconcile inspiring and unifying nationalist ideals—honor, virtue, patriotism—with persistent social frictions rooted in class, ideology, ethnicity, or gender.
Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780472096381
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A study of the paradoxical position of French nobility just before the French Revolution
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Red Globe Press
Published: 2003-07-17
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 033365210X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Jerzy Lukowski shows the pressures and tensions, both from below and from governments, which increasingly challenged traditional ruling groups in Europe during the century before the French Revolution. The position of the nobility depended on a stable world which accepted their authority; but that world was becoming fractured as a result of social and economic developments and new ideas. Lukowski explains the basic mechanisms of noble existence and examines how the European nobility sought to preserve a sense of solidarity in the midst of widespread change.
Author: Daryl M. Hafter
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2015-01-12
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 0807158321
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments-from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses-although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the "family economy," in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end prostitutes managed their own households; female weavers, tailors, and merchants increasingly appeared on eighteenth-century tax rolls and guild membership lists; and female members of the nobility possessed and wielded the same legal power as their male counterparts. Examining female workers within and outside of the context of family, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France challenges current scholarly assumptions about gender and labor. This stimulating and important collection of essays broadens our understanding of the diversity, vitality, and crucial importance of women's work in the eighteenth-century economy.
Author: William Doyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-04-09
Total Pages: 382
ISBN-13: 0199559856
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Doyle describes how the French revolutionaries tried to abolish the nobility, analysing the intellectual roots of hostility to nobles, the steps by which revolutionaries turned against aristocracy, the impact of persecution, and the long-term consequences of these developments for the nobility.
Author: Michael Kwass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-11-02
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9780521030199
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France, first published in 2000, offers a lucid interpretation of the Ancien Régime and the origins of the French Revolution. It examines what was arguably the most ambitious project of the eighteenth-century French monarchy: the attempt to impose direct taxes on formerly tax-exempt privileged elites. Connecting the social history of the state to the study of political culture, Michael Kwass describes how the crown refashioned its institutions and ideology to impose new forms of taxation on the privileged. Drawing on impressive primary research from national and provincial archives, Kwass demonstrates that the levy of these taxes, which struck elites with some force, not only altered the relationship between monarchy and social hierarchy, but also transformed political language and attitudes in the decades before the French Revolution. Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France sheds light on French history during this crucial period.
