Intended for history students and general readers, this book introduces and analyzes the dynamics and relationships of the various social groups or classes of 19th-century France - the nobility, bourgeoisie, middle class and petty bourgeoisie.

First published in 1987, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France argues that the social impact of the French Revolution has been greatly exaggerated, and that in 1815 France was still predominantly a rural and pre-industrial society. The revolution introduced only very limited changes in social structures and relationships – the daily lives of ordinary people remained virtually unchanged. A much more decisive turning point in French history, the author suggests, was the period of structural change in economy and society, which began in the mid nineteenth century. The first part of the book looks at many changes in the economy and their effect on living standards and social environment. The second part identifies the social groups which make up French society and provides detailed analyses of their lifestyles and social relationships. Part Three considers the influence of such key institutions as churches, schools, and the state. Drawing on an exceptionally wide range of primary sources, this is likely to be the definitive overview of French society for many years to come and will be of interest to researchers of French history and European history.

In the nineteenth century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. These new lower-class and female readers frightened liberals, Catholics and republicans alike. The study focuses on workers, women and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyse the fear of reading in nineteenth century France. The author presents a series of case-studies of actual readers, to examine their choices and their practices, and to evaluate how far they responded to (or subverted) attempts at cultural domination.

Examines the role of village notables in nineteenth-century France.

An innovative study revealing that folklore collections can shed new light on the lives of the socially marginalized.

Histories of France have erased the feminist presence from nineteenth-century political life and the feminist impact from the changes that affected the lives of the French. Now, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century completes the history books by restoring this missing--and vital--chapter of French history. The book recounts the turbulent story of nineteenth-century French feminism, placing it in the context of the general political events that influenced its development. It also examines feminist thought and activities, using the very words of the women themselves--in books, newspapers, pamphlets, memoirs, diaries, speeches, and letters. Featured is a wealth of previously unpublished personal letters written by Saint-Simonian women. These engrossing documents reveal the nuances of changing consciousness and show how it led to an autonomous women's movement. Also explored are the relationships between feminist ideology and women's actual status--legal, social, and economic--during the century. Both bourgeois and working-class women are surveyed. Beginning with a general survey of feminism in France, the book provides historical context and clarifies the later vicissitudes of the "condition feminine."

Paris and the Nineteenth Century moves between social and cultural history, literature, painting and photography. At its heart lies a series of readings of major nineteenth century texts - by Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet, Flaubert, Zola, Valles, Laforgue and others. In each of these texts the city becomes a matter for and problem of representation. Prendergast concludes by sketching some perspectives which join the pre-modern Paris of the nineteenth century to the postmodern city of the late twentieth century.

This study is a reflection on the major historians of nineteenth-century France, and shows that, near the end of the century, a major change of perspective occurred. The historians discussed in the opening sections of the book looked to the past for guidance, while modern historians from the twentieth-century onwards regard the past as a closed book which the historian has to open. Guizot is the hero of the first section of the book; in part two, Comtesse d’Agoult (Daniel Stern) is specifically mentioned, partly because she, who wrote a splendid history of the revolution of 1848, tends to be ignored as a historian while Michelet and Tocqueville are still discussed. The historians in part three are transitional figures who politically and morally still belong to the nineteenth-century, but whose histories show the new approach to the past.

Focusing on the ideology of regeneration, Jay Berkovitz traces the social, economic, and religious struggles of nineteenth-century French Jews. Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.