Despite their importance during the French Revolution, the Paris middle classes are little known. This book focuses on the family organization and the political role of the Paris commercial middle classes, using as a case study the Faubourg St. Marcel and particularly the parish of St. M dard. David Garrioch argues that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the commercial middle classes were steadfastly local in their family ties and outlook. He shows, too, that they took independent political action in defense of their local position. This gradually changed during the eighteenth century, and the Revolution greatly accelerated the process of integration, at the same time broadening the composition of what may now be termed the Parisian bourgeoisie. Central to Garrioch's argument is the idea that family, politics, and power are intimately connected. He shows the centrality of kinship to local politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the way new family structures were related to changes in the nature of politics even before the Revolution. Among the many important issues considered are birth control, the role of women, the importance of lineage, the spatial limits of middle-class lives, and the language and secularization of politics.

An excellent general history as well as an innovative synthesis of new research, The Making of Revolutionary Paris offers vivid portraits of individual lives, accounts of social trends, and analyses of significant events, exploring the evolution of Parisian society during the eighteenth century and revealing the city's pivotal role in shaping the French Revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

The Lamothes were an ordinary family in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. Well-to-do and well respected by their neighbors, they were local notables whose private and public lives suggest the importance of family, kin, and friendship networks, professional activities and cultural interests, as well as a desire to serve the public good. In this portrait of the Lamothes, Christine Adams explores the development of middle-class identity among urban professionals and reconsiders the role of this social group in the coming French Revolution. The most striking feature of this family history is that it is based on more than three hundred personal letters that circulated among the Lamothes&—parents and seven siblings&—over a period of twenty-five years. Such a collection is rare for this period, and Adams makes the most of it. Her study lends remarkable texture to provincial middle-class life. She weaves these letters into every aspect of the Lamothes' experience&—professional, literary, intellectual, social, and civic. She demonstrates a sustained mobilization of all family skills and resources to maintain the status of the males of the family and preserve (rather than risk) the family's emotional and material stability. While their conservative lifestyle suggests that the Lamothes were not &"revolutionary,&" they were, nonetheless, part of the bourgeoisie. Adams thus taps into a potent debate about middle-class consciousness and identity in the eighteenth century, arguing against those historians who doubt that such a social class existed in France before 1789.

Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity. In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed. Despite the large numbers of respectable middling town-dwellers, no group identified themselves as bourgeois. Drawing on political and economic theory and history, personal and polemical writings, and works of fiction, Maza argues that the bourgeoisie was never the social norm. In fact, it functioned as a critical counter-norm, an imagined and threatening embodiment of materialism, self-interest, commercialism, and mass culture, which defined all that the French rejected. A challenge to conventional wisdom about modern French history, this book poses broader questions about the role of anti-bourgeois sentiment in French culture, by suggesting parallels between the figures of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the American in the French social imaginary. It is a brilliant and timely foray into our beliefs and fantasies about the social world and our definition of a social class.

Publisher Description

A History of Modern France offers a framework to understand modern French history through a survey of the dramatic events that have punctuated its history from the eighteenth century to the present day. Covering events such as the French Revolution, the two World Wars and the more recent election of Emmanuel Macron and the "yellow vest" movement, the book takes a balanced approach to the competing interpretations of modern France inspired by its history. This edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the most recent scholarship on topics including French imperial history and the empire’s postcolonial legacy, the history of women and gender, and the French experience of World War I. A new section extends the narrative into mid-2019, and additional emphasis has been given to the role of historical memory in the making of French identity. Taking a chronological approach, the book is approachable for students and provides a clear and understandable picture of the history of modern France. Supported by further reading that has been updated to include the most recent publications, the book is the ideal introduction to the history of modern France for students of this fascinating country.

Gwynne Lewis’ history opens with a full analysis of all the components of traditional France, including political and religious structures, the seigneurial system, the bourgeoisie and the poor. Part two examines the meaning and challenge of the Enlightenment, with particular reference to women and the mass of the poor. Part three concentrates upon the relationship between the shift to laissez-faire economics, popular revolts and government repression, providing the essential background to the Revolutionary decade of the 1790s. The Revolution witnessed the rise of a politicised ‘Popular Movement’ that achieved, briefly, a measure of popular democracy. War and counter-revolution blocked the move towards real democracy, strengthened the authority of the centralised state, and enhanced the credibility of bourgeois political and economic power. One of the main contentions of this work is that the failure of both monarchical and Revolutionary regimes to deal with the massive social problem of poverty played a far larger part in explaining the collapse of the Bourbons in 1789, and the failure of democracy during the 1790s, than most historians have allowed. Likewise, the importance of religion in directing the momentous events of this period has also been under-estimated.