This study of tangible and intangible cultural heritage explains the significance of nobles’ conservationist traditions for public engagement with the history of France. During the French Revolution nobles’ property was seized, destroyed, or sold off by the nation. State intervention during the nineteenth century meant historic monuments became protected under law in the public interest. The Journées du Patrimoine, created in 1984 by the French Ministry for Culture, became a Europe-wide calendar event in 1991. Each year millions of French and international visitors enter residences and museums to admire France’s aristocratic cultural heritage. Drawing on archival evidence from across the country, the book presents a compelling account of power, interest and emotion in family dynamics and nobles’ relations with rural and urban communities.

This volume offers perspective on modern French society and culture through thematic chapters on topics ranging from geography to popular culture. Ideal for students and general readers, this book includes insightful, current information about France's past, present, and future. France is the country most visited by international tourists. Aside from clichéd images of baguettes and the Eiffel Tower, however, what is French society and culture really like? Modern France is organized into thematic chapters covering the full range of French history and contemporary daily life. Chapter topics include: geography; history; government and politics; economy; religion and thought; social classes and ethnicity; gender, marriage, and sexuality; education; language; etiquette; literature and drama; art and architecture; music and dance; food; leisure and sports; and media and popular culture. Each chapter contains an overview of the topic and alphabetized entries on examples of each theme. A detailed historical timeline covers prehistoric times to the presidency of Emmanuel Macron. Special appendices offer profiles of a typical day in the life of representative members of French society, a glossary, key facts and figures about France, and a holiday chart. The volume will be useful for readers looking for specific topical information and for those who want to develop an informed perspective on aspects of modern France.

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments – not just financial but also emotional and imaginative – in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

This book takes a long-term approach, spanning from the end of the 16th to the 19th century, to explore how men and women in Italy, France, and Spain collected, displayed, and passed down various types of papers. The contributors share a core interest in the relationship between social actors and their paper heritage. The collectors, who come from diverse cultural, social, and gender backgrounds, provide insights into the reasons and processes behind the accumulation, valorisation, and transmission of their paper heritage. Unlike most studies on collecting, this book shifts the focus away from collections and institutions to the owners of the collected objects and their desires for their accumulated papers. This volume covers three centuries and provides insights into the aspirations of collectors and the fate of their papers after transmission. It takes place against the backdrop of major social, political, and cultural changes affecting the Italian peninsula, the Spanish monarchy, and France. The cultural interests and the collector networks often extended beyond Europe, as noted by many of the essays in this volume. Paper Heritage in Italy, France, Spain and Beyond (16th to 19th Centuries) will interest scholars and students of Early Modern and Modern European History across various fields, including social and cultural history, intellectual history, gender history, history of collecting and patronage.

Historians have long been fascinated by the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. What difference did nobles make in French society? What role did they play in the coming of the Revolution? In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France’s past. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century appears some thirty years after the publication of the most sweeping and influential “revisionist” assessment of the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s La noblesse au dix-huitième siècle. 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. At the same time, they consider what has been gained or lost through the adoption of new methods of inquiry in the intervening years. Where, in other words, should the nobility fit into the twenty-first century’s narrative about eighteenth-century France? The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century will interest not only specialists of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and modern European history but also those concerned with the differences in, and the developing tensions between, the methods of social and cultural history. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Rafe Blaufarb, Gail Bossenga, Mita Choudhury, Jonathan Dewald, Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Thomas E. Kaiser, Michael Kwass, Robert M. Schwartz, John Shovlin, and Johnson Kent Wright.

How did warrior nobles’ practices of violence shape provincial society and the royal state in early seventeenth-century France? Warrior nobles frequently armed themselves for civil war in southern France during the troubled early seventeenth century. These bellicose nobles’ practices of violence shaped provincial society and the royal state in early modern France. The southern French provinces of Guyenne and Languedoc suffered almost continual religious strife and civil conflict between 1598 and 1635, providing an excellent case for investigating the dynamics of early modern civil violence. Warrior Pursuits constructs a cultural history of civil conflict, analyzing in detail how provincial nobles engaged in revolt and civil warfare during this period. Brian Sandberg’s extensive archival research on noble families in these provinces reveals that violence continued to be a way of life for many French nobles, challenging previous scholarship that depicts a progressive “civilizing” of noble culture. Sandberg argues that southern French nobles engaged in warrior pursuits—social and cultural practices of violence designed to raise personal military forces and to wage civil warfare in order to advance various political and religious goals. Close relationships between the profession of arms, the bonds of nobility, and the culture of revolt allowed nobles to regard their violent performances as “heroic gestures” and “beautiful warrior acts.” Warrior nobles represented the key organizers of civil warfare in the early seventeenth century, orchestrating all aspects of the conduct of civil warfare—from recruitment to combat—according to their own understandings of their warrior pursuits. Building on the work of Arlette Jouanna and other historians of the nobility, Sandberg provides new perspectives on noble culture, state development, and civil warfare in early modern France. French historians and scholars of the Reformation and the European Wars of Religion will find Warrior Pursuits engaging and insightful.

Custom, Law, and Monarchy explores how law evolved in early modern France, from an amalgam of customs, Roman and canon law, royal edicts, and judicial decisions, to the unified Civil Code of 1804. In exploring the history of this codification of law, Marie Seong-Hak Kim lays out a new way of understanding French history.