Focusing on the meaning of space for the French and the connection between the nation's history and its geography, this is the second volume in the translation of Nora's "Les Lieux de memoire". The essays gathered here cover essential approaches to French space: external and internal boundaries, the base unit of local space, and more.

Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based. In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship originate in Marx’s own method, which has led historians to fall back on abstract conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comninel reasserts the principles of historical materialism that found their mature expression in Das Kapital; and outlines an interpretation which concludes that, while the revolution unified the nation and centralized the French state, it did not create a capitalist society.

The third volume of Pierre Nora's monumental work documenting the history and culture of France turns to French manners, mores, and society. The essays in this volume are concerned with the kinds of things that make up the heart of French culture such as conversation, songs, and wine.

Offers the best essays from the acclaimed collection originally published in French. This monumental work examines how and why events and figures become a part of a people's collective memory, how rewriting history can forge new paradigms of cultural identity, and how the meaning attached to an event can become as significant as the event itself.

This book focuses on the philosophy, politics and impact of the 'New Right' which originated in France and has since influenced activism, ideology and policy in a number of European countries. This book explores the idea that revolutionaries do not necessarily need to come from the left, nor use arms in order to overturn liberal democracy. In the post-World War Two era, the extremists of the revolutionary right took three different paths: 1) parliamentary; 2) extra-parliamentary; and 3) metapolitical. The New Right (nouvelle droite – ND in France) took the metapolitical path, but that did not mean it abandoned its revolutionary desire to smash liberal democracy throughout Europe. The book examines four interpretations of the New Right. These interpretations include the following: 1) The New Right as a fascist or quasi-fascist movement; 2) The New Right as a challenge to the traditional right-left dichotomy, which has structured European political debates for more than 200 years; 3) The New Right as an alternative modernist movement, which rejects liberal and socialist narratives of modernity; accepts the technical but not political or cultural effects of modernity; and longs for a pan-European political framework abolishing liberal multiculturalism and privileging ethnic dominance of so-called original Europeans; and 4) The New Right as a variant of political religion and conversionary processes. The book concludes by analysing the positions, cultural and political impact, and relationship to democracy of the New Right. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of racism, fascism, extremism, European politics, French politics and contemporary political theory.

This book provides a powerful new theoretical framework for understanding cross-national cultural differences. Researchers from France and America present eight comparative case studies to demonstrate how the people of these two different cultures mobilize national "repertoires of evaluation" to make judgments about politics, economics, morals and aesthetics. This approach goes beyond essentialist models of national character to compare varying attitudes on topics ranging from racism and sexual harrassment to identity politics, publishing, journalism, the arts and the environment. The book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists alike.

In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the tens of thousands of foreign citizens whose exhaustively researched social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. Sahlins makes a signal contribution to the legal history of nationality in his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership.Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This "citizenship revolution," long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject. The author completes his original book with a study of naturalization under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. Tracing the twisted history of the foreign citizen from the Old Regime to the New, Sahlins sheds light on the continuities and ruptures of the revolutionary process, and also its consequences.