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.

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.

"An unusually compelling work of scholarly synthesis: a history of a city of revolution in a revolutionary century. Garrioch claims that until 1750 Paris remained a city characterized by a powerful sense of hierarchy. From the mid-century on, however, and with gathering speed, economic, demographic, political, and social change swept the city. Having produced an extremely engaging account of the old corporate society, Garrioch turns to the forces that relentlessly undermined it."—John E. Talbott, author of The Pen and Ink Sailor: Charles Middleton and the King's Navy, 1778-1813 "A truly wonderful synthesis of the many historical strands that compose the history of eighteenth-century Paris. In rewriting the history of the French Revolution as a more than century-long urban metamorphosis, Garrioch makes a brilliant case for the centrality of Paris in the history of France."—Bonnie Smith, author of The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice

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.

In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by François Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public. Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.

Publisher Description

Nineteenth-century France was a society of apparent paradoxes. It is famous for periodic and bloody revolutionary upheavals, for class conflict and for religious disputes, yet it was marked by relative demographic stability, gradual urbanisation and modest economic change, class conflict and ongoing religious and cultural tensions. Incorporating much recent research, Roger Magraw draws both upon still-valuable insights derived from the 'new social history' of the 1960s and upon more recent approaches suggested by gender history , cultural anthropology and the 'linguistic turn'.