One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Maréchal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action.

Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.

This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.

This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Éric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.

It is my hope that this publication of a "lost" work by Galiani will interest scholars of many nations and disciplines. Few writers could make a more compelling claim upon such a cosmopolitan audience. An Italian with deep roots in his homeland, Galiani achieved celebrity in the salons of Paris. An ecclesiastic, his most notable concerns were worldly, to say the least. An erudite classicist, Galiani was passionately concerned about economics and technology. A philosophe and ostensibly something of a subversive, he was enthralled by power and he served for many years as a government agent and adviser at home and abroad. Galiani embodied many of the preoccupations and paradoxes of the Enlightenment. His torians and literary analysts devoted to the study of the lumie'res through out Europe are bound to find Galiani's work important. In recent years there has been an efflorescence of interest in the history of political economy and its relationship not only to the history of ideas but also to the history of social structure, economic development, admin istrative institutions, collective mentalities, and political mobilization. Galiani's work helps to crystalize many of these connections which scholarly specialization has tended to obscure. Galiani had a leading voice in one of the most significant debates in the eighteenth century on the implications of radical economic, social, and institutional change.

This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, Sans-Culottes examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, Michael Sonenscher opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.