Description
Book SynopsisFrom Subject to Citizen offers an original account of the Second Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French political culture: a period in which thinkers of all political persuasions combined forces to create the participatory democracy alive in France today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond well-known features of the Second Empire, its centralized government and authoritarianism, and reveals the political, social, and cultural advances that enabled publicists to engage an increasingly educated public on issues of political order and good citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in particular as a remarkably intellectual decade during which Bonapartists, legitimists, liberals, and republicans applied their ideologies to the pressing problem of decentralization. Ideals such as communal freedom and civic cohesion rapidly assumed concrete and lasting meaning for many French people as their country entered the age of nationalism.
With the restoration of univers
Table of Contents
IllustrationsPrefaceIntroduction: Democracy and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century French Political Culture3Ch. 1The Paradoxes of Bonapartist Democracy29Ch. 2Tradition and Change: Legitimist Conceptions of Decentralization96Ch. 3Between Hope and Fear: The Limits of Liberal Conceptions of Decentralization162Ch. 4The Path Between Jacobinism and Federalism: Republican Municipalism233Conclusion: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Republican Citizenship306Bibliography323Index357
