Description
Book SynopsisMass Violence and the Self explores the earliest visual and textual depictions of personal suffering caused by the French Wars of Religion of 156298, the Fronde of 164852, the French Revolutionary Terror of 179394, and the Paris Commune of 1871. The development of novel media from pamphlets and woodblock printing to colored lithographs, illustrated newspapers, and collodion photography helped to determine cultural, emotional, and psychological responses to these four episodes of mass violence.
Howard G. Brown's richly illustrated and conceptually innovative book shows how the increasingly effective communication of the suffering of others combined with interpretive bias to produce what may be understood as collective traumas. Seeing these responses as collective traumas reveals their significance in shaping new social identities that extended beyond the village or neighborhood. Moreover, acquiring a sense of shared identity, whether as Huguenots, Parisian bourgeois, Fre
Trade Review
This is a wonderful book to think with.... A significant contribution to the recent analyses of emotions and, more generally, to the historiography about how proto-romantic cultural themes of the late eighteenth century reemerged with force during the early nineteenth.
* H-War *
[Brown] underlines the psychology behind how people interpret and reinterpret suffering, specifically the dualistic lenses of collective trauma and the self in modern society. Recommended [for] Graduate students and researchers.
* Choice *
In Mass Violence and the Self, Howard Brown has written a splendidly ambitious book that seeks to unravel the links binding together modernity and the experience of violence in France... there is no doubt that Brown has written a brave and thought-provoking book that should be widely read and discussed.
* Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Discourse on Method
1. Massacres in the French Wars of Religion
2. The Fronde and the Crisis of 1652
3. The Thermidorians' Terror
4. The Paris Commune and the "Bloody Week" of 1871
Conclusion
Notes
Index
