Search results for ""Author Frances"

During the decade or so surrounding 1540, there is a change in French thinkers' assumptions about themselves, their country, and their place in the world. This evolutionary change is examined from multidisciplinary points of view, providing readers with tools for interpreting, defining, and understanding it in a broader sense. The character of the change being explored here is neither rupture nor revolution. It is a displacement of center that contributes to, or in some cases actually creates, a changed relation between past and mid-sixteenth-century present as well as between that present and attitudes toward the future. During the period around 1540, French thinkers and French perceptions opened to the notion that what-had-never-been now could be, what for lack of a better term, called the new, often accompanied by a nationalism proclaiming it for France. This brings a fresh understanding of what it means to be French - in language, in music, even in food. It brings an expansion of categories to be treated as part of the French economy, like Canadian fish, or more surprisingly, leisure, or music. Marian Rothstein is Professor of French at Carthage College.

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The sought after original SS publication "Waffen-SS im Western" is available here for the first time. Translated into English and carefully reproduced, this rare SS book photographically documents the Waffen-SS campaigns in Holland, Belgium, and France during 1940. The photos were taken by SS war correspondents and vividly illustrate the early SS combat troops as they conquered Western Europe. A clear concise history showing wartime footage, including uniforms, insignia, headgear, weapons and more. This book has often been regarded as one of the best publications ever printed by the Nazi regime on the Waffen-SS. It is a highly valuable photographic study for military historians and collectors alike.

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The ninth edition of Inland Waterways of France is the ideal guide for planning cruises in and through the most fascinating and diverse waterway network in Europe. Author David Edwards-May has researched the many changes that have taken place during the last 10 years, and presents a detailed overview of the waterways extending throughout the South ('Midi'), the Southwest and Western France. This system totals 3000 kilometres of waterways that are maintained and developed almost exclusively for recreational navigation. This third volume of the new edition sets out the current state of the network in 146 pages in full colour, with detailed maps of junctions and other key sites on the network, overview maps for each waterway, and route descriptions. It is a unique blend of practical information, maps, background historical notes and colour photographs. It also highlights ongoing waterway restoration projects, in which the author has been personally involved for many years.

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Using recently released archival materials, Replacing France explains how and why the United States came to assume control as the dominant western power in Vietnam during the 1950s. Kathryn C. Statler examines diplomatic maneuvers in Paris, Washington, London, and Saigon to detail how Western alliance members failed to work together against the Communist threat. Motivated by a deep belief in the inherent superiority of their own cultures, both the United States and France sought to transform South Vietnam into a modern, westernized, and democratic ally. Although the United States ultimately replaced France, efforts to build South Vietnam into a nation failed. Instead, the Eisenhower administration created a dependent client state that was unable to withstand increasing Communist aggression from the north. Replacing France is a fundamental reassessment of the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

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The Neoliberal Republic traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France analyze how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades. Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, The Neoliberal Republic explores how the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.

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"Engineering the Revolution" documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the 'technological life'. Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact - the gun - by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the 'political' to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

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A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France chronicles the emegence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more just. Lesley H. Walker contends that this attempt during the eighteenth century to 'rewrite' social relations in terms of greater social equality represents an important but overlooked strand of Enlightenment thought. During this period, popular domestic novels, the ever-raging debates about women's social roles, and highly sought-after genre paintings produced a remarkable image of motherhood. Through a focus on feminine virtue, Walker studies female writers and artists to argue that these women theorize the domestic sphere as a site of significant social and ethical productivity.

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Traditionally, the story of the Greater Caribbean has been dominated by the narrative of Iberian hegemony, British colonization, the plantation regime, and the Haitian Revolution of the eighteenth century. Relatively little is known about the society and culture of this region-and particularly France's role in them-in the two centuries prior to the rise of the plantation complex of the eighteenth century. Here, historian Philip P. Boucher offers the first comprehensive account of colonization and French society in the Caribbean. Boucher's analysis contrasts the structure and character of the French colonies with that of other colonial empires. Describing the geography, topography, climate, and flora and fauna of the region, Boucher recreates the tropical environment in which colonists and indigenous peoples interacted. He then examines the lives and activities of the region's inhabitants-the indigenous Island Caribs, landowning settlers, indentured servants, African slaves, and people of mixed blood, the gens de couleur. He argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not merely a prelude to the classic plantation regime model. Rather, they were an era presenting a variety of possible outcomes. This original narrative demonstrates that the transition to sugar and the plantation complex was more gradual in the French properties than generally depicted-and that it was not inevitable.

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Britain’s war in the shadows of male spies and subterfuge in the heart of occupied France is a story well known, but what of the women who also risked their lives for Britain and the liberation of France? In 1942 a desperate need for new recruits, saw SOE turn to a previously overlooked group – women. These extraordinary women came from different backgrounds, but were joined in their idealistic love of France and a desire to play a part in its liberation. They formed SOE’s F Section. From the famous White Mouse, Nancy Wake, to the courageous, Noor Inayat Khan, they all risked their lives for King, Country and the Resistance. Many of them died bravely and painfully, and often those who survived, like Eileen Nearne, never told their stories, yet their secret missions of intelligence-gathering and sabotage undoubtedly helped the Resistance to drive out their occupiers and free France. Here, for the first time is the extraordinary account of all forty SOE F women agents. It is a story that deserves to be read by everyone. ‘They were the war’s bravest women, devoted to defeating the Nazis yet reluctant ever to reveal their heroic pasts. Now a new book tells their intrepid tales.’ Daily Express Squadron Leader BERYL E. ESCOTT served in the RAF and is one of the foremost experts on the women of SOE.

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This abridgement of Reflections on the Revolution in France preserves the dynamism of Edmund Burke's polemic while excising a number of detail-laden passages that are of less interest to modern readers. Brian R. Clack's introduction offers a compelling overview of the text and explores the consistency and coherence of Burke's views on revolution. Burke's critique of revolutionary politics is illuminated further by the extensive supplementary materials collected in a number of themed appendices. These include a selection of background material essential for an understanding of the Reflections, an overview of Burke's response to the American Revolution, a sampling of his earliest and later views on the French Revolution, selections from Burke's writings on reform, passages from A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, and a representative sampling of contemporary critical responses to the Reflections.

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The French Right is a constant, evolving and continuing theme in all aspects of the political life of the French nation - shaping much of this country's nation-state from the Revolution to the present - and is now a burning contemporary issue. The authors show how the influence of the French Right has entered into all areas of political, economic, social, cultural, religious and especially, radical aspects of Bonapartism, the Vichy experience and the World Wars, Gaullism, post-Gaullism and the resurgence of the Right under Le Pen. This edition updates the story and demonstrates that the French Right, despite electoral defeat, remains a potent force ans an underlying constant in French political experience.

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After a deadly duel with a jealous rival, Pierre de Siorac must travel to Paris, to seek his pardon from the King. In the capital city he finds a world of sweet words and fierce pride, where coquettish smiles hide behind fans, and murderous intents behind elegant bows. But the court's elaborate social graces mask a simmering tension that will soon explode to engulf the entire city. When it does, Pierre faces the greatest challenge of his young existence-not merely to win a royal pardon, but to escape from Paris with his life, and the lives of his beloved companions, intact.

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The individual and cultural upheavals of early colonial New France were experienced differently by French explorers and settlers, and by Native traditionalists and Catholic converts. However, European invaders and indigenous people alike learned to negotiate the complexities of cross-cultural encounters by reimagining the meaning of kinship. Part micro-history, part biography, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France explores the lives of Etienne Brulé, Joseph Chihoatenhwa, Thérèse Oionhaton, and Marie Rollet Hébert as they created new religious orientations in order to survive the challenges of early seventeenth-century New France. Poirier examines how each successfully adapted their religious and cultural identities to their surroundings, enabling them to develop crucial relationships and build communities. Through the lens of these men and women, both Native and French, Poirier illuminates the historical process and powerfully illustrates the religious creativity inherent in relationship-building.

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Despite having the highest rates of cannabis use in the continent, France enforces the most repressive laws against the drug in all of Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, France was once the epicentre of a global movement to medicalize cannabis, specifically hashish, in the treatment of disease. In Taming Cannabis David Guba examines how nineteenth-century French authorities routinely blamed hashish consumption, especially among Muslim North Africans, for behaviour deemed violent and threatening to the social order. This association of hashish with violence became the primary impetus for French pharmacists and physicians to tame the drug and deploy it in the homeopathic treatment of mental illness and epidemic disease during the 1830s and 1840s. Initially heralded as a wonder drug capable of curing insanity, cholera, and the plague, hashish was deemed ineffective against these diseases and fell out of repute by the middle 1850s. The association between hashish and Muslim violence, however, remained and became codified in French colonial medicine and law by the 1860s: authorities framed hashish as a significant cause of mental illness, violence, and anti-state resistance among indigenous Algerians. As the French government looks to reform the nation's drug laws to address the rise in drug-related incarceration and the growing popular demand for cannabis legalization, Taming Cannabis provides a timely and fascinating exploration of the largely untold and living history of cannabis in colonial France.

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Any attempt at comparing contemporary change in the UK and France is a bold one, since it means discussing two very different countries with strong distinctive constitutional identities. This book places its emphasis on the shared historical, political and cultural background of the UK and France, before focusing on the sweeping transformation of their constitutional frameworks in the past quarter of a century at a national and regional level – with a particular emphasis on Wales and Scotland – which culminated in the June 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership. Instead of examining each country separately, however, as is traditional, this study breaks new ground by explaining the pattern of institutional development in Britain and France from a comparative Franco-British perspective. It explores the complexities of recent constitutional change in both countries in an original and comprehensive way, and gives both British and French readers a deeper understanding of the two countries that have some much in common even though Brexit could drive them apart.

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THE HIDDEN YEARS, the captivating new novel from million-copy bestselling author Rachel Hore, is out now in paperback.Loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair, One Moonlit Night tells the captivating story of a husband and wife separated by secrets as well as by war.'Brimming over with everything I love about this author's writing: atmosphere, intrigue, wonderful characters and a beautiful love story. Pure delight to read' Tracy Rees‘So complex and moving, with a sense of mystery as powerful as the sense of love and betrayal’ Cathy Kelly‘Beautifully rich in period detail – an absorbing and touching story’ Erica James, Sunday Times bestselling author of Mothers & DaughtersAccept it, he is dead.No, it’s not true.It is. Everyone thinks so except you. Forced to leave their family home in London after it is bombed, Maddie and her two young daughters take refuge at Knyghton, the beautiful country house in Norfolk where Maddie’s husband Philip spent the summers of his childhood. But Philip is gone, believed to have been killed in action in northern France. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Maddie refuses to give up hope that she and Philip will some day be reunited. Arriving at Knyghton, Maddie feels closer to her missing husband, but she soon realises that there’s a reason Philip has never spoken to her about his past. Something happened at Knyghton one summer years before. Something that involved Philip, his cousin Lyle and a mysterious young woman named Flora. Maddie’s curiosity turns to desperation as she tries to discover the truth, but no one will speak about what happened all those years ago, and no one will reassure her that Philip will ever return to Knyghton.The extraordinarily powerful new novel from bestselling author Rachel Hore.

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Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 delves into the various circles of artists who lived in France following World War II. Featuring new scholarship and illuminating essays, this groundbreaking volume illustrates many of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, and films produced during these fertile years. Americans in Paris introduces the story of the American creative community that inhabited the City of Light following World War II. Proposing Paris as decisive for the development of postwar American art, this volume investigates the academies where many of these artists studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, the aesthetic discourses that animated their conversations, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad.

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In The Perraults, Oded Rabinovitch takes the fascinating eponymous literary and scientific family as an entry point into the complex and rapidly changing world of early modern France. Today, the Perraults are best remembered for their canonical fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," most often attributed to Charles Perrault, one of the brothers. While the writing of fairy tales may seem a frivolous enterprise, it was, in fact, linked to the cultural revolution of the seventeenth century, which paved the way for the scientific revolution, the rise of "national literatures," and the early Enlightenment. Rabinovitch argues that kinship networks played a crucial, yet unexamined, role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of the day, which in turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. Through skillful reconstruction of the Perraults’ careers and networks, Rabinovitch portrays the world of letters as a means of social mobility. He complicates our understanding of prominent institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as the very notions of authorship and court capitalism. The Perraults shows us that institutions were not simply rigid entities, embodying or defining intellectual or literary styles such as Cartesianism, empiricism, or the purity of the French language. Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies, and practices of writing.

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Mastering the Marketplace examines the origins of modern mass-media culture through developments in the new literary marketplace of nineteenth-century France and how literature itself reveals the broader social and material conditions in which it is produced. Anne O’Neil-Henry examines how French authors of the nineteenth century navigated the growing publishing and marketing industry, as well as the dramatic rise in literacy rates, libraries, reading rooms, literary journals, political newspapers, and the advent of the serial novel. O’Neil-Henry places the work of canonical author Honoré de Balzac alongside then-popular writers such as Paul de Kock and Eugène Sue, acknowledging the importance of “low” authors in the wider literary tradition. By reading literary texts alongside associated advertisements, book reviews, publication histories, sales tactics, and promotional tools, O’Neil-Henry presents a nuanced picture of the relationship between “high” and “low” literature, one in which critics and authors alike grappled with the common problem of commercial versus cultural capital. Through new literary readings and original archival research from holdings in the United States and France, O’Neil-Henry revises existing understandings of a crucial moment in the development of industrialized culture. In the process, she discloses links between this formative period and our own, in which mobile electronic devices, internet-based bookstores, and massive publishing conglomerates alter—once again—the way literature is written, sold, and read.

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By the end of France’s long seventeenth century, the seminary-trained, reform-minded Catholic priest had crystalized into a type recognizable by his clothing, gestures, and ceremonial skill. Although critics denounced these priests as hypocrites or models for Molière’s Tartuffe, seminaries associated the features of this priestly identity with the idea of the vray ecclésiastique, or true churchman. Ceremonial Splendor examines the way France’s early seminaries promoted the emergence and construction of the true churchman as a mode of embodiment and ecclesiastical ideal between approximately 1630 and 1730. Based on an analysis of sources that regulated priestly training in France, such as seminary rules and manuals, liturgical handbooks, ecclesiastical pamphlets and conferences, and episcopal edicts, the book uses theories of performance to reconstruct the way clergymen learned to conduct liturgical ceremonies, abide by clerical norms, and aspire to perfection. Joy Palacios shows how the process of crafting a priestly identity involved a wide range of performances, including improvisation, role-playing, and the display of skills. In isolation, any one of these performance obligations, if executed in a way that drew attention to the self, could undermine a clergyman’s priestly persona and threaten the institution of the priesthood more broadly. Seminaries counteracted the ever-present threat of theatricality by ceremonializing the clergyman’s daily life, rendering his body and gestures contiguous with the mass. Through its focus on priestly identity, Ceremonial Splendor reconsiders the relationship between Church and theater in early modern France and uncovers ritual strategies that continue to shape religious authority today.

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* Provocative look at the battle for France in May and June 1940 * Explains how the French were caught off guard, how the Germans swept into the country, and how the British battled the blitzkrieg * Recounts the evacuation at Dunkirk * Shows how the fall of France changed the course of World War II

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Focusing on representations of women’s experiences in contemporary France, ‘Taking Up Space’ examines how women inhabit a variety of work spaces. It also speaks to the importance of cultural productions in calling out labour issues affecting women, as well as in offering a platform that allows us to imagine a future where inclusive and equitable work spaces are the norm. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological use of objects, the book explores women’s experiences through different metaphors of the door related to labour. The contributors demonstrate how doors are not only closed or open, but also serve as a threshold. Taken together, the chapters convey how women’s work experiences can range from states of oppression to survival and celebration, and demonstrates how through deliberate stances and actions, various work spaces can become sites of liberation and revolution.

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Using class analysis to understand the dynamics of political conflict in mid-nineteenth-century France, Ronald Aminzade explores political activity among workers in three industrialized French cities--Toulouse, Saint-etienne, and Rouen. A comparative case-study design enables the author to analyze how the complex interaction between industrialization, class relations, and party development fostered revolutionary communes in some cities but not others. Challenging traditional theories of industrialization and revolution, Aminzade innovatively uses narratives to provide a historically grounded analysis of the failed municipal revolutions of 1871 and the triumph of liberal-democratic institutions in France. In each of these cities, distinctive patterns of capitalist industrialization and class restructuring intersected with shifting political opportunities at the national level to produce local republican parties with different ideologies, strategies, and alliances. Focusing on changing relations between republican parties and male workers, whose identities and economic standing were in transition, Aminzade examines struggles within local parties among liberal, radical, and socialist republicans. The outcome of these struggles, he argues, shaped the willingness of workers to embrace the ballot box or take to the barricades.

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As the only daughter of Blanche of Castile, one of France's most powerful queens, and as the sister of the Capetian saint Louis IX, Isabelle of France (1225-1270) was situated at the nexus of sanctity and power during a significant era of French culture and medieval history. In this ground-breaking examination of Isabelle's career, Sean Field uses a wealth of previously unstudied material to address significant issues in medieval religious history, including the possibilities for women's religious authority, the creation and impact of royal sanctity, and the relationship between men and women within the mendicant orders. Field reinterprets Isabelle's career as a Capetian princess. Isabelle was remarkable for choosing a life of holy virginity and for founding and co-authoring a rule for the Franciscan abbey of Longchamp. Isabelle did not become a nun there, but remained a powerful lay patron, living in a modest residence on the abbey grounds. Field maintains that Isabelle was a key actor in creating the aura of sanctity that surrounded the French royal family in the thirteenth century, underscoring the link between the growth of Capetian prestige and power and the idea of a divinely ordained, virtuous, and holy royal family. Her contemporary reputation for sanctity emerges from a careful analysis of the Life of Isabelle of France written by the third abbess of Longchamp, Agnes of Harcourt, and from papal bulls, letters, and other contemporary sources that have only recently come to light. Field also argues that Isabelle had a profound effect on the institutional history of Franciscan women. By remaining outside the official Franciscan and church hierarchies, Isabelle maintained an ambiguous position that allowed her to embrace Franciscan humility while retaining royal influence. Her new order of Sorores minores was eagerly adopted by a number of communities, and her rule for the order eventually spread from France to England, Italy, and Spain. An important study of a medieval woman's agency and power, Isabelle of France explores the life of a remarkable figure in French and Franciscan history.

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France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

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With the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, the next two centuries for France would be tumultuous. Bestselling historian and political commentator Jonathan Fenby provides an expert and riveting journey through this period as he recounts and analyses the extraordinary sequence of events of this period from the end of the First Revolution through two others, a return of Empire, three catastrophic wars with Germany, periods of stability and hope interspersed with years of uncertainty and high tensions. As her cross-Channel neighbour Great Britain would equally suffer, France was to undergo the wrenching loss of colonies in the post-Second World War as the new modern world we know today took shape. Her attempts to become the leader of the European union is a constant struggle, as was her lack of support for America in the two Gulf Wars of the past twenty years. Alongside this came huge social changes and cultural landmarks but also fundamental questioning of what this nation, which considers itself exceptional, really stood - and stands - for. That saga and those questions permeate the France of today, now with an implacable enemy to face in the form of Islamic extremism which so bloodily announced itself this year in Paris. Fenby will detail every event, every struggle and every outcome across this expanse of 200 years. It will prove to be the definitive guide to understanding France.

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This practical travel guide to France features detailed factual travel tips and points-of-interest structured lists of all iconic must-see sights as well as some off-the-beaten-track treasures. Our itinerary suggestions and expert author picks of things to see and do will make it a perfect companion both, ahead of your trip and on the ground. This France guide book is packed full of details on how to get there and around, pre-departure information and top time-saving tips, including a visual list of things not to miss. Our colour-coded maps make France easier to navigate while you're there. This guide book to France has been fully updated post-COVID-19 and it comes with a free eBook. The Rough Guide to FRANCE covers: Paris; The North; Champagne and the Ardennes; Alsace and Lorraine; Normandy; Brittany; The Loire; Burgundy; Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic coast; The Limousin, Dordogne and the Lot; The Pyrenees; Languedoc; The Massif Central; The Alps and Franche-Comte; The Rhone valley; Provence; The Côte d'Azur; Corsica.Inside this France travel guide you'll find:RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EVERY TYPE OF TRAVELLER Experiences selected for every kind of trip to France, from off-the-beaten-track adventures in Béziers to family activities in child-friendly places, like Provence or chilled-out breaks in popular tourist areas, like Paris.PRACTICAL TRAVEL TIPS Essential pre-departure information including France entry requirements, getting around, health information, travelling with children, sports and outdoor activities, food and drink, festivals, culture and etiquette, shopping, tips for travellers with disabilities and more.TIME-SAVING ITINERARIESIncludes carefully planned routes covering the best of France, which give a taste of the richness and diversity of the destination, and have been created for different time frames or types of trip.DETAILED REGIONAL COVERAGEClear structure within each sightseeing chapter of this France travel guide includes regional highlights, brief history, detailed sights and places ordered geographically, recommended restaurants, hotels, bars, clubs and major shops or entertainment options.INSIGHTS INTO GETTING AROUND LIKE A LOCALTips on how to beat the crowds, save time and money and find the best local spots for sampling the very best of French food, relaxing on fine sandy beaches and zipping down the slopes in the Alps. HIGHLIGHTS OF THINGS NOT TO MISSRough Guides' rundown of Brittany; Burgundy; The Pyrenees; The Dordogne's best sights and top experiences helps to make the most of each trip to France, even in a short time.HONEST AND INDEPENDENT REVIEWSWritten by Rough Guides' expert authors with a trademark blend of humour, honesty and expertise, this France guide book will help you find the best places, matching different needs.BACKGROUND INFORMATIONComprehensive 'Contexts' chapter of this travel guide to France features fascinating insights into France, with coverage of history, religion, ethnic groups, environment, wildlife and books, plus a handy language section and glossary.FABULOUS FULL COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHYFeatures inspirational colour photography, including the stunning Carcassonne Castle and the spectacular Canal du Midi.COLOUR-CODED MAPPINGPractical full-colour maps, with clearly numbered, colour-coded keys for quick orientation in the Atlantic coast, The Limousin and many more locations in France, reduce the need to go online.USER-FRIENDLY LAYOUT With helpful icons, and organised by neighbourhood to help you pick the best spots to spend your time.FREE EBOOK Free eBook download with every purchase of this guide book to France allows you to access all of the content from your phone or tablet, for on-the-road exploration.

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Stagestruck traces the making of a vibrant French theater industry between the reign of Louis XIV and the French Revolution. During this era more than eighty provincial and colonial cities celebrated the inauguration of their first public playhouses. These theaters emerged as the most prominent urban cultural institutions in prerevolutionary France, becoming key sites for the articulation and contestation of social, political, and racial relationships. Combining rich description with nuanced analysis based on extensive archival evidence, Lauren R. Clay illuminates the wide-ranging consequences of theater’s spectacular growth for performers, spectators, and authorities in cities throughout France as well as in the empire’s most important Atlantic colony, Saint-Domingue. Clay argues that outside Paris the expansion of theater came about through local initiative, civic engagement, and entrepreneurial investment, rather than through actions or policies undertaken by the royal government and its agents. Reconstructing the business of theatrical production, she brings to light the efforts of a wide array of investors, entrepreneurs, directors, and actors—including women and people of color—who seized the opportunities offered by commercial theater to become important agents of cultural change. Portraying a vital and increasingly consumer-oriented public sphere beyond the capital, Stagestruck overturns the long-held notion that cultural change flowed from Paris and the royal court to the provinces and colonies. This deeply researched book will appeal to historians of Europe and the Atlantic world, particularly those interested in the social and political impact of the consumer revolution and the forging of national and imperial cultural networks. In addition to theater and literary scholars, it will attract the attention of historians and sociologists who study business, labor history, and the emergence of the modern French state.

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Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century. PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues 1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye 2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod 3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana Holmes PART TWO: Society, Culture, Family 4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns 5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland 6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong 7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin 8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie Edwards PART THREE: Body, Life, Text 9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé 10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy 11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo 12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft 13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon Kemp PART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics 14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton 15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan 16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer 17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote 18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp 19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

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Changing Identities in Early Modern France offers new interpretations of what it meant to be French during a period of profound transition, from the outbreak of the Hundred Years War to the consolidation of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century. As medieval notions were gradually replaced by new definitions of the state, society, and family, dynastic struggles and religious wars raised questions about loyalty and identity and destabilized the meaning of "Frenchness."After examining the interplay between competing ideologies and public institutions, from the monarchy to the Parlement of Paris to the aristocratic household, the volume explores the dynamics of deviance and dissent, particularly in regard to women’s roles in religious reform movements and such sensationalized phenomena as the witch hunts and infanticide trials. Concluding essays examine how regional and confessional identities reshaped French identity in response to the discovery of the New World and the spectacular spread of Calvinism. Contributors. Charmarie Blaisdell, William Bouwsma, Lawrence M. Bryant, Denis Crouzet, Robert Descimon, Barbara B. Diefendorf, Richard M. Golden, Sarah Hanley, Mack P. Holt, Donald R. Kelley, Kristen B. Neuschel, J. H. M. Salmon, Zachary Sayre Schiffman, Silvia Shannon, Alfred Soman, Michael Wolfe

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In this highly original work, Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih present a dialogic account of the lingering effects of the terroristic attacks that occurred in Paris in November 2015. Situating the events within broader histories of state violence in metropolitan France and its colonial geographies, the authors interweave narrative accounts and photographs to explore a range of related phenomena: governmental and journalistic discourses on terrorism, the political work of archives, police and military apparatuses of control and anti-terror deterrence, the histories of wounds, and the haunting reverberations of violence in a plurality of lives and deaths. Traces of Violence is a moving work that aids our understanding of the afterlife of violence and offers an innovative example of collaborative writing across anthropology and sociology.

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"'May they be cursed in the chest and the heart, cursed in the stomach, cursed in the blood, cursed in the hands and feet and each of their members." Monks in medieval France lay flat before the altar as they intoned these maledictions laced with biblical quotations or paraphrases: "May their children be made orphans and their wives widows" (Psalm 108:9). In this long-awaited book, the result of more than a decade of research, Lester K. Little reconstructs and explores the phenomenon of officially sanctioned religious cursing in medieval Europe. He focuses on a church service, called in Latin either clamor or maledictio, used by monastic communities (primarily in Francia) between approximately 990 and 1250. Threatened by bands of heavily armed knights in a period of incessant civil strife, communities of monks, nuns, and cathedral clerics retaliated by cursing their enemies in a formal religious ceremony. After presenting the formulas the monks used in such cursing, Little explores the social, political, and juridical contexts in which these curses were used and explains how Christian authorities who condemned cursing could also authorize it. He demonstrates that these Benedictine maledictions often played a decisive role in resolving the monks' frequent property disputes wit local notables, especially knights. Little's approach to his subject is topical. After determining the clamor's sources, he takes up its kinship with such related liturgy as the humiliation of saints and then shows where and to what end it was used. By the conclusion of his work, he has recreated the whole culture of the medieval clamor, and in the process he has illuminated many other aspects of medieval social and legal culture.

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This comprehensive survey of Jansenism and Convulsionism in France is the only work currently available in English that attempts to place the Jansenist movement in the context of French political, social, economic, religious and intellectual developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author provides biographical sketches of its key leaders, analyzes their major writings, and highlights both the movement's internal conflicts and its struggles against Church and State persecution. From letters, diaries, books and speeches, Brian Strayer explains such important Jansenist themes as suffering, saintliness, truth, conflict, passive resistance, and their gradual embracing of toleration. He provides fresh insights into asceticism, Gallicanism, Richerism, Conciliarism, Jesuitism, and Convulsionism in their historical contexts. With gentle wit, the author exposes the contradictions and paradoxes within the movement, shares human interest stories about the Port-Royal nuns, and shows how papal bulls poisoned the religious and political life in France from 1643 to 1713 and beyond. "Suffering Saints" is the result of five years of research in primary and secondary sources from several major archives and libraries in Paris and the United States.

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Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937.Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.

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Roy Cloud had worked in the wine business for years, watching it transform from a retail backwater to a mainstream fixation, with a huge influx of consumers looking for wine with terroir. By a twist of fate, he found himself on a hurriedly arranged trip to France to persuade small-scale winemakers that he should represent their interests in the growing U.S. import market. While Roy’s palate would be challenged in finding the hidden gems of the Loire and Burgundy, his real dilemma was this: He didn’t speak a word of French. Enter Joe, Roy’s older brother. Different from Roy in every respect, Joe had studied in France and was fluent in the language—and, most importantly, he was free to join Roy in his search. It was simple: Roy would do the tasting, and Joe would do the talking. What could go wrong? In To Burgundy and Back Again, Roy presents a richly evocative account of their journey—one replete with discovery, adventure, and poignant surprises. Written in the tradition of A Year in Provence and Sideways, this elegantly penned book will delight wine lovers and armchair travelers alike.

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Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937.Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.

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Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. In doing so, she analyzes the different ways in which composers' lived environments related to their songs and categorizes their use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic. Demonstrating a cycle of mutual impact between nature and culture, Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people defined their identities, encouraging them to view themselves as belonging to specific landscapes. The book offers close readings of love songs, pastourelles, motets, and rondets from the likes of Gace Brulé, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de Machaut, and many others. Saltzstein shows how their music-text relationships illuminate the ways in which song helped to foster identities tied to specific landscapes among the knightly classes, the clergy, aristocratic women, and peasants. By connecting social types to topographies, trouvère songs and the manuscripts in which they were preserved presented models of identity for later generations of songwriters, performers, listeners, patrons, and readers to emulate, thereby projecting into the future specific ways of being on the land. Written in the long thirteenth century during the last major era of climate change, trouvère songs, as Saltzstein demonstrates, shape our understanding of how identity formation has rested on relationships between nature, culture, and change.

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In Negotiation and Resistance, Constance Brittain Bouchard challenges familiar depictions of the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of impoverished and powerless workers. Peasants in eleventh- and twelfth-century France had far more scope for action, self-determination, and resistance to oppressive treatment—that is, for agency—than they are usually credited with having. Through innovative readings of documents collected in medieval cartularies, Bouchard finds that while peasants lived hard, impoverished lives, they were able to negotiate, individually or collectively, to better their position, present cases in court, and make their own decisions about such fundamental issues as inheritance or choice of marriage partner. Negotiation and Resistance upends the received view of this period in French history as one in which lords dealt harshly and without opposition toward subservient peasants, offering numerous examples of peasants standing up for themselves.

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Just within a few decades, the global dream of building a 'middle class society' has vanished almost everywhere, giving way to an emerging global nightmare: 'social exclusion'. France and Japan have been among the most successful societies, taken as examples by the rest of the world that it is indeed possible for a nation to include almost an entire population in the middle class. However, even these two countries have suffered increasing disillusion since the 1980s. The main concern of these countries is now social exclusion.This book analyses and contrasts the French and Japanese experiences of social exclusion. Although social exclusion in France and Japan are, in many respects, quite similar, in important respects, they are also quite different. Using a wide array of methodologies, the book presents a diverse range of perspectives on the problem of social exclusion and suggests various ways the problem might be resolved.

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This book analyses the French political crisis, which has entered its most acute phase in more than thirty years with the break-up of traditional left and right social blocs. Governing parties have distanced themselves from the working classes, leaving behind on the one hand craftsmen, shop owners and small entrepreneurs disappointed by the timidity of the reforms of the neoliberal right and, on the other hand, workers and employees hostile to the neoliberal and pro-European integration orientation of the Socialist Party. The presidency of François Hollande was less an anomaly than the definitive failure of attempts to reconcile the social base of the left with the so-called modernisation of the French model. The project, based on the pursuit of neoliberal reforms, did not die with Hollande's failure; it was taken up and radicalised by his successor, Emmanuel Macron. This project needs a social base, the bourgeois bloc, designed to overcome the right-left divide by a new alliance between the middle and upper classes. But this, as we have seen recently on the streets of Paris and elsewhere, is a precarious process.

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The embodiment of the art and pleasure of French cookery, Pierre Franey (1921–96) was one of the most influential and beloved of America’s culinary figures. Before creating his “60-Minute Gourmet” column in the New York Times, writing his celebrated cookbooks, and entering our homes via television, Franey presided over the cuisine at two of the greatest French restaurants in America: the legendary Le Pavillon, then La Côte Basque. With style, charm, and affection for his native France and adopted America, Franey takes us into his life in the world of food, interweaving his story with irresistible recipes and, here and there, impulsively giving away a chef’s secrets. He takes us into his childhood in Burgundy, where the bountiful produce and the high respect accorded to the preparation of food grounded Franey in a tradition that would serve him well when he began his apprenticeship at age fourteen in Paris restaurants. In A Chef’s Tale, Franey relives the days of America’s French food revolution and adds immeasurably to our sophistication about the great world of French cooking—and about cooking itself.

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From the million-copy Sunday Times bestseller comes a gripping story of family secrets, all-consuming love and the chaos of war.2011. When Lucy’s troubled father Tom passes away, she travels to Cornwall to visit his childhood home – the once-beautiful Carlyon Manor. Before he died, Tom had been researching an uncle she never knew he had. Determined to find out why, Lucy tracks down Beatrice Ashton, a local woman who seems to know more than she lets on, and has an extraordinary story to tell . . . 1935. Growing up in Cornwall, Beatrice plays with the children of Carlyon Manor – especially pretty, blonde Angelina Wincanton. Then, one summer at the age of fifteen, she falls in love with a young visitor to the town: Rafe, whom she rescues from a storm-tossed sea. On the surface, her life seems idyllic. But the dark clouds of war are gathering, and nobody, not even the Wincantons, will be left untouched.A Gathering Storm is a powerful tale of courage and betrayal, spanning from Cornwall to London and Occupied France, in which friendship and love are tested, and the consequences span generations. Secrets from the past, unravelling in the present… Rachel delivers intriguing, involving and emotive narrative reading group fiction like few other writers can.Praise for Rachel Hore's novels: 'Compelling, engrossing and moving' SANTA MONTEFIORE 'Simply stunning . . . I savoured every moment’ DINAH JEFFERIES 'A story that stirs the deepest emotions' WOMAN & HOME ‘An emotive and thought-provoking read’ ROSANNA LEY ‘Hore tackles difficult subjects with a clever, light touch and a sunny positivity. Her women are brave and good and you desperately want them to win’ DAILY MAIL ‘An elegiac tale of wartime love and secrets’ TELEGRAPH ‘A tender and thoughtful tale' SUNDAY MIRROR

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"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the College de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher. The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications. The Neutral is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights. In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.

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"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the College de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher. The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications. The Neutral is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights. In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.

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