Search results for ""author david p. jordan""

The third volume of Pierre Nora's monumental work documenting the history and culture of France turns to French manners, mores, and society. While previous volumes focused on specific historical events, people, and institutions within France, the essays in "Legacies" are concerned with the kinds of things that make up the heart of French culture: conversation, cafes, songs, wine, gallantry, and places imbued with national symbolism such as Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur cathedrals. Linking these diverse topics together is the idea of patrimony - a term used by the French to designate the collective culture of the country or its national heritage - a concept that has undergone radical changes beginning with the Revolution and corresponding to other dramatic ruptures throughout France's history. As a whole, these twelve essays by leading French historians add up to an illuminating and well-rounded portrait of those cherished traditions that together form the basic foundation for the distinctive culture of the French.

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The fourth and final volume in Pierre Nora's monumental series documenting the history and culture of France takes a self-reflective turn. The eleven essays collected here consider the texts and places that make up the collective memory of the history of France, a country whose people are extraordinarily conscious of history and their place in it. Distinguished contributors look at the medieval Grands chroniques de France and the monasteries and chancelleries that produced them, the establishment of Versailles as a historical museum, and Pierre Larousse's Grand dictionnaire, an important touchstone of cultural memory. Other essays of this title range in topic from the creation of the National Archives, a curiously organized catacomb of manuscripts, to Annales, a publication begun in 1929 that profoundly revitalized the study of history in France. Taken together, these richly detailed essays fully explore the multifaceted ways France has institutionalized its history and are, along with the rest of Les Lieux de memoire, a crucial part of that process.

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"Les Lieux de Memoire" is perhaps one of the most profound historical documents on the history and culture of the French nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this multi-volume series has been hailed as "a magnificent achievement" ("The New Republic") and "the grandest, most ambitious effort to dissect, interpret and celebrate the French fascination with their own past" (The Los Angeles Times"). Written during a time when French national identity was undergoing a pivotal change and the nation was struggling to define itself, this unprecedented series consists of essays by prominent historians and cultural commentators which take, as their points of departure, a "lieu de memoire": a site of memory used to order, concentrate and secure notions of France's past. The first volume in the Chicago translation, "Rethinking France", brings together works addressing the omnipresent role of the state in French life. As in the other volumes, the "lieux de memoire" serve as entries into the French past, whether they are actual sites, political traditions, rituals or even national pastimes and textbooks. "Volume I: The State" offers a sophisticated and engaging view of the French and their past through widely diverse essays on, for example, the chateau of Versailles and the French history of absolutism; the "Code civil" and its ordering of French life; memoirs written by French statesmen; and Charlemagne and his place in French history. Nora's contributors constitute a who's who of French academia, yet they wear their erudition lightly. Taken as a whole, this extraordinary series documents how the French have come to see themselves and why.

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