Part 1 Times, spaces, powers: knowing France; mastery of space; time and history; peasant France and merchant France; the kingdom of exchange - the culture of privilege and the culture of commerce; the city, crucible of change; the regulated kingdom -Paris and the provinces. Part 2 Powers and conflicts: the king and his subjects; the king and the people; the end of rebellion; God, the king and the churches; elites and nobilities; public space; crises in state and society. Part 3 Enlightenment and society: life triumphant; the liberties of individuals; consumption and appearance; desacralization, secularization, illuminism; materializing the intelligence, abstracting things; Paris, capital of the Enlightenment.
Daniel Roche is Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Directeur d’Études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
France in the Enlightenment, first published in French five years
ago and now expertly conveyed into English by that canonical
translator of our time, Arthur Goldhammer, is the best cultural
history of that extraordinary episode now available. Drawing on a
whole generation of new work, it shares the fundamental premise of
most historians now active in the field: that to study the
Enlightenment is not simply, or even primarily, to study the
origins of the French Revolution… Instead of scouring the
Enlightenment for symptoms of revolution, [Roche] quarries the
Revolution for echoes of the Enlightenment.
*New York Times Book Review*
An enduring legend paints the 18th century as elegant, frivolous,
witty and charming…but Daniel Roche’s splendid book, sensitively
translated by Arthur Goldhammer, dispels fantasies and puts legends
in their place. It shows how false they are and yet how true, how
sweet and promising life must have been for some, how miserable for
many and, above all, how much more interesting reality is than
nostalgic myths… [Roche’s chapters] are lively, lucid and lavish
with information. He gives us the best kind of history: a crowded
panorama presented with panache that interweaves solid information
with anecdotes, cameos and lively illustrations.
*Los Angeles Times Book Review*
[An] always illuminating, often dazzling overview of Enlightenment
France, a work surely destined for classic status.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Daniel Roche…give[s] us a brilliant portrait of France in the
Enlightenment that describes how royalty and peasants alike lived,
what connected and separated Paris and the provinces and how the
‘culture of appearances’ dominated society at all levels. He also
examines the complex interactions of new ideas, old values,
economic realities, social structures and geographic loyalties that
produced the Enlightenment, then destroyed it.
*Dallas Morning News*
[France in the Enlightenment shows] how French society as a whole
changed in the 18th century—at the top, in the rapidly growing
middle and even at the bottom—toward those characteristics regarded
as modern: greater rationality in human affairs, expanding
secularism, a growing acceptability of democratic institutions and
the blossoming of belief in the possibility of progress… Mr.
Roche’s achievement in this book is to show how France changed
gradually over the 18th century in almost every aspect of life… Mr.
Roche covers this panorama with panache. What’s amazing is how much
he covers—Paris as well as the provinces, merchants as well as
nobles and peasants and the urban poor. Readers…[will] admire his
superb use of the telling anecdote or perfect quotation from the
era in question. They provide welcome detail to this vast canvas.
Arthur Goldhammer’s translation from the French is eloquent and to
the point.
*Washington Times*
Roche’s writing is dense with example—he has delved into every
corner of French life under the ancien regime, into parish and
departmental records, government reports on trade and transport and
forestry, into the writings of philosophers, divines, ministers,
provincial and urban memorialists, some of them obscure (such as
the glazier Jacques-Louis Metetra), into almanacs, libraries,
academies, Masonic lodges, town and village fairs; but everything
he brings to the text is there to stiffen his cumulative picture of
a complex and contradictory society in which ‘change is happening
in a world that saw itself as stable, changeless and coherent by
virtue of ancient principles and age-old values.’ What interests
Roche is the way changes are connected. He is as detailed and
meticulous as Tocqueville, whose great book his own both
complements and rivals… ‘Mastery of Space’, ‘Time and History’,
‘Peasant France and Merchant France’, ‘The Kingdom of Exchange’—the
grandeur and scope of Roche’s book is there in these early chapter
headings. The world it opens up, and the terms it offers for
understanding it, seem classically French, demanding but full of
charm—a charm that lies in the elegance and energy with which ideas
are handled, and the effortless rigour and clarity of the language,
Nothing goes unremarked upon or unconsidered, but for all its
density the writing is open to horizons: it breathes.
*Australian Review of Books*
His writings are encyclopedic, and he pioneered the study of early
modern sociability as well as the attempt to integrate material
culture into the history of mentalities and ideas. Having any book
from his pen in English should be an event to be welcomed… Roche
recapitulates his vast knowledge of the academies and the salons,
recognizing as he does that the academies served the interests of
the status quo far more than they propelled enlightened thinking…
In the end Roche’s Enlightenment stands as optimistic and
triumphant, and it represents ‘the triumph of life, belief in
progress, expansion of concrete as well as philosophical
individualism, a new material independence that changed people’s
understanding of nature and society.
*Canadian Journal of History*
Roche’s awe-inspiring familiarity with both primary and secondary
sources over a vast field allows him to conduct a debate on one
aspect of French society after another, in which he tends to assume
the reader’s familiarity with what actually happened. Those whose
previous knowledge of the period inclines them to challenge some of
his conclusions or to dispute some of his assertions will emerge
from his survey both better informed and with more matter for
argument.
*French History*
Roche brilliantly describes the turmoil of a society on the verge
of Revolution, and documents the way people viewed, worked with and
worked against the institutions of the Old Regime. Filled with
fascinating detail, this ‘panorama of a whole civilization’ opens
up new areas of research as it moves the reader through the various
institutions which finally clashed in 1789. Written with elegance
and authority (and ably translated by Arthur Goldhammer), this book
is destined to become one of the standard studies of
eighteenth-century France.
*Virginia Quarterly Review*
This book is much more than a simple history of the
Enlightenment—it is social and intellectual history combined… This
is a brilliant and sweeping work of synthesis by one of the most
prominent historians of 18th-century France.
*Library Journal*
An excellent book, the summation of a lifetime’s effort. A complete
history of a sophisticated culture on the edge of crisis and
transfiguration.
*Patrice Higonnet, author of Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins
during the French Revolution*
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