Elites in French Society

Elites in French Society
Author: Ezra N. Suleiman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-04-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9780691635682

Why do some elites survive while others do not? How do certain institutions manage to preserve their importance in the face of crises, instability, and change? How does a democratic society legitimize elitist institutions? Combining the use of important social theories--particularly those of Mosca, Schumpeter, Tocqueville, and Pareto--with empirical analysis, Ezra Suleiman tries to answer these questions in his examination of the dominance and stability of France's governing elites. The author draws on original survey data, historical evidence, and specialized documentary sources. His three part discussion deals, first, with the state institutions that nurture the French elite; second, with the organization, legitimization, and adaptation of the elite and its institutions; and third, with some of the policy and political implications of France's elitist system. In the final section of his book, he closely examines the relationship between elites in the public and private sectors. In his investigation of France's "state-created" elites, Professor Suleiman shows the great importance of the grandes coles in training and promoting the elites, and the grand corps in providing a base from which the elites launch themselves into extra-governmental careers. He also finds that the elites' capacity to adapt to an evolving social, political, and economic environment is a major factor in their ability to survive. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Twilight of the Elites

Twilight of the Elites
Author: Christophe Guilluy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300240821

A passionate account of how the gulf between France’s metropolitan elites and its working classes are tearing the country apart Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an “American society”—one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on “the periphery.” As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.

Elites in French Society

Elites in French Society
Author: Ezra N. Suleiman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2015-03-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400871301

Why do some elites survive while others do not? How do certain institutions manage to preserve their importance in the face of crises, instability, and change? How does a democratic society legitimize elitist institutions? Combining the use of important social theories—particularly those of Mosca, Schumpeter, Tocqueville, and Pareto—with empirical analysis, Ezra Suleiman tries to answer these questions in his examination of the dominance and stability of France's governing elites. The author draws on original survey data, historical evidence, and specialized documentary sources. His three part discussion deals, first, with the state institutions that nurture the French elite; second, with the organization, legitimization, and adaptation of the elite and its institutions; and third, with some of the policy and political implications of France's elitist system. In the final section of his book, he closely examines the relationship between elites in the public and private sectors. In his investigation of France's "state-created" elites, Professor Suleiman shows the great importance of the grandes écoles in training and promoting the elites, and the grand corps in providing a base from which the elites launch themselves into extra-governmental careers. He also finds that the elites' capacity to adapt to an evolving social, political, and economic environment is a major factor in their ability to survive. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

French Salons

French Salons
Author: Steven D. Kale
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2006-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801883866

Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.

Mobility, Elites and Education in French Society of the Second Empire

Mobility, Elites and Education in French Society of the Second Empire
Author: P. Harrigan
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0889207909

Based on a unique historical source, this book examines the social origins, career expectations, and first jobs of 28,000 students in the “elitist” French secondary schools of the 1860s. Using sophisticated statistical analysis as well as conventional historical sources, the work concludes that schooling reached a wider audience than has been so far believed and that substantial social mobility occurred within the school system, but that family background, rather than educational factors, directed students’ career aspirations and achievements. It also argues that although education expanded in urban, industrialized areas, mobility did not increase in these areas. A final chapter reconsiders nineteenth–century thought concerning education in the light of findings about the social effects of schools.

Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France

Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France
Author: Sarah Horowitz
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271062509

In Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France, Sarah Horowitz brings together the political and cultural history of post-revolutionary France to illuminate how French society responded to and recovered from the upheaval of the French Revolution. The Revolution led to a heightened sense of distrust and divided the nation along ideological lines. In the wake of the Terror, many began to express concerns about the atomization of French society. Friendship, though, was regarded as one bond that could restore trust and cohesion. Friends relied on each other to serve as confidants; men and women described friendship as a site of both pleasure and connection. Because trust and cohesion were necessary to the functioning of post-revolutionary parliamentary life, politicians turned to friends and ideas about friendship to create this solidarity. Relying on detailed analyses of politicians’ social networks, new tools arising from the digital humanities, and examinations of behind-the-scenes political transactions, Horowitz makes clear the connection between politics and emotions in the early nineteenth century, and she reevaluates the role of women in political life by showing the ways in which the personal was the political in the post-revolutionary era.

Researching Elites and Power

Researching Elites and Power
Author: Francois Denord
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-08-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030451755

This open access book describes how elite studies theoretically and methodologically construct their object, i.e. how particular conceptualizations of elites are turned into research practice using different methods for collecting, dealing with and analyzing empirical data. The first of four sections focuses on what Mills named the power elite and includes Bourdieu’s field of power. The second section addresses studies of the domain of economic power, whereas the third section centers on research on elite education. The fourth and last section highlights research on symbolic power, either within social fields or as a dimension of social structure at large, areas where recognition is essential. All sections comprise empirical case studies of elites and power, whereby each of which makes explicit the various methodological choices made in the research process. Through focusing on methodological approaches for the study of elites and power and on how such approaches relate to each other as well as to the theoretical perspectives that underpin them, this book will be a valuable source for social scientists.

Stepping into the Elite

Stepping into the Elite
Author: Jules Naudet
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2018-07-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199093652

The experience of shifting from one social class to another—from a dominated group to a dominant group—raises the question of how the upwardly mobile person relates to his/her group of origin. Stepping into the Elite traces the particular ways in which upwardly mobile people in India, France, and the United States—countries embodying three distinct stratification systems—make sense of this change. Given that people draw upon specific cultural tools or repertoires to analyse their world and situate themselves in it, Naudet identifies the extent to which narratives of ‘success’ vary from one country to another. For instance, he explains that while stories in a caste-ridden society such as India hinge on the preservation of bonds with the original class, in France, they are centered on the idea that an upwardly mobile person is alienated from all social groups. In the United States, on the other hand, the rhetoric of success is tinged by the ardent belief in the American society being classless. A sociological journey in three different cultural contexts, this book deftly ties the exploration of questions regarding transformation of social identity and views on being successful.

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
Author: Joan B. Landes
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801494819

In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.

Modern France

Modern France
Author: Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2011-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195389417

The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future.