Memoirs of an Egotist

Memoirs of an Egotist
Author: Stendhal
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2021-03-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1528765311

This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.

The Path Not Taken

The Path Not Taken
Author: Jeff Horn (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

How Revolutionary-era France, rejecting the example of laissez-faire, market-oriented Britain, pursued its own path to industrial prosperity.

The Great Cat Massacre

The Great Cat Massacre
Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2009-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465010482

The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

Feudalism, venality, and revolution

Feudalism, venality, and revolution
Author: Stephen Miller
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526148366

According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralisation had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. This book challenges the theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The king’s government comprised seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent motivating the people to make the French Revolution.

An Historical Geography of France

An Historical Geography of France
Author: Xavier de Planhol
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 602
Release: 1994-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521322089

In this 1994 book, Xavier de Planhol and Paul Claval, two of France's leading scholars in the field, trace the historical geography of their country from its roots in the Roman province of Gaul to the 1990s. They demonstrate how, for centuries, France was little more than an ideological concept, despite its natural physical boundaries and long territorial history. They examine the relatively late development of a more complex territorial geography, involving political, religious, cultural, agricultural and industrial unities and diversities. The conclusion reached is that only in the twentieth century had France achieved a profound territorial unity and only now are the fragmentations of the past being overwritten.

The Flour War

The Flour War
Author: Cynthia Bouton
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2010-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0271042109

In the spring of 1775, a series of food riots shook the villages and countryside around Paris. For decades France had been free of famine, but the fall grain harvest had been meager, and the government of the newly crowned King Louis XVI had issued an untimely edict allowing the free commerce of grain within the kingdom. Prices skyrocketed, causing riots to break out in April, first in the market town of Beaumont-sur-Oise, then sweeping through the Paris Basin for the next three weeks. Known as the Flour War, or the guerre des farines, these riots are the subject of Cynthia Bouton's fascinating study. Building upon French historian George Rud&é's pioneering work, Bouton identifies communities of participants and victims in the Flour War, analyzing them according to class, occupation, gender, and location. As typically happened, crowds of common people (menu peuple) confronted those who controlled the grain-bakers, merchants, millers, cultivators, and local authorities. Bouton asks why women of the menu peuple were heavily represented in the riots, often assuming crucial roles as instigators and leaders. In most instances, the people did not steal the provisions but forced those they cornered to sell at a price the rioters deemed &"just.&" Bouton examines this phenomenon, known as taxation populaire, and considers the growing &"sophistication of purpose&" of rioters by placing the Flour War within the larger context of food riots in early modern Europe.

Time and the French Revolution

Time and the French Revolution
Author: Matthew John Shaw
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0861933117

A history of the innovation and effects of the French Republican Calendar. The French Republican Calendar was perhaps the boldest of all the reforms undertaken in Revolutionary France. Introduced in 1793 and used until 1806, the Calendar not only reformed the weeks and months of the year, but decimalisedthe hours of the day and dated the year from the beginning of the French Republic. This book not only provides a history of the calendar, but places it in the context of eighteenth-century time-consciousness, arguing that the French were adept at working within several systems of time-keeping, whether that of the Church, civil society, or the rhythms of the seasons. Developments in time-keeping technology and changes in working patterns challenged early-modern temporalities, and the new calendar can also be viewed as a step on the path toward a more modern conception of time. In this context, the creation of the calendar is viewed not just as an aspect of the broader republican programme of social, political and cultural reform, but as a reflection of a broader interest in time and the culmination of several generations' concern with how society should be policed. Matthew Shaw is a curatorat the British Library, London.

Joseph II

Joseph II
Author: Walter W. Davis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9401192413

It has been said that never has a monarch so narrowly missed "greatness" as did the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. An idealistic, sincere, and hardworking monarch whose ultilitarian bent, humanitarian instincts, and ambitious programs of reform in every area of public concern have prompted historians to term him an "enlightened despot," "revolutionary Emperor," "philosopher on a throne," and a ruler ahead of his time, Joseph has also been condemned for being insensitive to the phobias and follies of his subjects, essentially unrealistic, almost utopian, in establishing his goals, and dogmatic and overly precipitous in trying to achieve them. Efforts to analyze and explain the actions of this complex and controversial personality have involved a number of savants in investigations of "Josephinism" (or as I prefer to call it, "Josephism"), dealing in great detail with the motiva tions, substance, and influence of his innovations. The roots of Josephism run deep, but can be observed emerging here and there from the intellectual and political soil that nourished them, before joining the central trunk of the system formulated during the latter years of Maria Theresa's reign to grow to an ephemeral and stunted maturity under Joseph II.

Orestes

Orestes
Author: Voltaire
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 56
Release: 2013-08-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1627933212

Orestes was produced in 1750, an experiment which intensely interested the literary world and the public. In his Dedicatory Letters to the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire has the following passage on the Greek drama: "We should not, I acknowledge, endeavor to imitate what is weak and defective in the ancients: it is most probable that their faults were well known to their contemporaries. I am satisfied, Madam, that the wits of Athens condemned, as well as you, some of those repetitions, and some declamations with which Sophocles has loaded his Electra: they must have observed that he had not dived deep enough into the human heart. I will moreover fairly confess, that there are beauties peculiar not only to the Greek language, but to the climate, to manners and times, which it would be ridiculous to transplant hither. Therefore I have not copied exactly the Electra of Sophocles-much more I knew would be necessary; but I have taken, as well as I could, all the spirit and substance of it."

The Pope's Body

The Pope's Body
Author: Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2000-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226034379

In contrast to the role traditionally fulfilled by secular rulers, the pope has been perceived as an individual person existing in a body subject to decay and death, yet at the same time a corporeal representation of Christ and the Church, eternity and salvation. Using an array of evidence from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, Agostino Paravicini- Bagliani addresses this paradox. He studies the rituals, metaphors, and images of the pope's body as they developed over time and shows how they resulted in the expectation that the pope's body be simultaneously physical and metaphorical. Also included is a particular emphasis on the thirteenth century when, during the pontificate of Boniface VIII (1294-1303), the papal court became the focus of medicine and the natural sciences as physicians devised ways to protect the pope's health and prolong his life. Masterfully translated from the Italian, this engaging history of the pope's body provides a new perspective for readers to understand the papacy, both historically and in our own time.