The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Modern France

Stephane Gerson

Published by Cornell University Press 2003

The Pride of Place

Local Memories and Political Culture in Modern France

Stephane Gerson

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501724312

Overview
Contents

About this book

Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane...

Author / Editor information

Stéphane Gerson is Assistant Professor of French and French Studies at New York University. He is coeditor of Why France? American Historians Reflect Upon Their Enduring Fascination.

Reviews

Ceri Crossley:

This thought-provoking and impressively documented book challenges the view that nineteenth-century French culture and politics were essentially about urbanization, centralization, and modernization.... This book will be essential reading for students of nineteenth-century France. However, it will also provide rewarding reading for anyone who has an interest, professional or otherwise, in the ways in which the state seeks to determine the research agenda and control the production of knowledge.

Bertrand Taithe:

This is a book brimming with ideas and overflowing with data. Engagingly written and theoretically informed, it is undoubtedly a key text in the revisionist analysis of the making of French identity.

Jo Burr Margadant, author of The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France, coeditor of French Historical Studies:

This highly original book challenges the conventional understanding of bourgeois political culture in nineteenth-century France. At both the local and national levels, Gerson finds a lively interest in celebrating the historical and cultural singularity of provincial towns and small regions. Drawing on colonial studies to explain the uneven results of negotiations between state officials and local boosters, this important book presents a strikingly new way of thinking about the politics of French identity from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic.

Pamela Pilbeam:

It is common knowledge that history was a nineteenth-century enthusiasm, but this volume explores an aspect little known except to scholars working on the departments. They will be entranced to see how obscured learned societies and their publications fitted into a national trend that has helped to create the enthusiasm for le pays which remains a passion today.

Daniel J. Sherman, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee:

In combination with his searching examination of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, Gerson's exploration of the continuities and limits of the state's self-conception as intellectual arbiter offers a compelling and original set of insights into the very nature of the political in modern France. We have reason to be grateful that the bureaucratic domain—sometimes humdrum, usually scorned, but always important—has found such an erudite and sympathetic interpreter.

D. A. Harvey:

Gerson's work demonstrates that, contrary to Parisian stereotypes, a lively and vital intellectual and cultural sphere existed in provincial France.

Caroline Ford, University of British Columbia:

French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie once said that historians could be divided into truffle hunters and parachutists. Stéphane Gerson is one of the rare examples of a historian who is both. His erudition and conceptual sophistication are impressive. He has an intimate local knowledge of archival sources—fast disappearing from the historical profession among North American scholars working on France. Gerson's command of primary sources and of the historiography and theoretical literature on memory, identity, and political culture is quite simply dazzling.

Robert Gildea, Merton College, Oxford:

In this imaginative, intelligent, and deeply researched work, Stéphane Gerson renews the attack on the dominant Jacobin and French-university view that France was administratively centralized and culturally One and indivisible in the nineteenth century.... This book breathes a good deal of new life into the French nineteenth century.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
INTRODUCTION: Local Memories and Modernity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART 1: Le Pays
ONE. The Field of Local Memories Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
PART II: L'Amour du Pays
TWO. Recomposing Self and Nation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
THREE. The Pedagogy of Place Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
FOUR. Local Memories and the Governing of the Minds Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
PART III: Le Mal du Pays
FIVE. Town, Nation, or Humanity? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
SIX. Local Difference and the State Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	206
SEVEN. The Quandary of Local Initiative Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
EIGHT. Sur les Lieux PROVINCIAL ELITES BEFORE THE STATE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
EPILOGUE: The Return to the Local Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
Selected Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	315

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 344
Illustrations
- Other: 2 maps, 22 halftones, 3 tables
Keywords: Europe; History

eBook

Published: August 6, 2018
ISBN: 9781501724312