BiblioVault - Books by Farge, Arlette

Archives of Infamy

Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens

Nancy Luxon

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life

What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.

Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the recent translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.

Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender.

Contributors: Roger Chartier, Collège de France; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick; Arlette Farge, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jean-Philippe Guinle, Catholic Institute of Paris; Michel Heurteaux; Pierre Nora, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Michael Rey (1953–1993); Thomas Scott-Railton; Elizabeth Wingrove, U of Michigan.

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Fragile Lives

Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Arlette Farge

Harvard University Press, 1993

The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the experiences of ordinary people—men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity—the home, the workplace, and the street—Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.

Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population's daily existence, the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events, from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police. As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed in judicial records, we come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a “fragile” society. Elegantly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.

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History of Women in the West

Georges Duby

Harvard University Press, 1992

Volume III of A History of Women draws a richly detailed picture of women in early modern Europe, considering them in a context of work, marriage, and family. At the heart of this volume is “woman” as she appears in a wealth of representations, from simple woodcuts and popular literature to master paintings; and as the focal point of a debate—sometimes humorous, sometimes acrimonious—conducted in every field: letters, arts, philosophy, the sciences, and medicine. Against oppressive experience, confining laws, and repetitious claims about female “nature,” women took initiative by quiet maneuvers and outright dissidence. In conformity and resistance, in image and reality, women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries emerge from these pages in remarkable diversity.

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The Vanishing Children of Paris

Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution

Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel

Harvard University Press, 1991

In the spring of 1750 a two-day series of riots erupted in Paris when the populace discovered that police were sweeping children off the streets in an overzealous attempt to control vagrancy. Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel use this bizarre incident and its colorful cast of actors to view broader issues such as the power of rumor, mob psychology, the exercise of authority, and the maintenance of peace in Paris under the ancien régime.

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