Ian Hacking tells the fascinating tale of Albert Dadas, a native of France’s Bordeaux region and the first diagnosed mad traveler. Dadas suffered from a strange compulsion that led him to travel obsessively, often without identification, not knowing who he was or why he traveled. Using the records of Philippe Tissié, Dadas’s physician, Hacking attempts to make sense of this strange epidemic.

In telling this tale, Hacking raises probing questions about the nature of mental disorders, the cultural repercussions of their diagnosis, and the relevance of this century-old case study for today’s overanalyzed society.

This book reasserts the importance of the French Revolution to an understanding of the nature of modern European politics and social life. Scholars currently argue that the French Revolution did not significantly contribute to the development of modern political values. They no longer hold that the study of the Revolution offers any particular insight into the dynamics of historical change. James Livesey contends that contemporary historical study is devalued through this misinterpretation of the French Revolution and offers an alternative approach and a new thesis.

Livesey argues that the European model of democracy was created in the Revolution, a model with very specific commitments that differentiate it from Anglo-American liberal democracy. The fundamental argument in the book is that these democratic values were created by identifiable actors seeking to answer political, economic, and social problems. The book traces the development of this democratic idea within the structures of the French Republic and the manner in which the democratic aspiration moved beyond formal politics to become embedded in institutions of economic and cultural life. This innovative work rewrites the history of French politics between 1795 and 1799.

The insurrection of 31 May-2 June 1793 that overthrew the Girondins and brought the Montagnards to power was a decisive event in the history of the French Revolution. Morris Slavin's study is the first that discusses the background, the mechanisms, and the immediate results of the uprising, as well as the hidden forces that produced it and the contradictions that were inherent in it from the beginning.

Slavin's approach to the controversy between the Gironde and the Mountain is from below (d'en bas), from the vantage point of the sections of Paris and their extralegal assembly, the Eveche assembly, and its Comite des Neuf. He shows how and why the Montagnards used the insurrectionary organs created by the sans-culottes for their own purposes, and how the Montagnards won them over against their Girondin enemies by granting the sans-culottes economic concessions, at the same time disarming them politically.

This revelation of the profound differences between the sans-culottes and the Montagnards on the goals of the insurrection is a major contribution to understanding French revolutionary behavior. Slavin finds that the rank and file in the pro-Girondin sections were just as self-sacrificing and just as patriotic as the followers of the Mountain. The dispute between the Girondins and the Montagnards was an intraclass contest, not a class struggle.

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven’t been able to explain it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath’s Making Spirit Matter studies how a particularly productive and influential group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinkers attempted to solve this puzzle by showing the mutual dependence of spirit and matter. The scientific revolution taking place at this point in history across disciplines, from biology to psychology and neurology, located our mental powers in the brain and offered a radical reformulation of the meaning of society, spirit, and the self. Tracing connections among thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, and others, McGrath plots alternative intellectual movements that revived themes of creativity, time, and experience by applying the very sciences that seemed to undermine metaphysics and religion. Making Spirit Matter lays out the long legacy of this moment in the history of ideas and how it might renew our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain today.

Surrealist artist Max Ernst defined collage as the "alchemy of the visual image." Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, M. E. Warlick persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career.

A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Warlick sets Ernst's work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites. This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst's works, as it affirms his standing as one of Germany's most significant artists of the twentieth century.

Between the two World Wars, particularly in the 1930s, the relations between the French civilian government and the Army went through a series of devastating changes. These turbulent developments culminated in the refusal of the Army’s leaders to obey their civilian superiors during the catastrophe of June 1940, the first such insubordination in modern French republican history. The author examines every aspect of this disastrous process, pursuing his analysis largely through the activities and thought of General Maxime Weygand, who, although deeply affected by the loss of civil–military trust, contributed importantly to it and eventually led the Army in its disobedience.

Philip Bankwitz finds the seeds of the disaffection between the French civilian authorities and the military in a variety of interconnected elements. During the early 1930s, for example, the soldiers became convinced that the Government’s policies concerning service time, military appropriations, and disarmament were pushing the Army to the brink of ruin. The Third Republic was highly unstable politically, as was shockingly demonstrated in February 1934 when the Government leaders resigned in the face of violent disorders in Paris attendant on the Stavisky Affair which climaxed two years of internal strife. Among soldiers, aware of the Government’s weakness, suspicious of its alleged antimilitarism, and fearful of the approaching conflict with Nazi Germany, there was a growing and almost unconscious tendency to think in terms of the possible need to extend the protection of the Army to the nation in its difficulties. In this way, important elements in the officer corps began, psychologically and emotionally, “to prepare for eventual intervention in national political affairs.”

General Weygand, whom the author interviewed on numerous occasions, held the personal conviction that the distrust between the civilian and military establishments was the root cause of French defeat. Mr. Bankwitz is convinced that this opinion of Weygand’s is possibly the single most important clue to the puzzling connection between the civil–military relationship and the collapse of June 1940. Granting all the other factors contributing to the defeat, it would be impossible to exaggerate the historical importance of Weygand’s disobedience—an act which also opened the way for later military saviors and for the ascendant role of the Army in French politics.

This is the first scholarly study in depth of the crucial prewar phase of the French army’s development into a disruptive force in national life. A chapter from the portentous twentieth-century story of the soldier in politics, it has relevance now to situations already formed or forming in other western societies. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by an encyclopedic bibliography of writing on French political history in this century.

In a provocative study, Paul Sonnino examines the diplomatic negotiations that took place in Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, which brought an end to the agonizing civil and religious conflict of the Thirty Years’ War.

Sonnino steps back from myriad historical readings of Westphalia to take the diplomats’ intentions and interactions strictly on their own terms. He places the reader alongside the pivotal figure of French minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin as he maneuvers for gain. The narrative thus offers a firsthand experience of the negotiations as they played out, as well as a penetrating look into the character, personality, and ideas of the crafty cardinal. Although Mazarin acquired the province of Alsace—making him a hero to French nationalists—he had a much more successful peace within his grasp, but lost it when he insisted on annexing the Spanish Low Countries. Sonnino also offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Fronde, linking the French domestic revolt to foreign policy, in Mazarin’s failure to secure peace with Spain.

Based on unprecedented archival documentation, Mazarin’s Quest provides an original and illuminating look at one of the most complicated diplomatic gatherings of all time.

Taking Professor Natalie Zemon Davis’ fascinating biographical studies of three Women on the Margins in the seventeenth century as an inspiration, the author of this book offers three portraits of men who were at the very center of governance in thirteenth-century France, men who strove in the shadow of King Louis IX (Saint Louis) to impose a redemptive regime on the realm. Professor Jordan treats them as individuals, but in a sense they are also types: Robert of Sorbon, a churchman; Etienne Boileau, a bourgeois; and Simon de Nesle, an aristocrat. Robert was the founder of the Sorbonne; Boileau was the prévôt or royal administrator of Paris; and Simon was twice co-regent of the kingdom. Thinking about them and their relations with Louis IX opens up a new and altogether sobering vista for exploring the nature of the king’s rule and the impact of his rule on his subjects.

“[An] excellent and exemplary study in the history of ideas…Provides a commendable model for those interested in the way ‘true’ and ‘false’ ideas interact and broadly influence behavior.” —Science

Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton, in his lively study of mesmerism and its relation to eighteenth-century radical political thought and popular scientific notions, provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.

A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse

A meditative, postapocalyptic noir, Mevlido’s Dreams is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse. Mevlido is a double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, a sprawling abyssal ruin marked by war and ruled by criminals. Suspended in the bardo between his loyalty to the surveillance state and to the anarchists, communists, and other rebels he monitors, Mevlido clings to life and hope—barely—in the city’s vast slums, haunted by the memory of the wife he failed to save during the last war and dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. At the same time, an enigmatic organization existing elsewhere—the Organs—observes Mevlido’s actions and debates its responsibility to him and to humanity as a whole. 

Asking what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world, this dense, brilliantly detailed postcollapse reality imagined by Antoine Volodine is one that grows ever more relevant amidst intensifying climate and political catastrophes. A key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido’s Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain.

At the time of his death in 1984, at the age of fifty-eight, Michel Foucault was widely regarded as one of the most powerful minds of this century. Hailed by distinguished historians and lionized on his frequent visits to America, he continues to provoke lively debate. The nature and merits of his accomplishments remain tangled in controversy. Rejecting traditional liberal and Marxist "dreams of solidarity," Foucault became the very model of the modern intellectual, replacing Sartre as the figure of the eminent Parisian and cosmopolitan master thinker.

Foucault himself discouraged biographical questions, claiming that he was "not at all interesting." Didier Eribon's captivating account overthrows that assertion. As a journalist well acquainted with Foucault for years before his death, Eribon was particularly well placed to conduct the dozens of interviews which are the cornerstone of this book. He has drawn upon eyewitness accounts by Foucault's closest associates from all phases of his life--his mother, his schoolteachers, his classmates, his friends and enemies in academic life, and his celebrated companions in political activism, including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. Eribon has methodically retraced the footsteps of his peripatetic subject, from France to Sweden to Poland to Germany to Tunisia to Brazil to Japan to the United States. The result is a concise, crisply readable, meticulously documented narrative that debunks the many myths and rumors surrounding the brilliant philosophe--and forces us to consider seriously the idea that all his books are indeed, just as Foucault said near the end of his life, "fragments of an autobiography."

Who was this man, Michel Foucault? In the late 1950s Foucault emerged as a budding young cultural attaché, friendly with Gaullist diplomats. By the mid-1960s he appeared as one of the avatars of structuralism, positioning himself as a new star in the fashionable world of French thought. A few months after the May 1968 student revolt, with Gaullism apparently shaken, he emerged as an ultra-leftist and a fellow traveler of Maoists. Yet during this same period, Eribon shows, he was quietly and adroitly campaigning for a chair in the College de France--the very pinnacle of the French academic system. This book does more than follow the career of one extraordinary intellectual. It reconstructs the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France from the postwar years to the present. It is the story of a man and his time.

Behind the façade of unity, the French intelligentsia was riven by the same fundamental divisions that had characterized it before the war. For example, the Republican Left argued that German nationalism and militarism began after Kant, with Fichte or Hegel, while the Catholic and nationalistic reactionary Right denounced Kant as the evil inspiration of France's liberal democracy and public school system. The heated rhetoric of the war and the unbearable loss of young lives, says Hanna, lent weight to a redefinition of French culture in national terms—and this, ironically, ended in the cultural conservatism of Vichy France.

This is the first study of the power of French pens and words during and after the Great War. It is a contribution to French and European history as well as to intellectual history.

Toulouse is one of the most striking examples of urban modernization both in France and in all of Europe. It exemplifies the unparalleled changes that transformed France into an urban nation after World War II. In Modernizing the Provincial City, Rosemary Wakeman examines the ways in which urban landscape and architecture, culture, and economic life were altered by public modernization programs designed to build "the new France." Her study is unique in treating modernization not in the conventional sense of a fixed, abstract model superimposed over defenseless provincial cities, but rather as a matter of unpredictable change.

Modernism in France was a politically determined process enacted by the national government and by corporate interests. Yet it encountered historically articulated urban communities that acted as their own agents in the process of transformation. Wakeman's argument is that modern French cities were created from the rivalries and negotiations between a variety of competing interests in the struggle to define contemporary urban life.

This inquiry into the forces shaping modern French history also contributes to the discussion taking place among sociologists, geographers, urbanists, and historians about the modern condition, the capitalist economic system, and the complex matrix of modern urban life.

“The mourning never stops, it just changes.” (Edward Albee)

For Claude Monet (1840–1926), the founder of French Impressionist painting, these words are a fitting testament to his lifelong relationship with the female muse, most notably—and most hauntingly—with his first wife, the model Camille Doncieux.

For the esteemed clinical psychologist and art historian Mary Mathews Gedo, Monet and His Muse represents a project twenty years in the making. Artfully interweaving biographical insight with psychoanalytic criticism, Gedo takes us on an exploration of Claude Monet’s conflicted relationships with women, complete with exquisitely researched material never before understood about one of our most popular—and inimitable—artists. Beginning with Monet’s childhood, Gedo delves into his relationships with a distant, unreliable father and his beloved, doting mother—whose death when Monet was just sixteen, the author establishes, inspired a lifetime preoccupation with the sea, its lushly imagined flora, and the figurative landscapes Monet painted to such acclaim.

And then—Camille. Entering Monet’s life when he was still a young man, becoming first his model and then mistress and then—finally—his wife, Camille Doncieux always fulfilled the function of muse, even after her life had ended, as Monet not only painted her one last time on her deathbed, but preserved her memory through the gardens he planted at his home in Giverny. Demonstrating how Monet’s connections with women were exceedingly complex, fraught with abusive impulses and infantile longing, Gedo sensitively uses Monet and Camille as exemplars in order to explore links between artists and muses in our modern age.

In a brilliant, original rendition, Monsters of the Gévaudan revisits a spellbinding French tale that has captivated imaginations for over two hundred years, and offers the definitive explanation of the strange events that underlie this timeless story.

In 1764 a peasant girl was killed and partially eaten while tending a flock of sheep. Eventually, over a hundred victims fell prey to a mysterious creature, or creatures, whose cunning and deadly efficiency terrorized the region and mesmerized Europe. The fearsome aggressor quickly took on mythic status, and the beast of the Gévaudan passed into French folklore.

What species was this killer, why did it decapitate so many of its victims, and why did it prefer the flesh of women and children? Why did contemporaries assume that the beast was anything but a wolf, or a pack of wolves, as authorities eventually claimed, and why is the tale so often ignored in histories of the ancien régime? Smith finds the answer to these last two questions in an accident of timing. The beast was bound to be perceived as strange and anomalous because its ravages coincided with the emergence of modernity itself.

Expertly situated within the social, intellectual, cultural, and political currents of French life in the 1760s, Monsters of the Gévaudan will engage a wide range of readers with both its recasting of the beast narrative and its compelling insights into the allure of the monstrous in historical memory.

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Löwy's Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author's essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from André Breton's essay "Arcane 17," which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Löwy's provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).

Probing the dialectics of innovation, diversity, continuity, and unity throughout surrealism's international presence, Morning Star also incorporates analyses of Claude Cahun, Guy Debord, Pierre Naville, José Carlos Mariátegui and others, accompanied by numerous reproductions of surrealist art. An extraordinarily rich collection, Morning Star promises to ignite new dialogues regarding the very nature of dissent.

Employing a multi-tiered approach, Emanuele Sica examines the simultaneously conflicting and symbiotic relationship between the French population and Italian soldiers. At the grassroots level, Sica asserts that the cultural proximity between the soldiers and the local population, one-quarter of which was Italian, smoothed the sharp angles of miscommunication and cultural faux-pas at a time of great uncertainty. At the same time, it encouraged a laxness in discipline that manifested as fraternization and black marketeering. Sica's examination of political tensions highlights how French prefects and mayors fought to keep the tatters of sovereignty in the face of military occupation. In addition, he reveals the tense relationship between Fascist civilian authorities eager to fulfil imperial dreams of annexation and army leaders desperate to prevent any action that might provoke French insurrection. Finally, he completes the tableau with detailed accounts of how food shortages and French Resistance attacks brought sterner Italian methods, why the Fascists' attempted "Italianization" of the French border city of Menton failed, and the ways the occupation zone became an unlikely haven for Jews.

“Lots of Romanians, in my day, dreamed of France; not many got there,” writes the author in his introduction. “Fortuitousness, contingency, and sheer good luck made me fall into France, just as one falls into love.” Fifty years after reaching France, by way of school in England, Eugen Weber presents a series of illuminations on the country he loves, and whose civilization he has made the center of his life's work as an interpreter of European history, subspecialty France.

My France focuses on some of the most intriguing aspects of French life: polities, myths, personalities, public problems, actions, conflicts. The topics Weber treats range from sports to religion, and include comments on folklore, peasant politicization, national socialism, the nature of the French right, antisemitism, and famous Frenchmen such as Pierre de Coubertin, Maurice Barres, and Marc Bloch. In every chapter he questions established assumptions, asks if things are quite as they are taken to be, and points out links between apparently unrelated doings (literature and private income, religion and superstition, fairy tales and everyday life). Every essay reflects his unique insight and is enlivened by his witty and graceful style, making My France irresistible not only to students of modern European history, but also to Francophiles and pundits of Europe everywhere.

Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity.

In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed. Despite the large numbers of respectable middling town-dwellers, no group identified themselves as bourgeois. Drawing on political and economic theory and history, personal and polemical writings, and works of fiction, Maza argues that the bourgeoisie was never the social norm. In fact, it functioned as a critical counter-norm, an imagined and threatening embodiment of materialism, self-interest, commercialism, and mass culture, which defined all that the French rejected.

A challenge to conventional wisdom about modern French history, this book poses broader questions about the role of anti-bourgeois sentiment in French culture, by suggesting parallels between the figures of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the American in the French social imaginary. It is a brilliant and timely foray into our beliefs and fantasies about the social world and our definition of a social class.

An epochal event in French history, the St. Bartholomew’s Day religious massacres are still the subject of controversy. A leading historian of the early modern period, Robert Kingdon, writes about the reactions to the massacres that were published at the time, showing how the relatively new medium of print was used by the Protestants to shape reaction to the catastrophe an early example of the printing press as an agent of social and political change.

Kingdon describes the loosely connected network of printers in Geneva, Basel, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, London, La Rochelle, and other cities that printed and distributed the grisly accounts of the murders of thousands of Protestants by Catholic zealots. But the pamphlets encompassed more than the making of martyrs. Some linked the massacres with an evil international conspiracy led by the French monarchy, Rome, and Spain. Others were political treatises arguing for a type of government that would no longer claim absolute power and would permit the survival of an ideological minority. Thus, the book contributes to an understanding of the history of printed propaganda and the role of myths in historical events, and illuminates important aspects of international diplomacy and political thought during the period of the later Reformation.