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Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France.
 
In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.
 
Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.

Drawing on early modern French thought to free nature and aesthetics from metaphysical humanism 

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.
 
This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today’s plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever.