A Social History of France, 1780-1800
Since 1960, there has been an expansion of research into the social history of France in the 18th and 19th centuries. This textbook synthesizes the insights this offers into a new social history of France during the turbulent century from the crisis of the Ancien Regime to the establishment of the Third Republic. Recent research into the construction of dominant ideologies of gender and ethnicity and the history of class formation is used to formulate new perspectives on the social impact of political upheavals, economic changes and the development of the state. The underlying theme of the book is the social relations of power, in the family, the workplace, and political life. Peter McPhee offers both a thematic approach - for example, in separate chapters on urban and rural France before and after the crisis of the mid-19th century - and a narrative social history of politics during key periods of political mobilization, such as the French Revolution and the Second Republic.