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"Paris (France) Social conditions 18th century."
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The revolutionary temper : Paris, 1748-1789
\"When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing--how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today's news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafes, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal's Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years-from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation--all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution. Darnton's authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy. And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience. Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Poetry and the police : communication networks in eighteenth-century Paris
\"We are given a vivid sense of how songs were circulated and performed on the streets of Paris…Darnton has opened up another rich vein of research in the eighteenth century.\" —Times Literary Supplement In spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an \"abominable poem about the king.\" So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense? In this captivating book, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton brilliantly traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society. This lucid and entertaining book reminds us of both the importance of oral exchanges in the history of communication and the power of \"viral\" networks long before our internet age.
eBook
Poetry and the Police
Darnton has ably mined the available evidence surrounding the 1749 investigation and string of arrests for sedition known as the \"Affair of the Fourteen\" and produced a remarkable analysis of a subversive Parisian public discourse that openly attacked the king, his mistress, new taxes, and an unpopular peace treaty. Darnton lucidly reconstructs a world where information traveled through poems and songs set to familiar melodies; he reminds us that our world of instant communication, tweets, and 24-hour news cycles is not as distinctive as we may believe. With rich end matter that includes the lyrics of poems and songs as well as a link to a superb recording of some of the songs by cabaret artist Helene Delavault, this interdisciplinary piece is highly recommended for serious students across the humanities as well as readers with an interest in 18th-century French culture and politics.
eBook
Erotic Exchanges
In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being \"kept.\" Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture.
Kushner's primary sources include thousands of folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional mistresses, reporting in meticulous, often lascivious, detail what these women and their clients did. Rather than reduce the history of sex work to the history of its regulation, Kushner interprets these materials in a way that unlocks these women's own experiences. Kushner analyzes prostitution as a form of work, examines the contracts that governed relationships among patrons, mistresses, and madams, and explores the roles played by money, gifts, and, on occasion, love in making and breaking the bonds between women and men. This vivid and engaging book explores elite prostitution not only as a form of labor and as a kind of business but also as a chapter in the history of emotions, marriage, and the family.
eBook
From Rogue to Everyman
Julie knew intimately the sights, sounds, and smells of the French capital, its Opera and playhouses, law courts, narrow dirty streets, hackney coaches, great houses, low taverns, and splendid public gardens. Working first as an informer and later as a police officer, he came to know only too well the activities of the capital's rakes, thieves, loan sharks, pickpockets, confidence men, blackmailers, crooked gamblers, and rowdy bullying soldiers, not to mention its twenty or thirty thousand prostitutes - all closely watched by as many as three thousand government spies and the eighteenth-century world's most invasive police network. Julie established close contacts with a number of the capital's leading \"maquerelles\" as well as their distinguished clients, and his underground news sheets, lifted mainly from secret vice squad reports, provided a restricted circle of wealthy subscribers with racy accounts of the town's sexual dalliances. His story ends in the dreaded Bastille. Extensive quotations from Julie's writings trace the moral itinerary of a clever, manipulating rogue, spirited liar, thief, poetaster, and libertine.
eBook