Product Description: This book compares the social decomposition in late medieval Europe to the societal failure witnessed today in the modern West, arguing that in the case of emergencies, a strong despotic state is the only way to maintain basic order...read more

Product Description: How do European states adjust to international markets? Why do French governments of both left and right face a public confidence crisis? In this book, leading experts on France chart the dramatic changes that have taken place in its polity, economy and society since the 1980s and develop an analysis of social change relevant to all democracies...read more

Product Description: This book reveals how France reinvented itself in the aftermath of WWII. After foreign military interventions, the French political and intellectual elites embraced regime change and launched an urgent program of nation building. They rebuilt French national identity with whatever material was available, and created a vibrant new cultural and intellectual life...read more

Product Description: The 14 studies in this volume are a collective demonstration of the flexibility and tenacity of the "Fin de Siecle" theme. Studies of literature and film are mixed with sociological and historical enquiries, providing an overview of the concept in its various manifestations and offering a range of insights...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For the tradition-bound French elites of pre-World War I and the interwar period, modernity presented itself as a series of questions about France’s place in a newly competitive industrial world and about their positions as the leaders and managers of a mass society...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Birth of a National Icon examines the emergence of the intellectual in fin-de-siecle France, setting this important phenomenon against the backdrop of an emerging mass democracy and concentrating on the key role played by the avant-garde. "Birth of a National Icon is an outstanding piece of scholarship. It makes a significant contribution to the history of the French intellectual for a number of reasons. First, Datta convincingly argues-against the long-standing conventional wisdom-that the birth of the French intellectual cannot be seen simply as a product of the Dreyfus Affair. In a richly textured survey of the 'little magazines' of the 1890s, she establishes that the set of concerns later attributed to the 'intellectual' were already very much in evidence in the years preceding the Dreyfus Affair. Second, she documents the role of the literary avant-garde in the construction of the French intellectual. Her impressive mastery of the avant-garde literary groups in the 1890s allows her to paint a portrait of their hopes and, even more importantly perhaps, their anxieties, both of which combined to give shape to the emerging intellectual. Third, in perhaps her most impressive contribution, she demonstrates that emphasis on the political division between Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard obscures the degree to which each side shared a common outlook, especially in regard to the role of the intellectual. -Paul Mazgaj, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (view table of contents)

Product Description: Traveling on the luxury liner France early in 1963, the Western world's most famous painting sailed across the Atlantic on its maiden voyage to the United States. President John F. Kennedy officially welcomed the Mona Lisa for her stay in the capital and New York...read more

Product Description: Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations...read more