Entitlement and Complaint

David G. Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France and Aging in World History as well as numerous articles on the history of old age and aspects of French cultural history. He is co-editor of Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, The French Revolution in Culture and Society, and a six-volume Cultural History of Old Age.

This book brilliantly combines archival research with insights from gerontological theory to explain how civil servants in post-Revolutionary France innovated a right to government-funded old-age retirement. This retiring vanguard left a surprisingly rich archive, revealing how they experienced old age. The self-definition of these men and their widows paved the way for twentieth-century concerns about old-age pensions, generational conflict, distributive justice, and the importance of life review. This is a beautiful book that realizes the full potential of crossing disciplinary boundaries between history and gerontology.

• PrefaceIntroduction Part One: Career and Retirement1. Pensions as Favor and Pensions as Right2. Careering Across the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Divide3. Setting Rules from Old Regime to Midcentury4. Restoration, Revolution, and Retirement: Ending Careers, 1814-1853 Part Two: The Language of Retirement5. Entitlement and Complaint: Creating a Rhetoric of Retirement6. Changing Content and Expectations7. Gender, Widowhood, and the Limits of Entitlement ConclusionNotesBibliography