Human Tradition in Modern France

K. Steven Vincent is professor of history at North Carolina State University. Alison Klairmont-Lingo is an independent scholar.

The editors and authors of this useful volume are aware of the added dimensions and insights that the scholarship of our day has contributed to our understanding of the complex French past since 1789. But they understand that bloodless categories are not enough and that live men and women made that history. The collaborators are bent here on restoring the human dimension to selected segments of the French past, and the reader of these pages will find lively vignettes of revolutionists, reformers, artists, actresses, colonialists, entrepreneurs, and others. A thoughtful introduction provides the political and social context, and a valuable bibliography concludes it.

• IntroductionPart I: 1789–1815Chapter 1: Voices from the Streets in the French RevolutionChapter 2: Death in the Bathtub: Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul MaratChapter 3: The Chénier Brothers and Jacques-Louis David: Artists in the French RevolutionPart II: 1815–1870Chapter 4: Victor Jacquemont in India: Travel, Identity, and the French Generation of 1820Chapter 5: Désirée Véret or the Past Recaptured: Love, Memory, and SocialismPart III: 1870–1914Chapter 6: Vacher the Ripper of the SouthwestChapter 7: Authority, Revolution, and Work: Views from the Socialist Left in the Fin de SiècleChapter 8: Family and Nation in Belle-Epoque France: The Debate over Léon Blum's Du MariageChapter 9: Notorious Women Speak for Themselves: French Actresses in the Nineteenth CenturyPart IV: 1940–PresentChapter 10: "The Oldest Negro in Paris": A Postcolonial EncounterChapter 11: Régis Debray: Republican in a Democratic AgeChapter 12: The Business of Pleasure: Creating Club Méditerranée, 1950–1970Suggested Readings