1848 was a year of revolution throughout Europe. Examining the economic, social and political crises, this book evaluates the political history of France during the revolution of 1848 and the French political culture of the time.

This 2004 book is about politicisation and political choice in the aftermath of the February Revolution of 1848, and the emergence of democracy in France. The introduction of male suffrage both encouraged expectations of social transformation and aroused intense fear. In these circumstances the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as President of the Republic - and his subsequent coup d'état - were the essential features of a counter-revolutionary process which involved the creation of a system of democracy as the basis of regime legitimacy and as a prelude to greater liberalisation. The state positively encouraged the act of voting. But what did it mean? How did people perceive politics? How did communities and groups participate in political activity? These and many other questions concern the relationships between local issues and personalities, and the national political culture, all of which impinged on communities increasingly as a result of substantial social and political change.

This book is organized around the personal struggles of ten extraordinary French women activists: Eugenie Niboyet, Eugenie Foa, Suzanne Voilquin, Josephine Bachellery, Pauline Roland, Jeanne Deroin, Elisa Lemonnier, Desiree Gay, Adele Esquiros, and Marie Noemie Constant. Ranging in age from 52 to 20 in 1848, coming from different economic backgrounds, these women share a common quest to be included in the economic and political rights won by the revolt against the July Monarchy. Banding together in the face of exclusion from the right to work guaranteed to all men in February 1848, they write petitions to the Provisional Government, and create the first daily feminist newspaper, “La Voix des femmes.” The newspaper is a forum for their demands: midwives who demand to be paid as civil servants, domestic workers who demand support while unemployed, teachers who demand opportunities for higher education and for higher wages. The right to vote and the right to divorce are debated in the newspaper. Seeking to widen their support, Niboyet and her cohort launch a political club, Le Club de femmes, which is ridiculed in the satiric press. The women activists of 1848 do not withdraw from the public sphere. They form workers’ associations. Deroin and Roland are imprisoned for their activism. All continue to work for women’s rights as teachers, writers, and artists. The women of 1848 inspire successive generations of women to continue their struggle.

This book explores leisure-related voluntary associations in France during the nineteenth century as practical expressions of the Revolutionary concept of fraternité. Using a mass of unpublished sources in provincial and national archives, it analyses the history, geography and cultural significance of amateur musical societies and sports clubs in eleven départements of France between 1848 and 1914. It demonstrates that, although these voluntary associations drew upon and extended the traditional concept of cooperation and community, and the Revolutionary concept of fraternity, they also incorporated the fundamental characteristics of competition and conflict. Although intended to produce social harmony, in practice they reflected the ideological hostilities and cultural tensions that permeated French society in the nineteenth century.

Challenging distinctions between fine and decorative art, this book begins with a critique of the Rodin scholarship, to establish how the selective study of his oeuvre has limited our understanding of French nineteenth-century sculpture. The book's central argument is that we need to include the decorative in the study of sculpture, in order to present a more accurate and comprehensive account of the practice and profession of sculpture in this period. Drawing on new archival sources, sculptors and objects, this is the first sustained study of how and why French sculptors collaborated with state and private luxury goods manufacturers between 1848 and 1895. Organised chronologically, the book identifies three historically-situated frameworks, through which sculptors attempted to validate themselves and their work in relation to industry: industrial art, decorative art and objet d'art. Detailed readings are offered of sculptors who operated within and outside the Salon, including S?n, Ch?t, Carrier-Belleuse and Rodin; and of diverse objects and materials, from S?es vases, to pewter plates by Desbois, and furniture by Barbedienne and Carabin. By contesting the false separation of art from industry, Claire Jones's study restores the importance of the sculptor-manufacturer relationship, and of the decorative, to the history of sculpture.

This book follows the story of the Second French Republic from its idealistic beginnings in February 1848 to its formal replacement in December 1852 by the Second Empire. Based on original archival research, The Second French Republic gives a detailed account of the internal tensions that irrevocably weakened France’s shortest republic. During this short period French political life was buffeted by strong and often contrary forces: universal manhood suffrage, fear of socialism, the President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, and the political ambitions of the military high command for the restoration of the monarchy.

A wide range of French women writers are surveyed, including Sand, Colette, Beauvoir and Duras among the "canonized", and many marginalized or forgotten and contemporary names not yet widely known outside France. These writers are seen within the political, economic and cultural context of women's lives and how these have changed across a century-and-a-half. Underpinning the whole account is the relationship between gender and language, between politics sexual and textual.

Charles Philipon (1800-1862) was the founder of the satirical illustrated press in France. With the newspapers he owned and directed, La Caricature and Le Charivari, he led an unprecedentedly coherent and vitriolic campaign of disrespect against King Louis-Philippe and his regime. Using a group of young caricaturists (the most talented of whom were Daumier, Grandville, and Travies) and the collaboration of a gifted team of writers (including Balzac) he crafted a new language of opposition. This book is the first full scholarly study of the structure of the illustrated press in the 1830s, its contribution to political debate in France, the dissemination of caricature and its potential as political propaganda, and the links between caricature and other forms of political-cultural discourse under the July Monarchy.

The origins and early years of the French women's press represent a pivotal period in the history of French women's self-expression and their feminist and cultural consciousness. Through a range of insightful textual analyses, this book highlights the political significance of this critically neglected literary medium.

The premise of Anna Green's timely and original book, is that nineteenth-century representations of childhood and adolescence-in paintings, but also in other forms of visual culture and in diverse written discourses of the period-are critical for understanding modernity. Whilst such well-worn signifiers for modernity as the city, the dandy and the prostitute have been well mined, childhood and adolescence have not. Paintings of the young produced in France from 1848 to 1886, Green contends, inform not only our understanding of modern life but also our perception of modernist or avant-garde painting. Figuring largely are Manet and the Impressionists, as well as a gamut of more traditional painters of children who are crucial in providing context for the avant garde. Because modernity is an essentially urban phenomenon, Green's focus is primarily on the city, usually Parisian, child. The painted youth of her study are organized initially by class and gender. Then the chapters are structured according to themes (parent-child relations, modes of discipline, work, education, and play, the spectacle, sexuality) that straddle the congruences among the book's triple trajectory: the young, their modernist representations, and the experience of modernity. Green's interdisciplinary approach ensures that this book will be of interest not only to art historians but to all those concerned with the cultural and social history of childhood.