This volume examines the issue of the timing of cultural change, problems of Revolutionary anticipations and reverberations, and the relationship between culture, politics, and society. Individual essays combine both old and new approaches, ranging from textual analysis to the study of local judicial records, from the psychohistorical to the demographic. But they all demonstrate the usefulness of linking social and cultural history, broadly conceived, and of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of events. Part One addresses directly the creation of French Revolutionary culture. The contributors describe the physical act of dismantling and redefining the culture of the Ancien Regime for revolutionary purposes, new conceptions of time, and generation relations in Revolutionary rhetoric and law. The second part identifies key cultural ingredients from the distant past. It reminds us of the extent to which the Revolution employed the huge storehouse of Western culture to create something original. Because the creation of a democratic culture implies a crisis of consciousness, Part Three brings together a range of investigations into the question of cultural crisis. Three essays see the Revolutionary era as engendering psychological dislocation. In Part Four, social historians reveal the variety of approaches they have taken in trying to understand eighteenth century France. The varied contributions exploit the sources that have become the stock-in-trade of modern social history. Poverty, crime, and population are among the leading topics in current historiography, but military and political institutions are also examined in new ways. This edited collection provides new insights into a critical period of world history and will be welcomed by all scholars of the French Revolution and its aftermath.

Contemporary concerns about aging societies have stimulated interest in past ways of growing old, and whilst historians have investigated the experience of the aged, cultural representations of old age, and the phenomenon of demographic ageing, however the literature has been overwhelmingly western. This study reviews the world-wide literature on aging and seeks to move beyond received wisdom about attitudes and experiences running from the ancient world to the present.

Aging in World History will introduce students and general readers to historical ways of thinking about aging in two senses: the experience of individuals and the transformation of populations. The first section introduces theoretical concerns, understandings of "natural" or "traditional" ways of growing old, and diverse cultural prescriptions and representations. The second section covers key issues from the medieval to the early modern era. The third section looks at transitions to modernity, whilst the final part explores the contemporary world, before concluding with an overview of past, present and future.

Contemporary concerns about aging societies have stimulated interest in past ways of growing old, and whilst historians have investigated the experience of the aged, cultural representations of old age, and the phenomenon of demographic ageing, however the literature has been overwhelmingly western. This study reviews the world-wide literature on aging and seeks to move beyond received wisdom about attitudes and experiences running from the ancient world to the present.

Aging in World History will introduce students and general readers to historical ways of thinking about aging in two senses: the experience of individuals and the transformation of populations. The first section introduces theoretical concerns, understandings of "natural" or "traditional" ways of growing old, and diverse cultural prescriptions and representations. The second section covers key issues from the medieval to the early modern era. The third section looks at transitions to modernity, whilst the final part explores the contemporary world, before concluding with an overview of past, present and future.

Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. David G. Troyansky tells two intertwined stories. He traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in “life reviews.� Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes. As employees aged and one cohort replaced another, their attempts to make sense of their careers and lives formed a larger story of post-revolutionary survival.

The dissolution of the French Empire and the ensuing rush of immigration have led to the formation of diasporas and immigrant cultures that have transformed French society and the immigrants themselves. "Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World" examines the impact of this postcolonial immigration on identity in France and in the Francophone world, which has encompassed parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Immigrants bear cultural traditions within themselves, transform "host" communities, and are, in turn, transformed. These migrations necessarily complicate ideals of national literature, culture, and history, forcing a reexamination and a rearticulation of these ideals. Exploring a variety of texts informed by these transnational conceptions of identity and space, the contributors to this volume reveal the vitality of Francophone studies within a broad range of disciplines, periods, and settings. They remind us that the idea and reality of "Francophonie" is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon but something that grows out of long-term interactions between colonizer and colonized and between peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. Truly interdisciplinary, this collection engages conceptions of identity with respect to their physical, geographic, ethnic, and imagined realities.