"Les Lieux de memoire" is perhaps one of the most profound historical documents on the history and culture of the French nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this multivolume series has been hailed as "a magnificent achievement" ("The New Republic") and "the grandest, most ambitious effort to dissect, interpret and celebrate the French fascination with their own past" ("The Los Angeles Times"). Written during a time when French national identity was undergoing a pivotal change and the nation was struggling to define itself, this unprecedented series consists of essays by prominent historians and cultural commentators which take, as their points of departure, a "lieu de memoire": a site of memory used to order, concentrate, and secure notions of France's past.
The first volume in the Chicago translation, "Rethinking France, " brings together works addressing the omnipresent role of the state in French life. As in the other volumes, the "lieux de memoire" serve as entries into the French past, whether they are actual sites, political traditions, rituals, or even national pastimes and textbooks. "Volume I: The State" offers a sophisticated and engaging view of the French and their past through widely diverse essays on, for example, the chateau of Versailles and the French history of absolutism; the "Code civil" and its ordering of French life; memoirs written by French statesmen; and Charlemagne and his place in French history. Nora's authors constitute a who's who of French academia, yet they wear their erudition lightly. Taken as a whole, this extraordinary series documents how the French have come to see themselves and why.
Contributors:
Alain Guery
Maurice Agulhon
Bernard Guenee
Daniel Nordman
Robert Morrissey
Alain Boureau
Anne-Marie Lecoq
Helene Himelfarb
Jean Carbonnier
Herve Le Bras
Pierre Nora

Set in Paris in the 1780s, Retif de la Bretonne's Ingenue Saxancour is a thinly veiled account of his daughter's disastrous marriage to an abusive husband. From the time of her marriage in January, 1780, until she left her husband in July, 1785, Agnes Retif suffered continually from severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Published in 1789, Retif's novel scandalized the public with its graphic descriptions of his son-in-law's sexual perversity and brutal violence. Retif's novel remains shocking more than two centuries later and continues to raise disturbing questions about power relations within abusive relationships. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the accusations leveled against Retif himself concerning his motives for writing and publishing this account: Was he, as some charged, a shameless exhibitionist willing to reveal his family's darkest secrets merely to attract attention and broaden his readership? Was he an unscrupulous opportunist willing to capitalize on his daughter's misfortunes and risk her reputation simply to pay his debts? Or was he, as he himself claimed, trying to warn young women about the dangers of marrying men of dubious backgrounds against their parents' wishes? Retif was all this and more: a reform-minded pioneer far in advance of his time with his graphic portrayal of spousal abuse, his call for greater public awareness of this perennial problem, and his crusade for liberal divorce laws that would allow women to escape from abusive relationships and to remarry. This, in fact, is what Agnes Retif was able to do after passage of the divorce law passed by France's revolutionary government in 1792. Mary S. Trouille is Professor of French at Illinois State University.

Ross Chambers, an eminent critic of French literature, proposes an original theory of the development of French modernism. His bold rereading of mid-nineteenth-century texts, from Madame Bovary to Les Fleurs du mal, leads to a reconception of the workings of narrative - in themselves and in relation to history. Chambers makes a distinction between a text's formal mode of address (narrative function) and the reflexive devices by which it invites interpretation (textual function). The works he considers reveal a discontinuity or disjunction between these two functions and as a result seem uncentered, their manner of conveying meaning oddly blurred. In this they recall the general malaise that swept through French society in the wake of the failed revolution of 1848. Chambers shows how the internal opposition of narrative and textual function, often read as a willful resistance to this historical ennui, is actually its symptom. Pursuing this argument through works by Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo, Chambers uses theoretical insights to illuminate textual details, which in turn clarify and advance his theory. The process yields a subtle and compelling meditation on the powers of writing and reading, which contributes significantly to the debate about the historical status of literary texts. At the heart of the book is the concept of oppositionality; in this respect The Writing of Melancholy is both a necessary complement to Chambers's previous work in Room for Maneuver and a discreet homage by a member of the post-1968 generation to those who were thirty-something in 1848. Originally published in French, the book has been revised and expanded to include an entirely newchapter on Gerard de Nerval's "Sylvie".

Trouille (French, Illinois State U.) offers a feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by seven contemporary women writers, exploring their paradoxical attraction to ideas considered reactionary, paternalistic, and even blatantly misogynist by today's standards. She cites the written responses and their reactions