The work of David Bien, one of America's foremost historians of eighteenth-century France, transformed our understanding of the ancien regime and the origins of the French Revolution. The editors bring together for the first time his most important articles, other previously unpublished essays and an interview transcript. Bien's empirically-grounded approach made him a central figure in the 'revisionist' debates on the origins of the French Revolution. His re-reading of the Calas affair as an anomaly in a growing trend of tolerance (rather than a sign of widespread bigotry among an entire class of magistrates) opened up significant new insights into the history of religious persecution, long influenced by Voltaire. Bien's ground-breaking research on the army and the sale of offices revealed the surprising extent of social mobility at the time and challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that it was frustration of the bourgeoisie which contributed to the outbreak of the Revolution. With a preface by Keith Baker and an introduction by Michael Christofferson, Interpreting the 'ancien regime'underlines the seminal importance of David Bien's work for contemporary debates about the social and political history of late-eighteenth-century France. It will be an indispensible resource for historians and historiographers alike.

This book examines the transformation of the French military profession during the momentous period that saw the death of royal absolutism, the rise and fall of successive revolutionary regimes, the consolidation of Napoleonic rule and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after the Empire's final collapse. Crossing traditional chronological boundaries, it brings together periods in French history that are usually treated separately and challenges established views of change and continuity during the Age of Revolution. Based on a wealth of archival sources, this book is as much a social history of ideas like equality, talent, and merit as a military history. -- .

The dramatic story of the slave ship Neirsee springs vividly to life in Rafe Blaufarb's graphic mircohistory, Inhuman Traffic. The story, set in the early nineteenth century, moves from the slave port of Old Calabar to the Caribbean and to the courts of Britain and France where the history of the illegal slave trade, slavery in the Caribbean, and diplomatic history all come into focus as Blaufarb follows the ship, its crew, and its captives. Students will be taken in by the vivid drawings and the rich narrative, but they will also find themselves immersed in an unusual learning experience. Blaufarb not only presents the history of the ship and captives, he takes the reader inside the project itself. He explains how he came upon the story, how he and his editor envisioned the project, and how he worked with the illustrator Liz Clarke to craft the 350 "cells" that compose the book. He and Clarke even take the reader inside archives in Britain and France which are themselves illustrated and their histories explained. Like all the best examples of the genre, Inhuman Traffic tells a compelling story through a complex interplay of image and text - it will keep students reading, and learning, to the very end.

The Great Demarcation explores how the French Revolution transformed the system of property-holding that had existed in France before 1789, thus creating the framework for modern definitions of property and political forms. This book examines the Revolution not from an economic or social perspective, but through the lens of the laws and institutions of property. The Revolution's dramatic legal restructuring aimed at two fundamental goals: removing formal public power from the sphere of private property, and excising property rights from the realm of the new sovereign, the nation. The revolutionaries accomplished these two aims by abolishing privately-owned forms of public power-such as jurisdictional lordship and venal public office-and by dismantling the Crown domain to construct a purely sovereign State. These efforts brought about a Great Demarcation: a radical distinction between property and power from which flowed critical distinctions between the political and the social, state and society, sovereignty and ownership, the public and private. These distinctions destroyed the conceptual basis of the Old Regime, laid the foundation of France's new constitutional order, and crystallized modern ways of thinking about polities and societies. This, Blaufarb claims, was the Revolution's fundamental act, the stake in the Old Regime's heart, and the basis of all of its other reforms. Tracing how the French Revolution sought to remake the country's legal and institutional reality, The Great Demarcation shows how the revolutionary transformation of Old Regime property helped to inaugurate political modernity.

This is a sourcebook on the "revolutionary Atlantic," a term historians increasingly use to describe the way the many revolutions from 1776 (USA) to 1826 (end of the wars of independence in Latin America) can be viewed as part of a connected whole. It is the first text to examine the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the various Latin American Revolutions from a synoptic perspective.

In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments-from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses-although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the ""family economy,"" in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end prostitutes managed their own households; female weavers, tailors, and merchants increasingly appeared on eighteenth-century tax rolls and guild membership lists; and female members of the nobility possessed and wielded the same legal power as their male counterparts. Examining female workers within and outside of the context of family, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France challenges current scholarly assumptions about gender and labor. This stimulating and important collection of essays broadens our understanding of the diversity, vitality, and crucial importance of women's work in the eighteenth-century economy.

What does it mean to own something? What sorts of things can be owned, and what cannot? How does one relinquish ownership? What are the boundaries between private and public property? Over the course of a decade, the French Revolution grappled with these questions. Punctuated by false starts, contingencies, and unexpected results, this process laid the foundations of the Napoleonic Code and modern notions of property. As Rafe Blaufarb demonstrates in this ambitious work, the French Revolution remade the system of property-holding that had existed in France before 1789. The revolutionary changes aimed at two fundamental goals: the removal of formal public power from the sphere of property and the excision of property from the realm of sovereignty. The revolutionaries accomplished these two aims by abolishing privately-owned forms of power, such as jurisdictional lordship and venal public office, and by dismantling the Crown domain, thus making the state purely sovereign. This brought about a Great Demarcation: a radical distinction between property and power from which flowed the critical distinctions between the political and the social, state and society, sovereignty and ownership, the public and private. It destroyed the conceptual basis of the Old Regime, laid the foundation of France's new constitutional order, and crystallized modern ways of thinking about polities and societies. By tracing how the French Revolution created a new legal and institutional reality, The Great Demarcation shows how the revolutionary transformation of Old Regime property helped inaugurate political modernity

By calming revolutionary turbulence while preserving fundamental gains of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte laid the foundations of modern France. But his impact reached beyond France's borders as well. His legacy of war, civil rights, exploitation, and national awakening reshaped identities across the European continent, while in the Atlantic world he destroyed the colonial order and helped plant the seeds of American power. In this collection of wide-ranging primary sources -- including confidential memoranda and correspondence, speeches, memoirs, letters, police reports, and songs, most of which appear in English translation for the first time -- Rafe Blaufarb situates Napoleon within his time while opening a broad perspective on the nature and impact of Napoleonic rule. His introduction provides a narrative of Napoleon's rise and fall and frames the key issues of Napoleon's life and times. Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography.