"The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a time when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and earlier eras took recognizable form, and the supreme individual, with a political, scientific, and above all existential value, emerged. The present book, fourth in the popular series, chronicles this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I-a century and a quarter of rapid, ungovernable change culminating in a conflict that, at a stroke, altered life in the Western world.
Guided by six eminent historians, we move from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which conceived of man as a noble creature of reason, into nineteenth-century Romanticism with its affirmation of distinctively individual creatures in all their mystery and impulsiveness, exalting intuition as a mode of knowledge. More and more, men and women wanted to sleep alone, to be left alone to read and write, to dress as they pleased, to eat or drink anything they liked, to consort with and love whomever they fancied. Growing democracies advanced those wishes to the status of rights, expanding markets stimulated them, and migration encouraged them. That new frontier, the city, simultaneously weakened family and community constraints, spurred personal ambitions, and attenuated traditional beliefs.
The authors dramatize the nineteenth century's organized effort to stabilize the boundary between public and private by mooring it to the family, with the father as sovereign. Such chapters as ""The Sweet Delights of Home,"" ""The Family Triumphant,"" and ""Private Spaces"" describe the new domestic ideal of the private dwelling as a refuge from perils and temptations in the public arena, the father as benevolent despot, the wife as contented practitioner of domestic arts, the children as small versions of adults, equipping themselves to follow in their parents' righteous footsteps. Particularly in England, the middle class was central to the formation of this homely standard, which spread to the working classes through evangelical preaching, utilitarian writings, and economic changes and improvements that resulted in a separation of home and workplace. At the same time, the gentry was transforming castles into country houses, knights into foxhunters, and landowners into gentleman farmers. The domesticating process also expressed itself in hygienic practices (soap, waterclosets, bathtubs), fashions in clothing, and vogues in sports, courtship, and lovemaking.
From the time of the French Revolution, when private or special interests were looked upon as shadowy influences likely to foster conspiracy and treason, through the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century, the authors reveal the more radical forms of modernity that arrived with the twentieth century, with its explosions of trade and technology. Besides the external development of goods and conveniences, the expanses of the psyche were also being reorganized, bringing a new openness about sexuality liberated from procreation and marriage. Feminism, a relatively sporadic movement in the nineteenth century, became a more persistent force, while young people and the avant-garde continued to break the rules and push for change as an end in itself. As always, law lagged behind reality: in practice, more and more people rebelled against communal and family discipline. The declaration of war in 1917 put a hold on some of the flowering of individuality, but the unstoppable trend toward personality nurtured by private life was only temporarily curbed."
Edited by:
Michelle Perrot
Translated by:
Arthur Goldhammer
Series edited by:
Phillippe Ariès,
Georges Duby
Imprint: Harvard Uni.Press Academi
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Volume: Vol 4
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 178mm,
Spine: 38mm
Weight: 1.361kg
ISBN: 9780674400030
ISBN 10: 0674400038
Pages: 744
Publication Date: 15 March 1994
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Primary
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction by Michelle Perrot 1. The Curtain Rises by Lynn Hunt, Catherine Hall Introduction by Michelle Perrot The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution The Sweet Delights of Home 2. The Actors by Michelle Perrot, Anne Martin-Fugier Introduction by Michelle Perrot The Family Triumphant Roles and Characters Bourgeois Rituals 3. Scenes and Places by Michelle Perrot, Roger-Henri Guerrand At Home Private Spaces 4. Backstage by Alain Corbin Introduction by Michelle Perrot The Secret of the Individual Intimate Relations Cries and Whispers Conclusion by Michelle Perrot Notes Bibliography Credits Index
Georges Duby, a member of the Academie Francaise, is Professor of Medieval History at the College de France. Michelle Perrot is Professor of Contemporary History at the Universite de Paris VII. Arthur Goldhammer received the French-American Translation Prize in 1990 for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.
Reviews for A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
The new emphasis on the history of everybody has now been consecrated in [this] ambitious five-volume series...masterfully translated by Arthur Goldhammer...Copious illustrative materials--paintings, drawings, caricatures, and photographs, all cannily chosen and wittily captioned to display domestic life...Magnificent. -- Roger Shattuck New York Times Book Review The fourth volume of this brilliant series arrives with the poignance of a letter that through some fluke of the postal system has been delayed 70 or 100 years and is read by descendants of the original addressee...A whole century's cries and murmurs are here, reminding us that their echoes are with us still. -- Joseph Coates Chicago Tribune Evocatively written, well translated and beautifully illustrated. -- Richard Sennett New York Newsday Spanning the period from the 11th century to the Renaissance and focusing on France and Tuscan Italy, this continues the projected five-volume history of private life from the Roman world to the present. 'Private' is here defined as what medieval people considered intimate, familial, domestic...[The book] display[s] an astounding knowledge and use of sources and offer rich detail about everything from affection and sex to domestic arrangements and latrines. The many illustrations strongly support the text. Essential for both research and general collections. -- Bennett Hill Library Journal What gives the volume its unity is not so much a rigorous definition of the subject, private life, as a consistency of concentration on a series of very interesting, interrelated themes: living space, and the degree of privacy that it can afford; family relationships, with special references to the nucleargroup that centers around a single married couple; relations between the sexes (both amorous and domestic); attitudes toward the body and nudity; the senseof individuality and self-perception...This volume offers a very full, richly variegated picture of the life, in different places and at different periods, of the Middle Ages. It has lavish and well-chosen illustrations to match the text. New York Review of Books General readers as well as academic specialists will revel in the wealth of historical detail and insight offered here. Aries saw three basic forces contributing to the profound social changes of the early modern era: the rise of state power, the spread of literacy, and new forms of religious piety. Together, the essays address each of these realms from several angles, providing glimpses at everything from cookbooks to charivaris, love letters to lettres decachet. The pattern that emerges is the creation of a sphere of private life, thought, and feeling that was unknown in the Middle Ages. Choice
