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 Revolut...

Provides an important revision of the causes of the failure of France's Vine and Olive Colony in Alabama, placing it within the context of America's westward expansionBonapartists in the Borderlands debunks the standard account of the Vine and Olive Colony, which stresses the failure of aristocratic, luxury-loving French to tame the wilderness. Rafe Blaufarb recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined fo...

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 continui...

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 wor...