Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly.What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From th...

This book explores imperial entanglements to reassess the Napoleonic Empire as a missing link—or at least an important chain—in the global and longue durée history of Empires. In recent years Napoleonic studies have, belatedly but resolutely, embraced the transnational historiographical turn, vastly expanding the field’s geographical scope. Its canonical chronological boundaries, on the other hand, appear increasingly narrow against this wider backdrop, giving the impression of a ...

"To the barricades!" The cry conjures images of angry citizens, turmoil in the streets, and skirmishes fought behind hastily improvised cover. This definitive history of the barricade charts the origins, development, and diffusion of a uniquely European revolutionary tradition. Mark Traugott traces the barricade from its beginnings in the sixteenth century, to its refinement in the insurrectionary struggles of the long nineteenth century, on through its emergence as an icon of an internati...

Sudhir Hazareesingh's How the French Think is a warm yet incisive exploration of the French intellectual tradition, and its exceptional place in a nation's identity and lifestyleWhy are the French an exceptional nation? Why do they think they are so exceptional? An important reason is that in France intellectual activity is regarded not just as the preserve of the thinking elite but for almost everyone. French thought can sometimes be austere and ...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2013‘Completely absorbing’**Amanda Foreman'Enthralling’**Guardian‘The Three Musketeers! The Count of Monte Cristo! The stories of courseare fiction. But here a prize-winning author shows us that the inspiration forthe swashbuckling stories was, in fact, Dumas’s own father, Alex - the sonof a marquis and a...

A "marvelously readable" critique of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and other French postwar intellectuals that "consistently entertains and provokes" ( The Washington Post).The uniquely prominent role of French intellectuals in European cultural and political life following World War II is the focus of this book by the acclaimed author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Tony Judt analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflict...

In 1941, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life: translating for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government. From 1941 to 1943, Stein translated thirty-two of Pétain's speeches, in which he outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with Nazi...

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the places most closely associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous conflict affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread throughout the world. In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars...

Madame de Pompadour's famous quip, "Après nous, le deluge," serves as fitting inspiration for this lively discussion of postwar French intellectual and cultural life. Over the past thirty years, North American and European scholarship has been significantly transformed by the absorption of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories from French thinkers. But Julian Bourg's seamlessly edited volume proves that, historically speaking, French intellecutal and cultural life since World War Tw...

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon's work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day.Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particu...

In the Museum of Man offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism. Alice L. Conklin takes us into the formative years of French anthropology and social theory between 1850 and 1900; then deep into the practice of anthropology, under the name of ethnology, both in Paris and in the empire before and especially after World War I; and finally, into the fate of the disciplin...

The early years of democracy in France were marked by a society divided by civil war, class war and violent conflict. Citizenship and Wars explores the concept of citizenship in a time of social and political upheaval, and considers what the conflict meant for citizen-soldiers, women, children and the elderly. This highly original argument based on primary research brings new life to debates about the making of French identity in the 19th century.Putting the latest theoreti...