French Royal Women During The Restoration And July Monarchy

This book examines public discussions around France's four most prominent royal women during the first and second Restoration and July Monarchy: the duchesse d'Angoulême, the duchesse de Berry, Queen of the French Marie-Amélie, and Adélaïde d'Orléans. These were the most powerful women of the last decades of the French monarchy but the new roles women were assigned in post-revolutionary France did not permit them to openly exercise political influence. This book explores continuities and variations in narratives of royal legitimacy, and how historians, authors, and politicians used national history - particularly medieval and early modern history - to either legitimize or undermine the French monarchy, and to define women's social and political roles. Heta Aali is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, and has published widely on French cultural history, nineteenth-century historiography, and medievalism.

This book examines public discussions around France's four most prominent royal women during the first and second Restoration and July Monarchy: the duchesse d’Angoulême, the duchesse de Berry, Queen of the French Marie-Amélie, and Adélaïde d’Orléans. These were the most powerful women of the last decades of the French monarchy, but the new roles women were assigned in post-revolutionary France did not permit them to openly exercise political influence. This book explores continuities and variations in narratives of royal legitimacy, and how historians, authors, and politicians used national history - particularly medieval and early modern history - to either legitimize or undermine the French monarchy, and to define women's social and political roles.

Essays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle Ages has returned to debates about history, culture, and politics in Northern and Eastern Europe. This volume explores political medievalism in two language areas that are crucial to understanding global medievalism but are, due to language barriers, often inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars and students. The importance of Russian medievalism has been acknowledged, but little analysed until now. Medievalism in Finland and Russia offers a selection of chapters by Russian, Finnish and American scholars covering historiography, presidential speeches, participatory online discussions and the neo-pagan revival in Russia. Finland is currently even more poorly understood than Russia in the discussions about global medievalism. It is usually mentioned only as of the birthplace of the Soldiers of Odin. The street patrol is, however, a marginal phenomenon in Finnish medievalism as this volume demonstrates. Instead of merely adopting the medievalist interpretation of the international alt-right, even the right-wing populists in Finland refer more to the nationalistic medievalist tradition, where crusades do not mark a Western Christian victory over the Muslim East, but a Swedish occupation of Finnish lands. In addition to presenting particular cases of medievalism, the chapters here on Finland challenge and diversify today's prevailing interpretation of shared online medievalism of European and American right-wing populists. This book reveals that while medievalisms in Finland and Russia share many features with the contemporary Anglo-American medievalist imaginations, they also display many original characteristics due to particular political situations and indigenous medievalist traditions. They have their own meta-medievalisms, cumulative core ideas and interpretations about the medieval past that are thoroughly examined here in English for the very first time.

Now in its second edition, Tyler Stovall’s Transnational France takes a transnational approach to the history of modern France that draws the reader into a key aspect of France’s political culture: universalism. Beginning with the French Revolution and its aftermath, Stovall traces French history right up to the present day and examines France’s relations with three other areas of the world: Europe, the United States, and France’s colonial empire. The book shines a light onto both French identity and the history of the world more broadly, which allows the reader to engage with French history in a much wider context. This new edition features an additional chapter on France in the twenty-first century that offers an analysis of current events and issues as seen through historical perspective. Issues addressed include anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the gilets jaunes, as well as the impact of Brexit, the maturation of the National Front under Marine LePen, and the administration of Emmanuel Macron. Giving a global view of France’s history, this is the perfect volume for students of modern France and French history courses.

The Satiric Decade analyzes the impact on republicanism of French political satire in newspapers, theaters, street behavior, and even the academy in the 1830s. Author Amy Wiese Forbes argues that satire gave rise to the critical spirit and republicanism that erupted in the 1848 Revolution and that propelled the process by which France evolved from an absolutist monarchy to a liberal and democratic polity in the 1870s.

The shocking and scandalous story of Messalina—the third wife of Emperor Claudius—one of the most controversial women to have inhabited the Roman world. The lubricious image of the Empress Messalina as a ruthless, predatory, and sexually insatiable schemer—derived from the work of male historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius—has taken deep root in the Western imagination. Here, the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin puts this traditional narrative of Messalina to the test. She looks first at Messalina's life as it is recounted in the primary sources, before using material and circumstantial evidence to reconstruct each aspect of Messalina's character: politician, wife, adulteress, and prostitute. Finally, she explores how posterity has memorialized Messalina, whether as artist's muse, epitome of depraved pagan womanhood, or as libertine icon portrayed in literature and film. Cargill-Martin sets out not to entirely rewrite Messalina's history, or to salvage her reputation, but to look at her life in the context of her time and to reclaim the humanity of a life story previously defined by currents of high politics and patriarchy.

This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.