Voices Of The People In Nineteenth Century France

An innovative study revealing that folklore collections can shed new light on the lives of the socially marginalized.

An innovative study revealing that folklore collections can shed new light on the lives of the socially marginalized.

The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe. Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France explores how these changes were experienced and negotiated by the people who lived there, drawing on the immense ethnographic archive of Felix Arnaudin (1844-1921). The study places the songs, stories, and everyday speech that Arnaudin collected, as well as the photographs he took, in the everyday lives of agricultural workers and artisans. It argues that the changes are were understood as a gradual revolution in bodily experiences, as men and women forged new working habits, new sexual relations, and new ways of conceiving of their own bodies. Rather than merely presenting a story of top-down reform, this is an account of the flexibility and creativity of the cultural traditions of the working population. William G. Pooley tells the story of the folklorist Arnaudin and the men and women whose cultural traditions he recorded, then uncovers the work carried out by Arnaudin to explore everyday speech about the body, stories of werewolves and shapeshifters, tales of animal cunning and exploitation, and songs about love and courtship. The volume focuses on the lives of a handful of the most talented storytellers and singers Arnaudin encountered, showing how their cultural choices reflect wider patterns of behaviour in the region, and across rural Europe.

"From Publishers Weekly : This irresistible history of the French Revolution is much more than a colorful mosaic. By splicing a reflective narrative with graphics (engravings, satirical cartoons, photographs) and primary documentsletters, trial transcripts, memoirs, decrees, newspaper editorialsit brings vivid immediacy to tumultuous events without sacrificing objective distance. The main narrative consists of dozens of tableaux, allowing room for such topics as prison conditions, Freemasonry, feudalism, the market for luxury goods. Along with the expected profiles of Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI, Robespierre and Marat, we meet scheming pretender Philippe of Orleans who tried to bring down the king, professional revolutionary Tom Paine imprisoned under the Terror, and unstable leftist Joseph Fouche who led a campaign of de-Christianization and later became Napoleon's police minister. The text is provocative in its discussion of the Jacobins' prototype welfare state and of the Terror as a response to foreign pressures."--via amazon.com (1988 HarperCollins ed.).

Using an interdiciplinary approach, this book brings together work in the fields of history, literary studies, music, and architecture to examine the place of folklore and representations of 'the people' in the development of nations across Europe during the 19th century.

This study offers a radical reassessment of a crucial period of political and cultural history. By looking at some 400 songs, many of which are made available to hear, and at their writers, singers, and audiences, it questions both our relationship with song, and ordinary Britons' relationship with Napoleon, the war, and the idea of Britain itself.

When Gillian Tindall discovered a cache of tightly folded letters in a deserted house in central France, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she uncovered the obscure and moving life of one woman, Celestine Chaumette. This is Tindall's brilliantly original recreation of the vanished world of a French village.

Vividly reconstructing the political ideas of the Brothers Grimm, Jakob Norberg transforms our image of history's most famous folklorists.