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French cuisine is such a staple in our understanding of fine food that we forget the accidents of history that led to its creation. This book brings these “accidents” to the surface, illuminating the magic of French cuisine and the mystery behind its historical development. The book explains how the food of France became French cuisine. This culinary journey begins with Ancien Régime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Carême, the “inventor” of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pépin. Not a history of French cuisine, this book focuses on the people, places, and institutions that have made this cuisine what it is today: a privileged vehicle for national identity, a model of cultural ascendancy, and a pivotal site where practice and performance intersect. With sources as various as the novels of Balzac and Proust, interviews with contemporary chefs such as David Bouley and Charlie Trotter, and the film Babette's Feast, the book maps the cultural field that structures culinary affairs in France and then exports its crucial ingredients. What's more, well beyond food, the intricate connections between cuisine and country, between local practice and national identity, illuminate the concept of culture itself.

Struggling to survive in post-World War II Germany, Beate Uhse-Rotermund (1919–2001)—a former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and young mother—turned to selling goods on the black market. A self-penned guide to the rhythm method found eager buyers and started Uhse-Rotermund on her path to becoming the world's largest erotica entrepreneur. Battling restrictive legislation, powerful churches, and conservative social mores, she built a mail-order business in the 1950s that sold condoms, sex aids, self-help books, and more. The following decades brought the world's first erotica shop, the legalization of pornography, the expansion of Uhse-Rotermund's business into eastern Germany, and web-based commerce. Uhse-Rotermund was only one of many erotica entrepreneurs who played a role in the social and sexual revolution accompanying Germany's transition from Nazism to liberal democracy. Tracing the activities of entrepreneurs, customers, government officials, and citizen-activists, this book examines the profound social, legal, and cultural changes that attended the growth of the erotica sector. Readings of governmental and industry records, oral histories, and the erotica industry's products uncover the roots of today's sexual marketplace and the ways in which sexual expression and consumption have become intertwined.

Shedding new light on the American campaign to democratize Western Germany after World War II, this book uncovers the importance of cultural policy and visual propaganda to the U.S. occupation. The book skillfully evokes Germany's political climate between 1945 and 1949, adding an unexpected dimension to the confrontation between the United States and the USSR. During this period, the American occupiers actively vied with their Soviet counterparts for control of Germany's visual culture, deploying film, photography, and the fine arts while censoring images that contradicted their political messages. The book reveals how this U.S. cultural policy in Germany was shaped by three major factors: competition with the USSR, fear of alienating German citizens, and American domestic politics. Explaining how the Americans used images to discredit the Nazis and, later, the Communists, it illuminates the instrumental role of visual culture in the struggle to capture German hearts and minds at the advent of the Cold War.

This study explores a series of dandy figures that emerged in France, Spain and Britain during the period of the French Revolution: the muscadins, jeunes gens and incroyables in France, the currutacos in Spain and the crops in England. Examining newspaper debates, vaudeville theater, satirical prints, pamphlets and treatises, it traces how these new types responded to the revolutionary moment from which they were born and introduced a fundamental shift in our conception of dandyism. Though often regarded as a disengaged or purely aesthetic figure, the dandy assumed in the 1790s new political roles and meanings as self-fashioning became an ideologically charged act. This study seeks to understand this new form of dandyism in light of the fashions of revolution and revolutions of fashion during this period.

This work traces the roots of the “economy of glory”– where glory and recognition function as recompense, as a kind of “moral money”– back to Antiquity and follows its ideological development in Old Regime France, its implementation under Napoleon, and its resonances in nineteenth-century French literature. Enlightenment thinkers come to see the political economy of glory as a powerful alternative to the liberal vision of a commercial economy based on the profit motive. Offering the promise of reconciling a whole series of contradictory values– virtue and interest, collective welfare and individual ambitions, equality and distinction, republican and aristocratic ideals– the economy of glory becomes a cornerstone of Napoleon’s attempts to overcome the divide separating the Old Regime from post-Revolutionary France. It also provides a new reading of Las Cases’s Memorial of Saint Helena depicting Napoleon’s daily struggle against his “jailer” Hudson Lowe on this tiny, god-forsaken island, and explores how the deposed emperor refashioned glory to fit the dimensions of ordinary life and to make of himself an everyman figure. After the Napoleonic episode, glory became a master-theme of nineteenth-century French literature. Balzac, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Hugo all explore its attractions and pitfalls. Understanding the underpinnings, history, and workings of the economy of glory provides fundamental insights into French culture and identity.

Although we usually think of the intellectual legacy of twentieth-century Vienna as synonymous with Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories, other prominent writers from Vienna were also radically reconceiving sexuality and gender. This study recovers the work of three such writers: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer. It emphasizes the distinctive intellectual world of liberal Vienna, especially the impact of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this highly scientific intellectual world. According to the author, Otto Weininger viewed human beings as bisexual and applied this theme to issues of creativity and morality. Robert Musil developed a creative ethics that was closely related to his open, flexible view of sexuality and gender, and Heimito von Doderer portrayed his own sexual obsessions as a way of understanding the power of total ideologies, including his own attraction to National Socialism. For the author, the significance of these three writers lies in their understandings of eros and inwardness, and in the roles that both play in ethical experience and the formation of meaningful relations to the world—a process that continues to engage artists, writers, and thinkers today.

This book provides an account of the fate of Paris's public spaces in the years following Nazi occupation and joyful liberation. Countering the traditional narrative that Paris's public landscape became sterile and dehumanized in the 1940s and 1950s, it instead finds that the city's streets overflowed with ritual, drama, and spectacle. With frequent strikes and protests, young people and students on parade, North Africans arriving in the capital of the French empire, and radio and television shows broadcast live from the streets, Paris continued to be vital terrain. The book analyzes the public life of the city from a variety of perspectives. A reemergence of traditional customs led to the return of festivals, street dances, and fun fairs, while violent protests and political marches, the housing crisis, and the struggle over decolonization signaled the political realities of France during the postwar period. The work of urban planners and architects, the output of filmmakers and intellectuals, and the day-to-day experiences of residents from all walks of life come together in this portrait of a flamboyant and transformative moment in the life of the City of Light.

From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government's declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the subject of this book, a chronicle of the Vichy regime's attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers. The author informs this story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, the book does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist. Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, the book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.

Invisible Hands proposes a new synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that focuses on a new way of thinking about order and disorder. The book charts how, in the eighteenth century, Europeans reimagined the nature and origins of the many orders that they inhabited: natural, social, political, economic, and cognitive. In place of a universe governed by orderly connections between cause and effect and designed by a providential Divinity, this alternative vision combined a recognition of the world's disorder and chance with a new appreciation for complexity, new understandings of causality, and new functions for the divine hand. At the foundation of this novel way of thinking was the ability to imagine complex systems – be they natural or human – as self-organizing. The order of large systems, more and more eighteenth-century people came to believe, needed no external design or direction. Instead, it was immanent in the very operations of the systems themselves, and grew in unpredictable ways from the complex activity of their many parts. Invisible Hands charts how and why this new logic of emergent order burst into the open in the early eighteenth century, and how the languages of self-organization were subsequently applied throughout Western Europe and North America in varied and sometimes incompatible ways, to questions in a wide array of domains as far apart as religion and philosophy, science and economy, mathematics and social thought, and law and politics.

The purpose of this book is to show the quality of German eighteenth-century writing and the continuing vital relevance of its ideas. The ‘scenes’ from this ‘unknown Enlightenment’ connect the principle of freedom of thought with all areas of its culture: epistemology, history, drama, poetry, travel, ethics, aesthetics, science, education, communication, and proposals for permanent peace. That makes a coherent overall argument, but the chapters can be read as studies of the individual themes.