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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.

This book emphasizes European integration as a fundamentally social and cultural process in addition to a political and economic one by studying the practice of travel and tourism by the young and the emergence of youth as a transnational social body in the postwar period. It explores the cultural practice of youth travel as a case study that argues for a less EU-centric approach to the writing of European integration history. European integration is usually treated as a top-down affair, but Backpack Ambassadors explores it from the bottom up through the cross-border travels of millions of backpacking youth. As a transnational history of youth mobility, this book is integral to understanding the historical development of European integration by showing how European states and societies sought to surmount cultural divides and promote civic discourse through the internationalism of the young. Backpack Ambassadors traces this cultural integration process from 1945 to 1992. It opens at the moment that Western Europe confronted the violent legacy of two world wars and concludes at the end of the Cold War and as European integration was redefined by the Maastricht Treaty. It is a history of youth culture and youth travel through cross-border mobility expanding from Northern and Western to Southern and Eastern Europe and beyond.

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.

Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes the Roman Empire’s afterlife as Western Europe’s history of neo-Roman mimesis. Each moment in the European history of imitating Rome, from Charles V to the Nazi empire, generated its own mimetic practices and texts reflecting on Rome and neo-Roman empires. The Romans’ monumentalizing empire-making and theatricality of politics shaped later imitations. These mimetic moments constructed the ancient empire as the ultimate expression of imperial power. At the same time, they also produced a never-ending series of scenes about Rome’s ruination. The first of these ruin scenarios originated with the Roman conquest of Carthage. Representing the ancient Roman metropole as a ruined stage, these scenarios thematize the enigma of Rome’s fall. They also define empire’s time as eschaton or endtime and raise the question of how to ward off the end. Political leaders, imperial theorists, and artists went in search of strategies to fortify their empires. The book traces this obsession with the Roman empire’s end from Augustus to Hitler, Polybios to Schmitt, Virgil to Riefenstahl, and Roman to Nazi architecture. The author combines intellectual history with literary/visual and psychoanalytic approaches. She proposes a model of imperial mimesis and the neo-Roman imaginary and analyzes the theatrical form of ruin scenarios across different media. She also develops a notion of realism proper to the political aesthetics of neo-Roman empires. This realism draws on the “absent presence” of ruins and mimesis as a mode of representation demanding recognition and imitation.

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.

For democratic states, the first part of the twenty-first century brought about an increase of surveillance and a re-emphasis on armed conflict coupled with a neoliberal distance from the concerns of the populace. To understand these tensions in the state, this book analyses the writings of prominent late nineteenth century French thinkers who responded to emerging forms of democracy with robust, complicated understandings of the democratic institution that recognized its limits and potential as a solution to questions of liberty, dwelled on its ramifications for imperial projects, and attempted to preserve individual freedoms and social equality. Through engagement with these writings, this book accomplishes several things. It situates the development of the modern democratic state in an international dialogue in which the U.S. and France are key constituents, engages with democracy as a historical practice to solve specific problems rather than a pure ideal, and casts discussions of the problems of democracy, power, and equality in a new light. The various chapters of the book, each dedicated to a different problem with democracy recognized by an individual thinker, ultimately articulate American and French contributions to the modern democratic state, identifying the Third Republic (1870-1940) as one such state founded on transnational exchanges and indicative of the principles of the present political order.

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.

It has been just over twenty-five years since “transnationalism” was born – as a perspective, a concept, and a research project. It fit easily into the globalization talk of the late 20th century and seemed obvious once revealed. Transnationalism means many things to many people, from crossing physical borders to crossing intellectual ones. Many use transnationalism to argue that we cannot do history in one country. For historians, transnationalism has become both a historiographic perspective and a search for and analysis of transnationals/isms past, be they in the form of movement of ideas, goods, or people. This book aims to question this “transnational moment” in particular as it relates to human mobility. Insofar as transnationalism has come to emphasize a somewhat heroic sense of individual opportunity, the difficulties of transnational activities have been lost from sight. While transnationalism arose as an understandably powerful antidote to the older sturm und drang of migration studies, it has perhaps led to an overly optimistic vision of migrant agency. Two criticisms may be raised. On the one hand, as has by now been amply shown, transnationalism is not a new phenomenon. On the other hand, as this book will explore, it is also not as easy as it looks. It is time to take a closer look at the metaphoric and real obstacles to transnational mobility. The Limits of Transnationalism thus explores a part of the story seldom told: the complications, the possible downsides, and the eventual failure of networks.

In Paris in 1954, a young man named André Baudry founded Arcadie, an organization for “homophiles” that would become the largest of its kind that has ever existed in France, lasting nearly thirty years. In addition to acting as the only public voice for French gays prior to the explosion of radicalism of 1968, Arcadie—with its club and review—was a social and intellectual hub, attracting support from individuals as diverse as Jean Cocteau and Michel Foucault and offering support and solidarity to thousands of isolated individuals. Yet despite its huge importance, Arcadie has largely disappeared from the historical record. The main cause of this neglect, this book explains, is that during the post-Stonewall era of queer activism, Baudry's organization fell into disfavor, dismissed as conservative, conformist, and closeted. Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews with the reclusive Baudry, the book challenges this reductive view, uncovering Arcadie's pioneering efforts to educate the European public about homosexuality in an era of renewed repression. In the course of relating this absorbing history, the book offers a startlingly original account of the history of homosexuality in modern France.

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven’t been able to solve it satisfactorily. Historian and anthropologist Larry Sommer McGrath’s Making Spirit Matter studies how a particularly productive and influential group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French thinkers answered this puzzle by showing the mutual dependence of spirit and matter. The scientific revolution taking place during this moment in history across disciplines, from biology to psychology and neurology, located our spiritual powers in the brain and offered a radical materialist reformulation of the meaning of society, freedom, and the self. Tracing connections among thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, and others, McGrath plots alternative intellectual movements that revived themes of creativity, time, and experience by applying the very sciences that seemed to undermine metaphysics and theology. In so doing, Making Spirit Matter lays out the long legacy of this moment in the history of ideas and how it might renew our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain today.

The Faustian bargain—in which an individual or group collaborates with an evil entity in order to obtain knowledge, power, or material gain—is perhaps best exemplified by the alliance between world-renowned human geneticists and the Nazi state. Under the swastika, German scientists descended into the moral abyss, perpetrating heinous medical crimes at Auschwitz and at euthanasia hospitals. But why did biomedical researchers accept such a bargain? This book offers a nuanced account of the myriad ways human heredity and Nazi politics reinforced each other before and during the Third Reich. Exploring the ethical and professional consequences for the scientists involved, as well as the political ramifications for Nazi racial policies, it places genetics and eugenics in their larger international context. In questioning whether the motives that propelled German geneticists were different from the compromises which researchers from other countries and eras face, the book aims to extend the argument into our modern moment, as we confront the promises and perils of genomic medicine today.

There is an untold tale of Americans in Paris, a history of expatriation and immigration that parallels the story of the “Lost Generation” expatriates who came to France for creative inspiration. This book argues that the “other Americans in Paris” –American heiresses who married cash-poor French noblemen, wayward souls who got into trouble there but especially American businessmen living on the Right Bank of the Seine – are part of an important story of the early half of the “American Century.” Following these overseas Americans is a way of internationalizing American history while questioning the meaning of “Americanization” in the twentieth century. At the same time, this book is an exercise in immigration history, discussing the parameters of community formation (chapter 1) and the sometimes paradoxical uses of citizenship and of their consulate by citizens abroad (chapter 2). It provides a new perspective on early twentieth-century business history (chapters 4 and 5) while examining the social relations that accompanied it (chapter 3 on marriage and divorce). However, after analyzing the ways in which Americans banded together, chapter 7 turns the community paradigm on its head and examines the interactions and the “reciprocal visions” of Americans and the French. Finally, while recognizing that not all Americans abroad are rich (see chapter 6 on the American poor), this book provides ample proof that “elite migration,” a neglected topic in the field of migration history, can provide a new historic dimension to transnational expats while testing our very class-linked definition of “immigration” itself.

France today is in the throes of a crisis about whether to represent social differences within its political system and, if so, how. It is a crisis defined by the rhetoric of a universalism that takes the abstract individual to be the representative not only of citizens but also of the nation. This book shows how the requirement for abstraction has led to the exclusion of women from French politics. During the 1990s, le mouvement pour la parité successfully campaigned for women's inclusion in elective office with an argument that is unprecedented in the annals of feminism. The paritaristes insisted that if the abstract individual were thought of as sexed, then sexual difference would no longer be a relevant consideration in politics, an argument that the author insists was neither essentialist nor separatist; it was not about women's special qualities or interests. Instead, parité was rigorously universalist—and for that reason was both misunderstood and a source of heated debate.

Horses became an inescapable part of daily life in nineteenth-century France, a time when natural historians debated the purpose of domestication, when artists judged animal emotions from equine eyes, and when the prevalence of horse beatings inspired the first animal protection laws. The combined and contradictory beauty and abuse of horses inspired artists, writers and riders alike. Moving between literature, art, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sport manuals and tracts of public hygiene, this book traces changes in human-horse relations from the psychological intimacies painted by Théodore Géricault to manifestations of willed cooperation in paintings of Rosa Bonheur. It charts the rise and fall of the “man on horseback” from Napoleon to the fin-de siècle circus and the increasing visibility (and distrust) of the woman rider or “amazone” from Gautier to Maupassant. Addressing Jacques Derrida’s “war on pity” in regard to animal suffering it considers the contest of human and animal labor practices as seen in widely publicized essay contests and in works of Eugène Sue, Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola. As the book illustrates how the democratization of riding brought with it an equestrian rhetoric inflected by sex, class and race, it also shows how horse breeding overlapped with national concerns over the degeneration of the French race, and how notions of dressage offered a new model for training the “brutish” masses. At its center the book questions how and why such partnerships between human and horse could also end with horsemeat on the dinner plate.