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The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a
time when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and earlier eras
took recognizable form, and the supreme individual, with a political, scientific,
and above all existential value, emerged. The present book, fourth in the celebrated
series, chronicles this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to
the outbreak of World War I -- a period of rapid, ungovernable change culminating
in a conflict that, at a stroke, altered life in the Western world. Guided
by six eminent historians, we move from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century,
which conceived of man as a noble creature of reason, into nineteenth-century
Romanticism with its affirmation of distinctly individual beings in all their
mystery and impulsiveness, exalting intuition as a mode of knowledge. More and
more, men and women wanted to sleep alone, to be left alone to read and write,
to dress as they pleased, to eat or drink anything they liked, to consort with
and love whomever they fancied. Growing democracies advanced those wishes to the
status of rights, expanding markets stimulated them, and migration encouraged
them. That new frontier, the city, weakened family and community constraints and
traditional beliefs and spurred personal ambitions. The
authors demonstrate the nineteenth century's organized effort to stabilize the
boundary between public and private by mooring it to the family, with the father
as sovereign. The new domestic ideal was the private dwelling as a refuge from
perils and temptations in the public arena, the father as benevolent despot, the
wife as contented practitioner of domestic arts, the children as small versions
of righteous adults. Particularly in England, the middle class was central to
the formation of this homely standard, which spread to the working classes through
evangelical preaching, utilitarian writings, and the separation of home and workplace.
At the same time, the gentry was transforming castles into country houses, knights
into foxhunters, and landowners into gentleman farmers. The domesticating process
also expressed itself in hygienic practices (soap, waterclosets, bathtubs), fashions
in clothing, and vogues in sports, courtship, and lovemaking. From
the time of the French Revolution, when private or special interests were looked
upon as shadowy influences likely to foster conspiracy and treason, through the
rapid transformations of the nineteenth century, the authors reveal the more radical
forms of modernity that arrived with the twentieth century, with its explosions
of trade and technology. Besides the external development of goods and conveniences,
the expanses of the psyche were also being reorganized, bringing a new openness
about sexuality liberated from procreation and marriage. Feminism, a relatively
sporadic movement in the nineteenth century, became a more persistent force, while
young people and the avant-garde continued to break the rules and push for change
as an end in itself. The declaration of war in 1914 put a hold on some of the
flowering of individuality, but the trend toward personality nurtured by private
life was only temporarily curbed. Michelle Perrot,
Professor at the University de Paris-VII, provides an introduction and conclusion,
as well as three chapters. Other contributors include Lynn Hunt, Catherine Hall,
Anne Martin-Fugier, Roger-Henri Guerrand, and Alain Corbin. |
