Dependence upon grain deeply marked every aspect of life in eighteenth-century France. Steven Kaplan focuses upon this dependence at the point where it placed the greatest strain on the state, the ...society, and the individual—on the daily supply of grain and flour that furnished the staff of life. He reconstructs the history of provisioning in pre-industrial Paris and provides a comprehensive view of a culture shaped by the subsistence imperative. Who were the agents of the provisioning trade? What were their commercial practices? What sorts of relations did they maintain with each other? How did the authorities regulate their business? To answer these questions, Professor Kaplan combed the archives and libraries of France. He maps out the elementary structures of the trade and shows how they were transformed as a result of cultural and political as well as commercial and technological changes. In rich ethnographic detail he evokes the dayto-day life of merchants, millers, bakers, brokers, and market officials. He shows how flour superseded grain and how the millers overtook the merchants in the provisioning process. He explores the tension between the suppliers' need for freedom and the consumers' need for security. Even as he weaves the intricate patterns of life inside and outside the marketplace he never loses sight of the immense interests at stake: the stability and legitimacy of the government, the durability of the social structure, and the survival of the people.
Steven Laurence Kaplan reconstructs and analyzes the loud and bitter arguments over the meaning of the French Revolution which have consumed French intellectuals in recent years. Kaplan recounts the ...contemporary debates over the meaning of the Revolution, tracing the impact of the historians' bitter quarrel, from Parisian academic circles to the public arenas of the bicentennial celebration. He considers the roles played in those arguments by three of France's most influential historians: François Furet, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel Vovelle. In 1993, Editions Fayard published Steven Laurence Kaplan's controversial history of the bicentennial commemoration of the French Revolution. Here available in English is one of the most polemical parts of that work, Kaplan's account of the contemporary debates over the meaning of the Revolution. F arewell, Revolution: The Historians' Feud, France, 1789/1989 traces the impact of the historians' bitter quarrel, from Parisian academic circles to the public arenas of the bicentennial celebration. Kaplan considers in intimate detail the roles played in those arguments by three of France's most influential historians: François Furet, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel Vovelle. As he reenacts the feud, Kaplan invites a reassessment of the relationship between the writing of history and the practice of politics. His book suggests that the charged relationship between history and politics that enlivened the bicentennial may be the Revolution's most enduring legacy.
Work in France Kaplan, Steven Laurence; Koepp, Cynthia J
05/2018
eBook
Eighteen scholars from both sides of the Atlantic look at the question of work across three centuries of French history. Representing both younger and older generations, they move beyond traditional ...disciplinary boundaries in order to consider human labor as it was actually performed and to determine what it has meant to specific groups and individuals at particular historical moments.This book proposes some fundamental revisions in the history of work which will have important implications for our understanding of social, political, economic, and cultural developments not only in France but throughout Europe.
Les apprentissages parisiens aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles Crowston, Clare H; Kaplan, Steven Laurence; Lemercier, Claire
Annales : histoire, sciences sociales (French ed.),
12/2018, Volume:
73e année, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
RésumésL’article discute des changements et des continuités dans les pratiques de l’apprentissage et ses normes sociales, à Paris, avant et après la Révolution française. Il souligne l’intérêt d’une ...analyse quantifiée et de comparaisons entre sources hétérogènes pour aborder ce sujet. Il traite d’abord de la question du rapport entre nombre d’apprenti·es et nombre de maîtres·ses dans chaque métier, ainsi que des aspirations qui pouvaient être celles des apprenti·es et de leurs parents : avec quel espoir entrait-on en apprentissage ? L’étude de trajectoires individuelles pour le xviii e siècle et d’une statistique de l’époque pour le xix e siècle permet notamment d’indiquer que l’apprentissage était loin de toujours déboucher sur une carrière au sein du métier appris. Un travail sur les sources judiciaires montre ensuite que le rôle des tribunaux dans le règlement des conflits autour de l’apprentissage s’est à la fois accru et transformé, en se concentrant sur le respect du temps imparti. L’article illustre enfin la persistance, sur la longue durée, de normes largement partagées définissant les bons apprentissages et de pratiques s’écartant nettement de ces normes, différentes selon le genre et le métier, que ce soit avant ou après la fin des corporations.
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9.
Provisioning Paris Kaplan, Steven Laurence
Provisioning Paris,
09/2018
Book Chapter
“The subsistence of the people is the most essential object that must occupy the administration,” wrote Jacques Necker, minister,philosophe, banker, and grain speculator.¹ Save for two brief ...interludes, this commitment to the consumer-people of France was the uncontested tenet of public policy during the old regime. It was founded on the conviction that social stability could be guaranteed only by guaranteeing the food supply. History seemed to prove beyond a doubt that hunger and dearth had “preceded, prepared and caused” grave, sometimes fatal disorders in Rome, Constantinople, and China. Without order, government could not endure and society could not
François Furet execrated the Marxist line for many reasons, some more overtly avowed than others. One is unlikely ever to be able to measure the tenacious, subterranean influence of his membership in ...the party, the capital of guilt that this experience generated, and its conversion into a crusading, expiatory energy of anger and refutation. He combined the vindictive ardor of the emancipated intellectual exposing and deriding the monumental errors of Communism along with the missionary intensity of the deprogrammer toiling patiently and didactically to free minds from sectarian possession. The revelations of the gulag quickened his resolve; the growing evidence
