Suchergebnisse

This book, first published in 1984, examines the lifetime of Georges Cuvier, and in his constant and varying struggles to retain his position both as a politician and as a leading naturalist we find displayed almost all of the political tensions of Restoration France. Our understanding of the new French intellectual elite is enhanced if we can explain what sort of power this group wielded, and how it related to the structure of politics as a whole. Cuvier's career epitomises this relationship to the highest degree. Examination of the building of his career under the Directory and Empire offers many new insights into the way the expanding market for science, the restructuring of society as a whole, and the moral authority of science itself could be utilised as resources in the making of a reputation. The influence of scientific competition and controversy on Cuvier's scientific work is examined at length, and it is argued that they exerted a decisive effect on the structure of his biological and geological thinking.

This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event. It was not simply a series of events with worldwide repercussions, but also represented the foundation of the middle-class domination of social, cultural and political space, which survives today and is the site of major crises of public culture. One such site is the body. In spite of its prominence in consumer culture as an object of adornment and beautification, the human body retains none of its historic dignity and authority. The argument of this book is that the French Revolution played a crucial part in this diminution of the body. It traces revolutionary models of behaviour around the body and public life, and explains how such myths as the division between public and private, male and female worlds, and such masculine values as objectivity' were an integral part of the new public world created by the revolutionary middle class.