Suchergebnisse

"This innovative study of the lives of ordinary people - peasants, fishermen, textile workers - in nineteenth-century France demonstrates how folklore collections can be used to shed new light on the socially marginalized. David Hopkin explores the ways in which people used traditional genres such as stories, songs and riddles to highlight problems in their daily lives and give vent to their desires without undermining the two key institutions of their social world - the family and the community. The book addresses recognized problems in social history such as the division of power within the peasant family, the maintenance of communal bonds in competitive environments, and marriage strategies in unequal societies, showing how social and cultural history can be reconnected through the study of individual voices recorded by folklorists. Above all, it reveals how oral culture provided mechanisms for the poor to assert some control over their own destinies"--

After Verdun fell to the Prussians in 1792, a group of women carried a basket of sugared almonds to the King of Prussia's tent. Twelve of these 'Virgins of Verdun' would pay with their lives for this gesture during the Terror. This article attempts to explain the women's actions in terms of the models of behaviour available to them, derived from an early modern 'culture of war' associated with sieges, as well as the new opportunities for women, created by the Revolution, to express their own political choices. It also attempts to unravel the motives of those who prosecuted the Virgins, and those who celebrated their 'sacrifice'. Verdun was one of the first chapters in the modern cultural history of war, and so is a chance to explore changing ideas about the role of civilians in warfare, the autonomous personality of cities, and the public life of women.

The purpose of this article is to show how specific aspects of the popular culture of Lorraine (eastern France) can be linked to distinctive features of the region's historical demography after the Thirty Years' War. It examines two customs associated with courtship: the dâyage, an exchange of riddle-like verses between groups of men and women at winter wakes, and the dônage, mock banns of marriage called by young men on the first Sunday of Lent. Both will be shown to have encouraged particularly high levels of geographical endogamy and premarital fertility, while the metaphors of monetary exchange that ran through both the dâyage and the dônage into the marriage service itself encouraged social homogamy. These customs served as a language in which rural Lorrainers between the seventeenth and the twentieth century could analyze and discuss their demographic strategies. The article considers the role of local elites (political before the Revolution, literary after) in fostering these customs and turning them into a badge of Lorrainer identity.

Marauding first emerged as a suitable topic for the popular imagery manufacturers located in France's eastern garrison cities in the wake of the Allied invasions of 1814-15. During the nineteenth century, however, domestic marauders replaced foreign soldiers as a central theme in military imagery. While foreign soldiers were condemned for such actions, French soldiers were lauded for their marauding talent. Marauding was depicted as part of a martial re-education programme, in which rural recruits were taught to despise their peasant origins and to prey on their countrymen. Thus the soldier acquired a new military morality and developed the skills of quick-wittedness and individual bravura so necessary for his new occupation. Because such fl air was conceived of as inherently Gallic, marauding was also a process of becoming more French. For the state authorities, who censored the production of popular imagery and were even major customers (through the schools), such prints were a means of preparing young men for the transformation from peasants into Frenchmen.