St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
The Centre for French History and Culture of the University of St Andrews, together with the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution at Florida State University and the University of London Institute in Paris, is pleased to announce the publication of the second volume in its new series for French history: “St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture”.
The second title, now available, is:
“Caste, Class and Profession in Old Regime France: the French Army and the Ségur Reform of 1781” by David D. Bien, with Jay M. Smith and Rafe Blaufarb (St Andrews, 2010: ISBN 978-1-907548-02-4 [paperback], ISBN 978-1-907548-03-1 [e-book])
First published in French in 1974, David D. Bien’s essay on the nature of nobility in old regime France pivoted around the 1781 “Ségur regulation” that required four generations of nobility for most officers entering the army. Once seen as a classic manifestation of the so-called “aristocratic reaction” against commoners, the loi Ségur, in Bien’s deft analysis, instead emerges as a telling sign of tensions within an increasingly divided nobility. While exploding crude myths about class conflict and its causative role in the Revolution, Bien mounts a strong case for viewing eighteenth-century social tensions as the product of professional identity as much as social class. This study is presented here for the first time in English with a short preface by Rafe Blaufarb, and a wide-ranging introduction by Jay M. Smith that places Bien’s work in the wider context of historical thinking over the past half-century on the origins of the French Revolution.
Published paperback copies will shortly be available in leading world libraries, and may be obtained through on-demand print from the Centre. E-book files may be consulted and downloaded through the webpage of the Centre for French History and Culture and through the Digital Research Repository of the University of St Andrews.
The titles in this series are FREE, and libraries are warmly invited to establish an e-book link in their catalogue systems to this series.
TO LINK YOUR WEBBROWSER OR YOUR UNIVERSITY LIBRARY TO THE SERIES AND ITS TITLES GO TO:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/frenchcentre/publications.shtml
Future publications for 2011-13 will include:
- an essay collection on Geneva and the French Wars of Religion edited by Sara Barker
- Malcolm Walsby’s edition of a sixteenth-century protestant pastor’s journal
- an essay collection on women and wills in medieval and early modern France edited by Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Kathryn Reyerson
- Carolina Armenteros’s study of women and aristocracy in the revolutionary age
For further details on this series, and on how to publish in it, please contact the editor-in-chief, Dr Guy Rowlands, at the University of St Andrews.
