Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women

(To trace the origins of feminist consciousness in France,...)

To trace the origins of feminist consciousness in France, James Smith Allen explores the lives and words of three nineteenth-century women: Marie-Sophie Leroyer, Geneviève Bréton-Vaudoyer, and Céline Renooz-Muro. Though not identifying themselves with any specific group of feminists--indeed, even rejecting the label "feminist"--these women wrote extensively about important feminist issues: marriage, sexuality, education, religion, and politics. Theirs was a discreet, relational feminism that they expressed by considering their relationships to themselves and to others. Because they were less political (and thus less well known) than other feminists, these three women have been neglected by historians and literary theorists. But they are thus more representative of a generation of women who often wrote about, but did not necessarily act on, their independent ideas. For them, writing was transgression enough. By examining the writings of these three figures, including many unpublished diaries, letters, and memorabilia, Allen documents the deliberate efforts of modern French women to construct a stable, reliable, discursive self. A bold experiment in empathetic biography, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women will appeal to readers interested in history, literary theory, and women's studies. Originally published in 2000.

https://www.amazon.com/Poignant-Relations-Three-Modern-French/dp/0801862043

2000

In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800-1940 (Princeton Legacy Library)

( Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, and others have written...)

Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, and others have written much on the history of reading in the Old Regime, but this is the first broad study of reading to focus on the period after 1800. How and why did people understand texts as they did in modern France? In answering this question, James Allen moves easily from one interpretive framework to another and draws on a wide range of sources--novels, diaries, censor reports, critical reviews, artistic images, accounts of public and private readings, and the letters that readers sent to authors about their books. As he analyzes reading "in the public eye," the author explores the formation of "interpretive communities" during the years when reading silently and alone gradually became more common than reading aloud in a group. In the Public Eye discusses printing, publishing, literacy, schooling, criticism, and censorship, to study the social, cultural, economic, and political forces that shaped French interpretive practice. Examining the art and act of reading by different audiences, it discloses the mentalities of literate people for whom few other historical records exist. The book will be essential reading for those interested in modern French history, post-structuralist literary theory and criticism, reader-response theory and criticism, and social and intellectual history in general. Originally published in 1991.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691031622/?tag=2022091-20

In the Solitude of My Soul: The Diary of Genevieve Breton

(Originally published to glowing reviews and literary priz...)

Originally published to glowing reviews and literary prizes in France in 1985, this revealing diary not only recounts the moving and tragic relationship of its author, Geneviève Bréton, with the rising young nineteenth-century artist Henri Regnault, it also serves as a valuable historical document concerning the social, cultural, and political life of the French Second Empire. The young Geneviève Bréton began her journal in 1867 as a consolation for the death of her eldest brother, Antoine. She met Regnault soon after on a trip to Rome. Throughout the next four years of their relationship, Bréton eloquently describes the personal, cultural, and political turbulence that affected her life. Writing against the backdrop of France’s fateful conflict with Prussia and the hardships and dangers of the siege of Paris and the Commune, Bréton, with innate candor and lyricism, creates a text that beautifully illuminates French art, literature, family life, society, and politics of the time. Her poignant account of her love for and engagement to Regnault reveals special insight into the life and mind of an extraordinary, though little known, literary talent. At Regnault’s death in 1871 during the Franco–Prussian War, the expression of her anguish is as much testimony to the political and cultural disorder of the time as it is to her own personal tragedy. Following Bréton’s own instructions that she left before her death in 1918, this English version of the diary reincorporates material that was deleted from the French edition. Graced by rare photographs of the Bréton family as well as Regnault’s paintings, the book contains a touching foreword by the author’s granddaughter, Daphné Doublet-Vaudoyer. In its first English translation, it is a book for lovers of French life and culture, as well as students of French history; literature, and art.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Q2WC30/?tag=2022091-20

Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the 19th Century

(This impressive work is the first attempt to discover the...)

This impressive work is the first attempt to discover the place that romantic ideas had in the lives of ordinary men and women in nineteenth-century France. Focusing on the Paris book world of this period, Allen reveals how the rise of a new popular literature--jolly chansonniers, the romans-feuilletons or serial novels, melodramas, gothic and sentimental novels, dramatic nationalistic histories--by such authors as Dumas, Sand, Lamennais, Ancelot, Desnoyer, and de Kock coincided with remarkable developments in the production, distribution, and consumption of books. Allen's research ranges from a survey of the then-popular romantic titles and authors and the trade catalogs of booksellers and lending libraries, to the police records of their activities, diaries and journals of working people, and military conscript records and ministerial literacy statistics. The result is a remarkable picture of the exchange between elite and popular culture, the interaction between ideas and their material reality, and the relationship between the literature and the history of France in the romantic period. Originally published in 1981.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815622325/?tag=2022091-20

A Civil Society: The Public Space of Freemason Women in France, 1744-1944

(A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women a...)

A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women as full participants in the masonic brotherhood that shared in the rise of France’s civil society and its “civic morality” on behalf of women’s rights. As a vital component of the third sector during France’s modernization, freemasonry empowered women in complex social networks, contributing to a more liberal republic, a more open society, and a more engaged public culture. James Smith Allen shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society, including the promotion of women’s rights in the late nineteenth century. Pulling together the many gendered facets of masonry, Allen draws from periodicals, memoirs, and archival material to account for the rise of women within the masonic brotherhood in the context of rapid historical change. Thanks to women’s social networks and their attendant social capital, masonry came to play a leading role in French civil society and the rethinking of gender relations in the public sphere. Originally published in 2021

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496227782/