Cultural History

This book is an account of Old Regime Europe that explores the cultural revolution that transformed 18th-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV’s Versailles was pushed from the centre to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space — the public sphere. The book shows how many of the world’s most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library, the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic. It was here that public opinion staked its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of culture and politics. For the established order this new force was to prove both a challenge and an opportunity and the book’s comparative study of power and culture shows how regimes sought to keep their balance as the ground moved beneath their feet. In the process the book explains, among other things, why Britain won the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ against France, how Prussia rose to become the dominant power in German-speaking Europe, and why the French monarchy collapsed.

This is a double biography of Jean-Marie Roland (1734–1793) and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, later Madame Roland (1754–1793), leading figures in the French Revolution. J.‐M. Roland was minister of the Interior for a total of eight months during 1792. The couple were close to Brissot and the Girondins, and both died during the Terror. Mme Roland became famous for her posthumous prison memoirs, and is the subject of many biographies, but her husband, despite being a key figure in administration of France, seldom out of the limelight during his time in office, is often marginalized in histories of the Revolution, This book examines the Roland marriage from its beginnings in an ancien regime mésalliance, opposed by both families, through its close cooperation in the 1780s, to its final phase as a political partnership during the Revolution. Both Roland’s actions as minister and Mme Roland’s role as a woman close to power were praised and blamed at the time, and the controversies have persisted. Based on manuscript sources including unpublished letters, this study sets out to examine an unusual companionate marriage over the long term: its intimacy, parenthood, everyday life in the provinces, friendships, academic cooperation, political enthusiasms and quarrels, and finally its dramatic ending during the Revolution.