Becoming Bourgeois - by Christopher H Johnson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Becoming Bourgeois traces the fortunes of three French families in the municipality of Vannes, in Brittany--Galles, Jollivet, and Le Ridant--who rose to prominence in publishing, law, the military, public administration, and intellectual pursuits over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Book Synopsis

Becoming Bourgeois traces the fortunes of three French families in the municipality of Vannes, in Brittany--Galles, Jollivet, and Le Ridant--who rose to prominence in publishing, law, the military, public administration, and intellectual pursuits over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Revisiting complex issues of bourgeois class formation from the perspective of the interior lives of families, Christopher H. Johnson argues that the most durable and socially advantageous links forging bourgeois ascent were those of kinship. Economic success, though certainly derived from the virtues of hard work and intelligent management, was always underpinned by marriage strategies and the diligent intervention of influential family members.Johnson's examination of hundreds of personal letters opens up a whole world: the vicissitudes of courtship; the centrality of marriage; the depths of conjugal love; the routines of pregnancy and the drama of childbirth; the practices of child rearing and education; the powerful place of siblings; the role of kin in advancing the next generation; tragedy and deaths; the enormous contributions of women in all aspects of becoming bourgeois; and the pleasures of gathering together in intimate soirées, grand balls, country houses, and civic and political organizations. Family love bound it all together, and this is ultimately what this book is about, as four generations of rather ordinary provincial people capture our hearts.

Review Quotes

Becoming Bourgeois joins the vibrant scholarship on the history of emotions, particularly on love and family in the modern era. It is as engaging as it is significant for the history of modern France and of the European bourgeoisie by a preeminent scholar of the history of social class formation.

Following an interconnected set of families in the western French city of Vannes from the end of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, Christopher H. Johnson argues that kinship--especially marital strategies and the cultivation of intense familial affection--made the modern bourgeoisie.... Becoming Bourgeois is a model for combining social and cultural history. Johnson knows the traditional materials of social history--tax rolls, property transactions, and voter lists--inside and out. He is also fully in command of the état-civil and the details of the marriages, births, and deaths on the Jollivet-Galles family trees. His sympathetic and meticulous readings of the family correspondence make the archive of social and demographic history come to life.

Johnson's latest book, in my opinion, represents his supreme intellectual achievement. Since the turn of the century, his method of studying economic history--culling data, facts, and testimony from archives; synthesizing and interpreting them by means of theories of development and crisis--has been overtaken by studies of the writings on political economy.

The book chips away at our assumptions about a period and a class thatseem to epitomize 'separate spheres.' It convincingly demonstrates the importance of studying the inner life of a family--its taken-for-granteds, its habitus, and within the grid of kinship that provides the bedrock of class solidarity. It is also a delight to read.

About the Author

Christopher H. Johnson is Professor of History Emeritus at Wayne State University. He is the author of Utopian Communism in France, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920, and Maurice Sugar and coeditor most recently of Blood and Kinship.