The Pride of Place - by Stephane Gerson (Paperback)

About the Book

Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane...

Book Synopsis

Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France--from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments.

Review Quotes

Gerson's work demonstrates that, contrary to Parisian stereotypes, a lively and vital intellectual and cultural sphere existed in provincial France.

In combination with his searching examination of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, Gerson's exploration of the continuities and limits of the state's self-conception as intellectual arbiter offers a compelling and original set of insights into the very nature of the political in modern France. We have reason to be grateful that the bureaucratic domain--sometimes humdrum, usually scorned, but always important--has found such an erudite and sympathetic interpreter.

In this imaginative, intelligent, and deeply researched work, Stéphane Gerson renews the attack on the dominant Jacobin and French-university view that France was administratively centralized and culturally One and indivisible in the nineteenth century.... This book breathes a good deal of new life into the French nineteenth century.

It is common knowledge that history was a nineteenth-century enthusiasm, but this volume explores an aspect little known except to scholars working on the departments. They will be entranced to see how obscured learned societies and their publications fitted into a national trend that has helped to create the enthusiasm for le pays which remains a passion today.

This is a book brimming with ideas and overflowing with data. Engagingly written and theoretically informed, it is undoubtedly a key text in the revisionist analysis of the making of French identity.

This thought-provoking and impressively documented book challenges the view that nineteenth-century French culture and politics were essentially about urbanization, centralization, and modernization.... This book will be essential reading for students of nineteenth-century France. However, it will also provide rewarding reading for anyone who has an interest, professional or otherwise, in the ways in which the state seeks to determine the research agenda and control the production of knowledge.

About the Author

Stéphane Gerson is Assistant Professor of French and French Studies at New York University. He is coeditor of Why France? American Historians Reflect Upon Their Enduring Fascination.