Entitlement and Complaint

Ending Careers and Reviewing Lives in Post-Revolutionary France

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

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Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. David G. Troyansky tells two intertwined stories. He traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in “life reviews.” Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes. As employees aged and one cohort replaced another, their attempts to make sense of their careers and lives formed a larger story of post-revolutionary survival.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-06-19
Mått226 x 160 x 33 mm
Vikt544 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor256
FörlagOUP USA
ISBN9780197638750

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David G. Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France and Aging in World History as well as numerous articles on the history of old age and aspects of French cultural history. He is co-editor of Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, The French Revolution in Culture and Society, and a six-volume Cultural History of Old Age.

PrefaceIntroductionPart One: Career and Retirement1. Pensions as Favor and Pensions as Right2. Careering Across the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Divide3. Setting Rules from Old Regime to Midcentury4. Restoration, Revolution, and Retirement: Ending Careers, 1814-1853Part Two: The Language of Retirement5. Entitlement and Complaint: Creating a Rhetoric of Retirement6. Changing Content and Expectations7. Gender, Widowhood, and the Limits of EntitlementConclusionNotesBibliography

This book brilliantly combines archival research with insights from gerontological theory to explain how civil servants in post-Revolutionary France innovated a right to government-funded old-age retirement. This retiring vanguard left a surprisingly rich archive, revealing how they experienced old age. The self-definition of these men and their widows paved the way for twentieth-century concerns about old-age pensions, generational conflict, distributive justice, and the importance of life review. This is a beautiful book that realizes the full potential of crossing disciplinary boundaries between history and gerontology.