Pride of Place

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.

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.- Robert Gildea, Merton College, Oxford (Journal of Contemporary European Studies) Gerson's work demonstrates that, contrary to Parisian stereotypes, a lively and vital intellectual and cultural sphere existed in provincial France.- D. A. Harvey (Choice) 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.- Daniel J. Sherman, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (H-France) 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.- Pamela Pilbeam (History) 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.- Bertrand Taithe (French History) 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.- Ceri Crossley (French Studies)