France

Softcover. Paris, S.N.E.P., 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. very good. 116 tipped-in color plates, folio, printed beige boards. Paris: Editions SNEP, (1952). Very good (+). The evolution of painting in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the 18th century. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 447 pages, b&w illustrations. Sylvia Beach ran a bookshop in Paris in the 1920s and 30s and was at the heart of the literary world there which also included Hemingway, Pound, Flanner, Gide, and of course Joyce whose novel "Ulysses" she published. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Vintage, 1st pbk, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages. That Sweet Enemy brings both British wit (Robert Tombs is a British historian) and French panache (Isabelle Tombs is a French historian) to bear on three centuries of the history of Britain and France. From Waterloo to Chirac's slandering of British cooking, the authors chart this cross-channel entanglement and the unparalleled breadth of cultural, economic, and political influence it has wrought on both sides, illuminating the complex and sometimes contradictory aspects of this relationship--rivalry, enmity, and misapprehension mixed with envy, admiration, and genuine affection--and the myriad ways it has shaped the modern world. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, New York Review Books, 1st US., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 488 pages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, French aristocratic society developed an art of living based on a refined code of good manners. Conversation, which began as a way of passing time, eventually became the central ritual of social life. In the salons, freed from the rigidity of court life, it was women who dictated the rules and presided over exchanges among socialites, writers, theologians, and statesmen. They contributed decisively to the development of the modern French language, new literary forms, and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas. With a cast of characters both famous and unknown, ranging from the Marquise de Rambouillet to Madame De Stael was a, and including figures like Ninon de Lenclos, the Marquise de Sevigne, and Madame de Lafayette, as well as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Diderot, and Voltaire, Benedetta Craveri traces the history of this worldly society that carried the art of sociability to its supreme perfection-and ultimately helped bring on the Revolution that swept it all away. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Faber & Faber, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages. In the twelfth century, Languedoc, in the far south, was among the most beautiful parts of France, far away from the world of the feudal north. However, it was in this rich region that a heresy of Eastern origin took hold, forcing the Catholic Church to confront a rival whose teachings questioned the foundations of Christian thought. These heretics, called Cathars, held a profoundly pessimistic view of the world that was based on the duality of all things, including good and evil: according to one heretic, "The one, the good God, made the invisible world, while the other, the evil God, made the visible one." Jonathan Sumption's acclaimed history examines the roots of this heresy as well as of the crusade the Church undertook in 1208 to stamp out the infidels, who ultimately were conquered by the Catholic armies. But this book does more than simply describe this terrible war; it reconstructs a lost world of great cultural richness, one that saw the creation in Languedoc of the troubadour tradition as well as the magnificent castles at Cabaret and Carcassonne. Clean copy.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages. Noel Burch and Genevieve Sellier adopt a sociocultural approach to films made in France before, during, and after World War II, paying particular attention to the Occupation years (1940-44). The authors contend that the films produced from the 1930s until 1956--when the state began to subsidize the movie industry, facilitating the emergence of an "auteur cinema"--are important, both as historical texts and as sources of entertainment.Citing more than 300 films and providing many in-depth interpretations, Burch and Sellier argue that films made in France between 1930 and 1956 created a national imaginary that equated masculinity with French identity. They track the changing representations of masculinity, explaining how the strong patriarch who saved fallen or troubled women from themselves in prewar films gave way to the impotent, unworthy, or incapable father figure of the Occupation. After the Liberation, the patriarch reemerged as protector and provider alongside assertive women who figured as threats not only to themselves but to society as a whole. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. NY/London, Verso, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dustjacket. The violence that has ravaged Algeria has often defied explanation. Regularly invoked in debates about political Islam, transitions to democracy, globalization, and the right of humanitarian interference, Algeria's tragedy has been reduced to a clash of stereotypes: Islamists vs.a secular state, terrorists vs. innocent civilians, or generals vs. a defenseless society. The prevalence of such simplistic representations has disabled public opinion inside as well as outside the country and contributed to the intractability of the conflict. This collection of essays offers a radical corrective to Western misconceptions. Rejecting essentialist and determinist approaches, Hugh Roberts explores the outlook and evolution of the various internal forces as they emerged--the Islamists, the Berberists, the factions within the army, and the regime in general--and he looks at external interests and actors. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 200 pages, b&w illustrations. Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliche of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding-all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world-it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Belgium, Brepols , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 696 pages, 34 b/w illustrations.The rise of modern science and European colonial and imperial expansion are indisputably two defining elements of modern world history. James E. McClellan III and Francois Regourd explore these two world-historical forces and their interactions in this comprehensive and in-depth history of the French case in the Old Regime presented here for the first time. The case is key because no other state matched Old-Regime France as a center for organized science and because contemporary France closely rivaled Britain as a colonial power, as well as leading all other nations in commodity production and participating in the slave trade. Based on extensive archival research and vast primary and secondary literatures and sharply reframing the historiography of the field, this landmark volume traces the development and significance for early-modern history of the Colonial Machine of Old-Regime France, an unparalleled agglomeration of institutions geared to the success of the French colonial enterprise, including the Royal Navy, the Academie Royale des Sciences, the Jardin du Roi, and a host of related specialist institutions working together at home and overseas. Mainly supported by the French state, the Colonial Machine reveals itself through its actions from the time of Colbert and Louis XIV as it grappled with fundamental problems facing contemporary European colonialism. SIGNED LETTER from co-author McClelland laid in. Clean copy.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st pbk, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 180 pages. The spirit of an event consecrated in anarchist legend is captured in these documents. Eyewitness reports, accounts of participants, and archival documents are used by Dr Edwards to illustrate the many facets of the seventy-three-day Paris Commune of 1871, the largest urban insurrection in modern history. Each section of the book is preceded by an explanatory note, and footnotes clarify contemporary references The introduction to the documents provides a general survey of the origins and events of the Commune. Bright, clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st US, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 301 pages. The classic study of the life of the nobility at the royal court of France, especially under Louis XIV. Paper tanning slightly, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Curt Valentin, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, textured beige boards with a green cloth spine. 94 pages of text and 58 black & white plates. Limited to 1,000 copies. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 440 pages. Black cloth, no dust jacket. The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France's most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois's work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois's political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois's intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss.

Softcover. Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 225 pages. First published in 1930 and untranslated until now, this is one of the minor classics of French historical literature. The author relates the bizarre beginnings of the Third Republic during the presidency of Adolphe Thiers (1871-1873), when an assembly dominated by monarchists groped uncertainly toward the establishment of a republican government.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1925, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, purple cloth gilt lettering and decoration on spine, gilt medallion on front cover. 355 pages, color frontispiece. Illustrated with several B&W maps and reproductions. Mild fade to spine. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Alcove Press , 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with foxing, tanning. No markings.

Softcover. Honolulu HA, University Press of the Pacific, reprint, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. First published in 1874, 448 pages with index. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 339 pages, b&w illustrations. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) dominated life in England and France for well over a century. It became the defining feature of existence for generations. This sweeping book is the first to tell the human story of the longest military conflict in history. Historian David Green focuses on the ways the war affected different groups, among them knights, clerics, women, peasants, soldiers, peacemakers, and kings. He also explores how the long war altered governance in England and France and reshaped peoples' perceptions of themselves and of their national character. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 310 pages. Jacques Adler (1927-2017) was born in 1927. Jacques brought his experience in the Resistance to the study of history and used it in his pioneering Ph.D. Jacques joined the Jewish underground in Paris and was active throughout the war. During the Liberation, Jacques was involved in the Resistance takeover of the offices of the Union generale des israelites de France (UGIF), the organization which the Vichy regime forced French Jews to create and pay for in order to control the Jewish community. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, maroon cloth with orange lettering. Two-color plates, b&w endpapers drawing by Leo O'Donnell. Dust jacket worn with major chipping. Book is clean, tight copy. The story of a fatherless youth in thirteenth century, battling his cousin for his ancestral castle and inheritance.

Hardcover. Philadelphia , Hogan and Thompson, reprint, 1836, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, leather bound, 285 pages with index. Front fly leaf gone, book opens to title page. Hinges cracked, rear cover barely holding on. No markings.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 220 pages.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 199 pages illustrated in color. This book provides a new way of thinking about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture by prioritizing production over reception. Abandoning the ideologically driven discourse that distinguished fine from decorative art between the 1690s and 1770s, The Mobile Image reveals how the two have been inextricably bound from the earliest stages of artistic instruction through the daily life of painters' workshops. In this study, author David Pullins defines artisanal and artistic means of learning, seeing, and making through a system of "mobile images": motifs that were effectively engineered for mobility and designed never to be definitive, always awaiting replication and circulation. He examines the careers of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and Francois Boucher, situating them against a much broader cast of actors--such as printmakers, publishers, anonymous studio assistants, and architects, among others--to place eighteenth-century painting within a wider context of media and making. clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pegasus Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. In 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years between, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors - notably English, Russian and American - attracted the talented, rich and famous as well as those who wanted to be. For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Clean copy.