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 Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure.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. 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.
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.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses-from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps-Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city. A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, realiste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 354 pages, b&w illustrations. An illustrated study brings to life the atmosphere and personalities of pre-revolutionary Paris, traces their influence on the American envoy, and recounts his participation in the life of the city and its intrigues at court. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice, unclipped dust jacket with light tanning to spine. 290 pages plus index. Clean copy. THE ENLIGHTENMENT has long been the victim of uninformed or hostile criticisms. Even so respected a source as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the Enlightenment as "shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition," thus collecting in one sentence most of our current prejudices. In this provocative book--at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic--Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot--to the esteem they deserve.
Hardcover. NY, Walker & Company, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. chronicles the Roman Catholic Church's crusade against--and ultimate annihilation of--the Albigenses, or Cathars, a group of heretical Christians who thrived in what is now the Languedoc region of Southern France. The Cathars held revolutionary beliefs that threatened the authority of the church. The world, they maintained, was not created by a benevolent God. Rather, it was the creation of a force of darkness, immanent in all things. They considered worldly authority a fraud, and authority based on some divine sanction, such as claimed by the church, outright hypocrisy. Innocent III, resolved to eradicate the Cathar threat to church authority, recruited the military powers of France, eager to expand their territory to the south. Together, they systematically exterminated the Cathars and their supporters in a series of crusades between 1209 and 1229. The Dominican-led Inquisition that ensued built upon this momentum of intolerance and tormented Europe for centuries to come. 333 pages, endpapers map.
Hardcover. University AL, University of Alabama Press, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, red cloth covers in a lightly worn dust jacket. Here are the passionate memoirs of the French Communard leader, a hero, saint and martyr to the socialists and anarchists battling the injustices of the Third Republic. 202 pages with a bibliography. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Greenwich CT, New York Graphic Society, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, dark red cloth/dark red DJ. 144 pp. 108 bw plates. All of Falconet's major works and attributions are illustrated in gravure, with many details. Includes a translation from the French of Falconet's Reflections sur la sculpture by Eda Mezer Levitine.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 441 pages, index, notes, glossary, chronology, b&w illustrations. A dramatic new interpretation of the French Revolution that draws troubling parallels with today's politic and religious fundamentalism.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with some fading, 461 pages. History of the six-year period between the fall of Robespierre and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Bookplate on inside front cover, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 385 pages, b&w illustrations. In this highly original history of the world's most famous bicycle race, Christopher S. Thompson, mining previously neglected sources and writing with infectious enthusiasm for his subject, tells the compelling story of the Tour de France from its creation in 1903 to the present. Weaving the words of racers, politicians, Tour organizers, and a host of other commentators together with a wide-ranging analysis of the culture surrounding the event including posters, songs, novels, films, and media coverage Thompson links the history of the Tour to key moments and themes in French history. He argues persuasively that this hugely popular sporting event has been instrumental in French attempts to grapple with the great challenges they have confronted during their tumultuous twentieth century from World Wars, political divisions, and class conflict to economic modernization, women's emancipation, and threats to public health. Name on half title page, otherwise clean.