Sarah C. Maza

Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty

Here is the first major study of domestic service in France from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, describing its transformation from a male-oriented occupation, aristocratic in style and often geared to public display, to one that was female, middle-class, and centered on the household.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle‐Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France*

Was there a rising middle class in eighteenth-century France, and did it contribute decisively to the upheaval that began in 1789? Right now that question is murkier than ever for having been mostly abandoned in recent years. In the past two decades in the historiography of prerevolutionary France the spotlight has moved away from social issues; while excellent monographs dealing with society continue to appear each year, the central debate on the causes and nature of the French Revolution has focused lately on political life. Amid the flurry of pathbreaking recent publications on political culture, print culture, and political ideologies, of debates on gender, sexuality, and the public and private spheres, we seem to have lost sight of the old question of the middle class. How important, dynamic, and central to society and to historical change were the urban professional and commercial middle classes in eighteenthcentury France? “Very,” argued the now defunct orthodox interpretation, which in the Marxist tradition viewed the Revolution as the result of early capitalist development; “Not at all,” answered the revisionists in the 1970s and 1980s, pointing to the lack of significant social and economic change in France prior to 1789. In recent years assessments of France’s prerevolutionary de-

Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France.

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.