Paris in the Age of Absolutism PDF Download

Author: Orest Ranum
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046457
Category : Paris (France)
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Author: Orest A. Ranum
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
By the eighteenth century Paris was one of the great wonders of Europe, renowned for its magnificent royal monuments and as a center for science, literature, and the arts. More so than any other European city, Paris reflected the spirit of an age--an age that reached its zenith with the reign of France's Sun King, Louis XIV. No book better captures that spirit than Orest Ranum's Paris in the Age of Absolutism, first published in 1968 and now reissued in a revised and expanded edition. Ranum's tour of Paris begins in the late 1500s with a French capital city exhausted by the violence of the Wars of Religion and proceeds through the long century that ends with the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Henry IV (1589-1610), head of the Bourbon branch of the royal family, laid the foundations of modern Paris, but it was during the mature years of his grandson, Louis XIV, and during the service of his visionary minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, that a New Rome was created. By 1715 the city was far different from what it had been in 1590. There were now large geometrical public squares with statues of the King at their focal point. There were arches of triumph, hospital-prisons, a new and gigantic wing on the Louvre, handsome stone bridges, streetlights, and massive stone quays along the Seine. Ranum ranges widely through the streets and quarters of Paris, attentive to the achievements of town planners, architects, and engineers as well as to city politics, social currents, and the spirit of religious reform. Behind it all lay the rule-creating authoritarianism of the absolute state, which, ironically, unleashed Parisians' creative impulses in everything from literature, painting, and music to architecture, mathematics, and physics. Paris in the Age of Absolutism is one of those rare books that combines elegant prose with stunning erudition, making it both captivating for general readers and challenging to scholars. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account the wealth of scholarship that has appeared since 1968. Of particular note are a new introduction and a new chapter on women writers. A larger format accentuates a full selection of illustrations, many of them new to this edition.

Author: Orest A. Ranum
Publisher: Midland Books
ISBN: 9780253202383
Category : Paris
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Author: Geoffrey Treasure
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134980590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Mazarin was the model statesman of the early modern period in French history. This book follows his career from pupil of the Jesuits, through legate in Paris and Avignon, to service for Louis XIII and beyond. Mazarin's role in the survival of absolute monarchy during the upheavals of the Fronde and his guidance of the young Louis XIV are given full weight. His crucial part in many diplomatic exchanges, and in particular those which brought an end to the Thirty Years War and the Franco-Spanish War, is examined in detail. His life is placed in the context of a study of the times, highlighting the rapidly changing nature of government.

Author: Michael S. Kimmel
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9780887381805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Author: William Beik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521367820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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This analysis of the provincial reality of absolutism argues that the relationship between the regional aristocracy and the crown was a key factor in influencing the traditional social system of seventeenth century France.

Author: Maurice Ashley
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Illustrated the impact of diverse movements and various individuals on European history and on development in the U.S., Asia, and elsewhere.

Author: William Farr Church
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Author: Ragnhild Marie Hatton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349169811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Author: Yves-Marie Bercé
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312158071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Yves-Marie Bercé's The Birth of Absolutism offers a refreshingly original approach to the history of France between the Edict of Nantes and the personal rule of Louis XIV, a period dominated by the names of two cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin. Berce brings to the task not only familiarity with the sources and with the French historiography, but also a thorough acquaintance with the large body of English and American research upon seventeenth-century France. This has enabled him to escape the diminishing perspective of an older French school, the 'grand history told from Paris' which subordinated the course of events to an account of the inevitable triumph of the 'Royal state'. Bercé's vision of French history is not of a 'one-way ticket to the future'. The French Crown is beset by aristocratic faction only too ready to avail itself of royal minorities, religious dissent or provincial grievances in the pursuit of its own ambitions. Richelieu is not only the brilliant strategist with a mission to undermine Habsburg hegemony in Europe, he is also a political gambler, staking the very stability of the kingdom on an interventionist foreign policy which was sometimes saved from utter disaster only by the fortunes of battle. Mazarin is not only the mentor of Louis XIV, but a deft operator with an uncanny ability to come back from the political dead. Bercé's own researches into provincial history are put to good effect in showing how the fiscal and military demands of war created social and economic strains which provoked regular peasant risings and culminated in the more organised and threatening opposition of the Fronde. The story of early seventeenth-century France is thus one which might have turned out very differently. It is still, in the end, a story of the rise of absolutism: but it is a highly resistible, and often fiercely resisted rise.