Description: The foremost historian of 18th-century France explores how the Old Regime's institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Roche depicts the "culture of appearances"--the food and clothing, living quarters, and reading material of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces.
Brief description: Daniel Roche is Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Directeur d'Études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Review Quotes: France in the Enlightenment, first published in French five years ago and now expertly conveyed into English by that canonical translator of our time, Arthur Goldhammer, is the best cultural history of that extraordinary episode now available. Drawing on a whole generation of new work, it shares the fundamental premise of most historians now active in the field: that to study the Enlightenment is not simply, or even primarily, to study the origins of the French Revolution... Instead of scouring the Enlightenment for symptoms of revolution, [Roche] quarries the Revolution for echoes of the Enlightenment.--William Doyle "New York Times Book Review"