Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters

by Denise Z. Davidson

Overview

Surviving Revolution explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement.

Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501784880
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2025
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Denise Z. Davidson is Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Georgia State University. She is the author of France After Revolution and coauthor of Le roman conjugal.

What People are Saying About This

Sarah Horowicz

Davidson's deeply-textured account moves fluently between intimate and familial and political to show how uncertainty and turmoil made family strategies around marriage, bourgeois self-reproduction, and wealth particularly challenging.

Sarah Horowitz

Davidson's deeply textured account moves fluently between intimate and familial and political to show how uncertainty and turmoil made family strategies around marriage, bourgeois self-reproduction, and wealth particularly challenging.

Christine Adams

Denise Z. Davidson describes in rich detail the anxiety and uncertainty that underlay bourgeois status in a way that only a microhistory can.