A Taste for Comfort and Status by Christine Adams

A Taste for Comfort and Status by Christine Adams

The Lamothes were an ordinary family in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. Well-to-do and well respected by their neighbors, they were local notables whose private and public lives suggest the importance of family, kin, and friendship networks, professional activities and cultural interests, as well as a desire to serve the public good. In this portrait of the Lamothes, Christine Adams explores the development of middle-class identity among urban professionals and reconsiders the role of this social group in the coming French Revolution. The most striking feature of this family history is that it is based on more than three hundred personal letters that circulated among the Lamothes—parents and seven siblings—over a period of twenty-five years. Such a collection is rare for this period, and Adams makes the most of it. Her study lends remarkable texture to provincial middle-class life. She weaves these letters into every aspect of the Lamothes' experience—professional, literary, intellectual, social, and civic. She demonstrates a sustained mobilization of all family skills and resources to maintain the status of the males of the family and preserve (rather than risk) the family's emotional and material stability. While their conservative lifestyle suggests that the Lamothes were not "revolutionary," they were, nonetheless, part of the bourgeoisie. Adams thus taps into a potent debate about middle-class consciousness and identity in the eighteenth century, arguing against those historians who doubt that such a social class existed in France before 1789.

“For any scholar examining the economic and financial viability of the family unit, or the degree to which family members related as a working and economic unit as well as an intimate one, this book not only offers a very important and convincing history but provides as well an impressive bibliography that is as thorough as it is interdisciplinary”

—Suzanne R. Pucci Business History Review

Christine Adams is Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She co-edited, with Jack R. Censer and Lisa Jane Graham, Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State, 1997).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780271033594
ISBN 10	0271033592
Title	A Taste for Comfort and Status
Author	Christine Adams
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pennsylvania State University Press
Year published	2000-02-15
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.