History : France

By what channels did the French Enlightenment reach the eighteenth-century Irish reader, and what was its impact? What were the images of Ireland in current France? What did the philosophes like Montesquieu and Voltaire think of the country and its people? These are the questions a team of scholars attempts to answer in this volume. Part I explains who could read French; Part II examines the views of Ireland and the Irish; and Part III explores the transmission of ideas through the importation of French books and translations from a number of cosmopolitan centers. more...

Price: $130.00

On 17 July 1791 the revolutionary National Guard of Paris opened fire on a crowd of protesters: citizens believing themselves patriots trying to save France from the reinstatement of a traitor king. To the National Guard and their political superiors the protesters were the dregs of the people, brigands paid by counter-revolutionary aristocrats. Politicians and journalists declared the National Guard the patriots, and their action a heroic defence of the fledgling Constitution. more...

Price: $45.00

Little more than two hundred years ago, only the most reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared traverse the unmapped territory of the modern-day Middle East. Its history and peoples were the subject of much myth and speculation—and no region aroused greater interest than Egypt, where reports of mysterious monuments, inscrutable hieroglyphics, rare silks and spices, and rumors of lost magical knowledge tantalized dreamers and taunted the power-hungry. It was not until 1798, when an unlikely band of scientific explorers traveled from Paris to the Nile Valley, that Westerners received their first real glimpse of what lay beyond the Mediterranean Sea. Under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Army, a small and little-known corps of Paris's brightest intellectual lights left the safety of their laboratories, studios, and classrooms to embark on a thirty-day crossing into the unknown—some never to see French shores again. Over 150 astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists, doctors, chemists, engineers, botanists, artists—even a poet and a musicologist—accompanied Napoleon's troops into Egypt. Carrying pencils instead of swords, specimen jars instead of field guns, these highly accomplished men participated in the first large-scale interaction between Europeans and Muslims of the modern era. And many lived to tell the tale. Hazarding hunger, hardship, uncertainty, and disease, Napoleon's scientists risked their lives in pursuit of discovery. They approached the land not as colonizers, but as experts in their fields of scholarship, meticulously categorizing and collecting their finds—from the ruins of the colossal pyramids to the smallest insects to the legendary Rosetta Stone. Those who survived the three-year expedition compiled an exhaustive encyclopedia of Egypt, twenty-three volumes in length, which secured their place in history as the world's earliest-known archaeologists. Unraveling the mysteries more...

Price: $19.95

In this fascinating study, Mike Broers explores the intense cultural conflict created by French rule in Italy at the start of the nineteenth century. more...

Price: $120.00

Gives readers a glimpse into the otherwise shrouded existences of gay men in nineteenth-century France. This work relates the experiences of a man about town, a cross-dressing entertainer, a troubled adolescent, and two fetishists, among others. more...

Price: $27.95