| Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After Contributor(s): Sahlins, Peter (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801488397 ISBN-13: 9780801488399 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $53.41 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2003 Annotation: In recent decades the combined pressures of immigration, European integration, and globalization have sparked profound crises of identity in France. Against this backdrop, scholars of France have begun to investigate the genealogy of nationality and citizenship. In his rich and learned new book, Peter Sahlins treats these themes historically, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, from an unusual and unexpected perspective: how and why foreigners became French citizens in the Old Regime and after. "Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the histories of thousands of individual foreigners and their families whose social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. In his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization, Sahlins draws on a wide range of juridical and political writings to consider the neglected problems of citizenship and state membership in the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy. Rather than date the establishment of modern political citizenship and nationality law from the French Revolution of 1789, Sahlins argues that the transformations began in the "citizenship revolution" of the eighteenth century He finds that changes in nationality law and political culture in the eighteenth century led to the much-contested abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins also shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizenship that found its expression before the French Revolution. His original andexhaustive treatment of naturalization sheds light on our understanding of not only the sources of the French revolution and the revolutionary process, but also its consequences. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Europe - France - Social Science | Emigration & Immigration - History | Social History |
| Dewey: 323.623 |
| LCCN: 2003020422 |
| Physical Information: 1.06" H x 6.54" W x 9.24" (1.58 lbs) 472 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 1800-1850 - Chronological Period - 16th Century - Chronological Period - 17th Century - Chronological Period - 18th Century - Cultural Region - French |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the tens of thousands of foreign citizens whose exhaustively researched social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. Sahlins makes a signal contribution to the legal history of nationality in his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership.Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This citizenship revolution, long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject. The author completes his original book with a study of naturalization under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. Tracing the twisted history of the foreign citizen from the Old Regime to the New, Sahlins sheds light on the continuities and ruptures of the revolutionary process, and also its consequences. |
Contributor Bio(s): Sahlins, Peter: - Peter Sahlins is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees; and Forest Rites: the War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France; and coauthor, with Jean-François Dubost, of Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres. |