Social Laboratory for Modern France

Horne Janet R. Horne

Description

As a nineteenth-century think tank that sought answers to France's pressing "social question," the Musee Social reached across political lines to forge a reformist alliance founded on an optimistic faith in social science. In A Social Laboratory for Modern France Janet R. Horne presents the story of this institution, offering a nuanced explanation of how, despite centuries of deep ideological division, the French came to agree on the basic premises of their welfare state.Horne explains how Musee founders believed-and convinced others to believe-that the Third Republic would carry out the social mission of the French Revolution and create a new social contract for modern France, one based on the rights of citizenship and that assumed collective responsibility for the victims of social change. Challenging the persistent notion of the Third Republic as the stagnant backwater of European social reform, Horne instead depicts the intellectually sophisticated and progressive political culture of a generation that laid the groundwork for the rise of a hybrid welfare system, characterized by a partnership between private agencies and government. With a focus on the cultural origins of turn-of-the-century thought-including religion, republicanism, liberalism, solidarism, and early sociology-A Social Laboratory for Modern France demonstrates how French reformers grappled with social problems that are still of the utmost relevance today and how they initiated a process that gave the welfare state the task of achieving social cohesion within an industrializing republic.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383246
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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A Social Laboratory for Modern France

A Social Laboratory for Modern France

                     

                

Janet R. Horne

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Duke University Press Durham and London  ˜

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Permissions and Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Frontispiece:Progression des sociétés mutualistes en France.: , Stés; : , Stés. Représentant  millions d’individus.Composition par A. L. Copyright: Collection Viollet

          

. The Modern Sphinx: Debating the Social

     .                   

. Inventing a Social Museum

Acknowledgments

Question in Nineteenth-Century France

Index

Notes

Conclusion

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

Bibliography

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Introduction

xi

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Contents



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. A Laboratory for Social Reform



      .                

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. Voluntary Associations and the Republican Ideal

. The Modernity of Hygiene: Interventions in the City

. A Genealogy of Republican Reform

        .                 

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

Je vais le plus rarement possible dans les grandes bibliothèques. J’aime

mieux me promener sur les quais, cette délicieuse bibliothèque publique.

Néanmoins je visite parfois la Nationale ou la Mazarine et c’est à la Biblio-

thèque du Musée social, rue Las Cases, qui je fis connaissance d’un lecteur

singulier qui était un amateur de bibliothèques.

Je me souviens,me dit-il,de lassitudes profondes dans ces villes où j’errais et afin de

me reposer, de me retrouver en famille, j’entrais dans une bibliothèque.

C’est ainsi que vous en connaissez beaucoup.

Elles forment une part importante de mes souvenirs de voyages.

—           ,         Le flaneur des deux rives

I go as rarely as possible to big libraries. I prefer to stroll along the banks [of

the Seine], that wonderful public library.

Nevertheless, I sometimes visit the Bibliothèque nationale, or the Mazarine.

But it was at the Musée social library, on the rue Las Cases, that I met an ex-

traordinary reader who was an amateur of libraries.

‘‘I recall,’’ he told me, ‘‘feeling moments of deep lassitude in the cities where I

roamed; so, in order to rest, to find myself in a family, I would enter a library.’’

‘‘So that is how you know so many of them.’’

‘‘They form an important part of my travel memories.’’