Consumption, Sociability, and Mobility: Daniel Roche and French Historical Studies
One of the foremost historians of early modern France, Daniel Roche (1935-2023) had a tremendous impact on both sides of the Atlantic. A 2004 special issue of French Historical Studies devoted to his work contained reflections by leading Anglophone historians and a response by Roche. The project here is distinct: a collection of articles by French and American scholars testifying to Roche’s formative influence on our field through the questions, themes, and approaches they adopt.
Elizabeth Bond’s analysis of letters to the editor in newspapers responds to Roche’s early study of provincial academies and his career-long engagement with quantitative methods. Two articles provide further contributions to Roche’s pioneering work on the Consumer Revolution. Julia Landweber highlights the global context of consumption through an investigation of the introduction of coffee to France, while John Shovlin examines the anti-aristocratic turn of the luxury debate in the mid-eighteenth century.
Two articles were written by historians trained by Roche who have gone on to distinguished careers of their own. Antoine Lilti reexamines the Parisian salons through the lens of social practice, reassessing them as institutions of elite sociability. Stephane van Damme’s study of the mobility of philosophes across the urban space of Paris appeared in a special issue of FHS inspired in part by Roche’s work on early modern cultures of mobility.
Together, these articles reveal the importance of Roche’s contribution to some of the most important historiographical questions of our time: the relationship between cultural representations and social practices; the material conditions of intellectual life; and the causal factors behind the emergence of individualism and egalitarianism in hierarchical societies. The new directions in which these scholars extend Roche’s questions and approaches is the best homage they could provide to his oeuvre.
—Clare Haru Crowston, Univ. of British Columbia
