HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

Examines the outrage against--and attempts to end--the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. Each of the four, it was commonly believed, owed its origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish those perpetrators who were members of the elite. In this exciting new book, Andrew explores each vice's treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of "class superiority" among the soon-to-emerge British middle class.

The famed Bow Street Runners were not the only "police" in eighteenth-century London. This book examines the night watch system, the locally controlled regime of law enforcement that provided professional policing in the areas of metropolitan London outside the City of London until 1829, the year in which Sir Robert Peel established England's first centralized police force (the Metropolitan Police, known as Scotland Yard).

This is the first comprehensive study of the 90-year history of the Bow Street Runners, a group of men established in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Fielding, with the financial support of the government, to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London. They were developed over the following decades by his half-brother, John Fielding, into what became a well-known and stable group of officers who acquired skill and expertise in investigating crime, tracking and arresting offenders, and in presenting evidence at the Old Bailey, the main criminal court in London.

Through the experiences of ordinary 18th century men, women and children, Arlette Farge traces the solidarities and conflicts which arose between rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbours and colleagues. The author deals with three arenas of conflict and solidarity: the home, the workplace and the street.
The author vividly describes a society, in the process of mutation, which was gradually reconstructing a new set of values.

From Rogue to Everyman chronicles the colourful career of archetypal rogue Charles de Julie, foundling, army deserter, pimp, police officer, underground journalist, poet, and prisoner in the dreaded Bastille. Laurence Bongie reveals both the richly woven tapestry of Ancien Régime social history and a ground-level perspective of everyday material life in eighteenth-century Paris, a city of wit and learning where wealth and luxury were juxtaposed with the most squalid and degrading varieties of human poverty, disease, and crime.

How to establish someone's identity in an age without photography or even a well organized state bureaucracy? Beginning in the Ancien Regime, France resorted to a paper identity based on registers, certificates, passports and other documents. The author explores the impact this paper trail had on ideas about individual identity.

Peter Linebaugh's groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging served the purpose of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and new forms of private property. In this new edition Peter Linebaugh reinforces his original arguments with detailed responses to his critics based on an impressive array of historical sources.

In the second half of the 18th century, Paris was the second largest city in Europe, with a population of some half a million. Contemporary writers described it as anonymous and chaotic, and so it must have seemed to many new arrivals from the provinces. Yet the records of the local police officials, which have remained virtually untouched for two hundred years, reveal a world which was far from anonymous, where most people went about their daily affairs in streets and shops where not only the places but also the faces were familiar. From the mass of individual disputes and incidents reported to the police in each quarter there emerges a picture of a structured, largely self-regulating local community based first and foremost on neighbourhood ties.

In spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an "abominable poem about the king". So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense? In this book, Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court.

This pioneering study examines the considerable changes that took place in the criminal justice system in the century after the Restoration. Against a background of social and cultural change in the metropolis the author reveals how and why an alternative means of dealing with crime emerged in the policing of London, in the practices and procedures of prosecution, and in the establishment of new forms of punishment.

Farge shows that in the course of the eighteenth century the Parisian poor, previously ignored and unorganized, gradually entered into the public debates of their times.