A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600-1800Things which we regard as the everyday objects of consumption (and hence re-purchase), and essential to any decent, civilised lifestyle, have not always been so: in former times, everyday objects would have passed from one generation to another, without anyone dreaming of acquiring new ones. How, therefore, have people in the modern world become 'prisoners of objects', as Rousseau put it? The celebrated French cultural historian Daniel Roche answers this fundamental question using insights from economics, politics, demography and geography, as well as his own extensive historical knowledge. Professor Roche places familiar objects and commodities - houses, clothes, water - in their wider historical and anthropological contexts, and explores the origins of some of the daily furnishings of modern life. A History of Everyday Things is a pioneering essay that sheds light on the origins of the consumer society and its social and political repercussions, and thereby the birth of the modern world. |
Contents
The natural framework and the human framework | 11 |
Stability and change | 19 |
Towns trade and inventions | 31 |
The weight of the town | 33 |
The towns and consumption | 39 |
Business and industry trade and services | 43 |
The experience of urban life | 46 |
Ordinary consumption and luxury consumption | 54 |
The production of water | 141 |
Natural and social constraints | 153 |
Clean and dirty wholesome and unwholesome | 157 |
Furniture and objects | 166 |
The demands of usage | 167 |
The space of a material art | 170 |
Production and consumption of furniture | 177 |
Return to function utility and change | 181 |
Budgets a la Marshal Vauban | 55 |
Eighteencentury budget investigations | 62 |
From scarcity to luxury | 72 |
Ordinary life | 79 |
Rural and urban houses | 81 |
Habitat and everyday life | 82 |
The traditional rural house between custom and innovation | 89 |
Lighting and heating | 106 |
Night and day | 110 |
The pedagogy of lighting | 115 |
The conquests of light urban lighting | 119 |
Heat and cold | 123 |
Wood coal supplies and technical reflections | 130 |
Water and its uses | 135 |
The pressure on water | 136 |
The utility and the sacredness of water | 138 |
Storing classifying receiving | 185 |
Clothing and appearances | 193 |
Hierarchy fashion totality | 196 |
Codes and principles manners and sumptuary laws | 201 |
Towns and prosperity a first change | 205 |
From Paris to the provinces the change in the eighteenth century | 213 |
Bread wine taste | 221 |
Need labour symbol | 222 |
Consumption food products and expenditure on them | 225 |
Bread and wine from Holy Communion to good manners | 235 |
New knowledge new consumer goods | 242 |
Conclusion | 250 |
Notes | 256 |
| 286 | |
| 305 | |
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A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600-1800 Daniel Roche No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
Alsace Ancien Régime appearances architecture behaviour Bièvre bourgeois bourgeoisie bread Brittany budget buildings Caen calculated capacity cent circulation civilisation clothes consumers consumption culture decor demand depending economy eighteenth century Encyclopédie everyday everywhere evolution expenditure fashion fireplace forms français France function furniture habitat heating hierarchy Histoire Ile-de-France income increase inventories labour Lavoisier Leamington Spa less light linen litres living livres Louis Louis XVI luxury Lyons maison material Maurice Halbwachs means metres modern moral nature needs nineteenth century objects one's organisation Parisian peasants Périgord Perrot Physiocrats poor population possible production progress Régime regions relation rich Roche role Roscoff Rouen rural sartorial scarcity seventeenth and eighteenth seventeenth century social Société society space stove sumptuary laws supply symbolic taste things tion town trade traditional transformation University of Paris urban Vauban village wage-earners wealth wine wood XVIII siècle