Social History, "New Cultural History," and the Rediscovery of Politics: Some Recent Work on Modern FranceWork and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades. Michael SonenscherIndustrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914. Elinor AccampoWomen, Work, and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879-1919. Mary Lynn StewartChild Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century France: Assuring the Future

Abstract

The new social is usually identified with history from below. Its favorite protagonists are the men and women of the popular classes, the weak, the poor, the marginal elements in society-vagrants, criminals, deviants, abandoned children, and so on. France, home of the Annales school and host to legions of enthusiastically Francophile researchers from America and the United Kingdom, has long been at the cutting edge of pioneering scholarship in the field. Nowhere have the flawed ideological assumptions and the methodological deficiencies of the old been more mercilessly exposed. Despite a certain revival of biography (evident, for instance, in the ongoing series of political biographies published by Fayard), old-style political history, preoccupied exclusively with high politics, affairs of state, and the world of social elites, has lost the preeminence it once enjoyed in the French historical profession (with the important exception of work on the twentieth century). However regretted in certain quarters, old-style narrative history, as Jacques Le Goff has maintained, is