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Article: The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. By Stephane Gerson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii plus 324 pp.).
Gustave Flaubert held in horror the suffocating conventionalism of provincial life, its buttoned-up formality and pretentious-cum-comic erudition a la Bouvard and Pecuchet. Stephane Gerson, however, takes the matter of provincialism to heart, mapping the extensive and varied efforts of nineteenth-century Frenchmen to cultivate sentiments of loyalty and affection to hometown and pays.
Gerson's point of entry into the subject is local associational life. He takes the department of the Nord as ...