← New Books Network
New Books Network
Denise Z. Davidson, "Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters" (Cornell UP, 2025)
00:48:17
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
A
Make every get together chill this Memorial Day. Get up to an extra thousand dollars off select top brand appliances like LG plus get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cubed ice and crushed ice. Shop appliance Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See store online for details.
- [00:31]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:36]
C
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in History. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here with Denise Davidson, professor of history and the director of the Humanities Research center at Georgia State, to talk about her new book, Surviving Bourgeois Lives and Letters, just out in 2025 with Cornell University Press. Hi, Denise.
- [00:55]
B
Hi Yana.
- [00:56]
C
And how are you doing today?
- [00:58]
B
I'm doing great. How are you?
- [01:01]
C
Lovely. It's another we've had a whole week of sunshine in Amsterdam. I'm just excited. I'm doing a lot of sitting outside reading and hanging out with my basset hound. It's a good.
- [01:14]
B
Sounds nice.
- [01:15]
C
Yeah. Okay. So you're the author of France after the Revolution and Romain Conjugal. My appalling French accent again. So it seems you've got a career long interest in both the French Revolution in that era and then family history and the lives of individuals. So it feels like this book is in that vein. So just right up your street. Yeah. So I'm not really surprised. But how did you come to write this particular book?
- [01:45]
B
Right. So it goes back to the mid or actually the late 90s. I had finished my dissertation, had not yet been published as a book. That took a few years. But I had finished my dissertation and was back in the archives of in leo, the municipal archives in leo, and found out about a brand new collection that they had acquired. And when I first got to look at it, the archivist told me about it, knowing my interests in women's history and the way she put it in my interest in la sociabilite socializing, I guess you could translate it as socializing with a purpose. And so she told me about this new collection, thinking that there was one section of it that I would probably find interesting, the letters of a woman from Lyon who was born in the middle of the 18th century, 17, late mid-1760s, I think she was born 1765, something like that, and later in life pursued a very active correspondence with her son in law, her name was Catherine. Catherine Arnaud Tizon. Her son in law was Pierre Vitet. The collection is called the Fond Vit. So it's his letters that he collected over his lifetime. And over the course of about 20 to 25 years, they wrote to each other on a very regular basis, typically about every five days. And so I had over 600 of her letters. So the archivist told me about it and let me look at it even before it was cataloged downstairs in these vaults where the archives are located at the time, where they were located in the Archbishop's residence in Lyon. And I thought this might be my next book project because I loved the idea of having these letters that gave me access to the words and thoughts and reactions of a woman who lived through so much. She lived through the revolution in Leo. Her husband was very politically active, and so. And could have easily lost his head after the Terror, when he was on the wrong side of things at that point. And. And so, anyway, I just thought that she was a fascinating person to learn more about. And that was the beginning of it. I then learned more about the collection as a whole. The Lyon Municipal Archives cataloged them very quickly. And so they became available by the early 2000s for anyone to look at. And I had a full REICH Grant in 2006, 2007, that let me spend a whole year just reading Pierre Vite's papers. So I started with Catherine's 600 or so letters, but then went ahead and read many of his other family members. He also had lots of letters from friends. I looked at some of those, but mostly I decided to focus on family and make this a book about family and the role of correspondence and networking and how these people, again, who'd lived through this extremely chaotic moment of the French Revolution and then the decades afterwards, how they tried to make sense of this new world that they were in and how they tried to survive the kind of chaotic moments that they were living through.
- [05:08]
C
This is so exciting. Like, I. I just. I remember thinking this, like, so someone just says, hey, new cache of letters. And it's like, swoon. And you get to go down into the. Like you're looking at them. They haven't even been cataloged yet. This is amazing. I mean, there's incredible excitement and then the reality of having to sit and
- [05:28]
B
read 600 letters and thousands of others in the end. Yes.
- [05:35]
C
The agony and the ecstasy of the archival situation.
- [05:40]
B
Right. Yeah. And then quickly, I should explain a little bit about the collection itself. So the family, the descendants of this family, The Vitae family, they ended up, they're now the. The Beauregard family put the collection up for sale in I think 1995 or 6 and the National Archives purchased them, purchased the whole collection and include included some paintings and other things. Some things got bought by private collectors. It was put for sale at auction. But most of the stuff was purchased by the archives, certainly the papers, and it was called the Font Vite. But the collection was actually divided in two. And so what I mostly worked with was the collection in Lyon. And so again, these were the letters collected by a man named Pierre Vitet, who was the son of Louis Vitet, who was a doctor and was a mayor, was the mayor of Lyon during the first few years of the French Revolution and then ends up being elected as a deputy to the Convention. So his father was there for the vote on the execution of Louis xvi. He votes against it, which means he was on the side with the group that later becomes proscribed, this group that become labeled the Girondins. And he ends up having to go into exile. And Pierre joins him in Switzerland in exile for most of the year of the Terror. Pierre's son, whose name was Louis Vitet, like his grandfather, went by Ludovic maybe to distinguish him from his grandfather. And he went on to have a very prominent play political career as well. He was the founder of one of the organization that helped overthrow the Bourbon Restoration and launched the July Monarchy. And he was a very close collaborator of Francois Guizot, who was kind of the main political leader during the July Monarchy. And so what they decided to do when they purchased, when the archives purchased this collection was that everything from Ludovic forward was kept in Paris and everything for the previous generations because they were viewed as having local significance since Louis had been a mayor of Lyon and so on was kept in Lyon. And I was lucky that they did that because the Lyon Municipal Archives made the materials available almost instantaneously. It just took a couple of years to catalog. And of course it's a very long process for archivists to catalog materials, having to stamp each one and put them in acid free folders and all of that, and create catalogs to go with it. But the an took many years to make the papers available. I first looked at the later generations papers, I think in 2012, and they only became available around 2009. So I did a little bit of research in Paris because it turned out that the papers that were defined as Ludovics actually included quite a few of Pierre's. They start around 1827, I have one little funny story. It took me forever to figure out the year of Pierre Vite's death. He's like one of the central characters in my book. But the archives of the Paris City hall were burnt during the Paris Commune in 1870. And so a lot of those records were destroyed and his must have been among them. Couldn't find his death record, but I was able to figure it out by looking at his son's correspondence. And in the 1850s, in 1858, 57, 58, I found letters of condolence from his friends, including one from Francois Guizot himself, which is kind of nice to see. So I think I forget the exact date. I think it was January 1850, July 1858, that he was dead. And it was after a year of a long illness. So he may have had a stroke or something like that before dying. But anyway, so most of my work was in. Leo got inspired by this initial collection of letters by this woman. But I end up also doing a lot of work in Paris. And then the family that Pierre Vitet marries into, his wife's name is Amelie. So both families originate in Lyon, but they end up in Rouen. And so I did quite a bit of research in Rouen, especially in notarial records. These are the legal documents created like marriage contracts, buying and selling, property rental contracts and so on. So I used a lot of those materials to kind of follow the family was doing. So it's this kind of triangulation of these three cities, Lyon, Roy and Paris,
- [10:19]
C
and like sorting out the family and how they, and you know, who they are, how they work together, what their contacts are. So I want to talk, before we go any further, I want to talk about letters and sources, you know, because there are these ways, they're really wonderful. It's an EGO document. In some cases, you know, a signature document is you, you, you know, this person that you're studying held it in their hands and there's something really magical and you get at what they are, what they're thinking. But there is no such thing as a perfect source. And there are some issues with negotiating letters. So I'm curious, like how what, what you saw as the issues and how you handled that, right?
- [11:00]
B
Yeah, there are definitely issues with using letters, and there's been really wonderful work on this. Basically, I view these letters as an opportunity for kind of self performance. And when people write a letter, obviously it's addressed to a particular person. One thing to remember about letters in these years, especially these kinds of family letters, that we're talking about is that the letters were frequently read aloud among the family. So even if the letter was addressed to Pierre, for example, or Amelie, she wrote to either of them, or both of them sometimes depended. Even if the letter was addressed to an individual person, the assumption was that it would be shared. And so these were not. This is not space for discussing private or intimate matters. And I assume there's a lot I can know about these families thanks to their letters, but there are lots of things I can't know. And so, for example, I assume that if Pierre Vitae ever had a mistress, those letters wouldn't have been saved, they would have been burnt. They would never have made it into this collection, which Pierre Vite was consciously preserving for posterity, right, for his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren someday to be able to see. And so there are lots of silences and I view correspondence and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about this. Correspondence was a strategy. It was a way to build and maintain relationships. Some of whom were close, personal, loving relationships, right? Some of those relationships, like Catherine and Pierre's, they clearly really loved each other, cared for each other. And that's another thing to think about here. We could maybe talk about this later. One could view it as a kind of unusual relationship between a mother in law and son in law to have such a kind of deep bond. But going back to the issue of correspondence, the letters were strategic, often formulaic. They focused on the positive. There were moments where they were living through very difficult times, say, when France faced defeat in 1814 and again in 1815, and the occupation of foreign troops on French soil after Waterloo. And so they do talk about their struggles, but it's all kind of with the goal of kind of giving each other, encouraging each other to get through this. We'll get through this somehow. We'll persevere, you know. And so it's rare that we see very negative emotions voiced, though it does occasionally happen. Probably the letters that I found that were the most imbued with, with anger, frustration, disappointment revolved around near, well, what pretty much was a financial catastrophe in the family. Catherine's niece married the brother of a very prominent man named Suchet. He became a marshal, Napoleonic marshal. And that man ended up basically almost going bankrupt. They managed to avoid outright bankruptcy. The family got together and found a way to pay off his creditors and attempt to salvage his honor for the sake of the rest of the family. But those letters are probably the ones that are more full of emotion than anything else, because it was viewed as this, as an incredible kind of betrayal of the family's trust that he was unable to properly oversee his finances. So, yeah, so letters are an incredibly powerful tool, but they're not. Yeah, there's no perfect source, and you have to read them with kind of. You need to. You need to try to see what's there and what's not there and see, think about why they were writing to the person they were writing to and not assume that they're a direct reflection of reality. You can never do that.
- [15:44]
C
Right. It's. Yeah, it. It can tell you a lot about norms and what, what they want it to be, but you're not. Like every conversation there is. There's spin. And I think, I don't want to sit on this for too long, but I just want to note for our listeners that communication is so different and it's. It's important to remember that communication right now is so ephemeral. I do so much communication over text. I'm listening to a podcast and I'm like, oh, my friend who lives across the ocean would be interested in this. Let me send a text. It's gone.
- [16:19]
B
Gone.
- [16:20]
C
But this, this is not the case. You know, for most of the pre modern world, something you put down on paper could be there forever or, you know, in your hundreds of years, and there are strangers reading it and talking about it.
- [16:34]
B
Yeah, exactly. And people were very aware of that, that these letters were traces of their words that would exist, could theoretically exist forever, could be shared with anyone. The other thing I should mention, too, there was a practice that they had that I thought was interesting. In order to share more private comments, they would use a separate sheet. And maybe I should explain the format of the letters quickly. So typically they wrote on a large, largest sheet of paper folded in half to create four sides. They would write on three of those sides, and then the last side would be left blank so that they could fold the letter. They didn't use envelopes. They folded them in a certain way and could put a seal on them and then that. So that last blank sheet was used to write the address on once the paper was folded properly. So if, let's say, they wanted to discuss. One of the matters that comes up a lot in the letters between Catherine and Pierre are discussions of marital negotiations, something that takes up a lot of their time. Amelie, Pierre's wife, was Catherine's oldest daughter, and so she had three other children to find spouses for. And Pierre ended up becoming a very close collaborator on that. But they kept These things very secret from everyone, including the women especially. And especially the women, you could say the young women who were being discussed. And so if there were, if Catherine wanted to discuss something like that that she didn't want shared with others, she would write that on a separate sheet of paper so that the person she was writing to could remove that sheet discreetly and then read the rest of the letter to the family, as would normally be done without people being suspicious about why he wasn't reading a person's letter.
- [18:33]
C
All right, so the first, your book is organized in two sections, and the first introduces us to the families and talks about what's happening, this really traumatic, difficult, tumultuous time in history that's going on. Part two, Life Goes on, is approached thematically, and I'd like to go through these parts. So let's talk about marriage, the Most Important alliance. What should our listeners know there?
- [19:00]
B
So that chapter covers the theme of marriage and mostly focuses on these three younger siblings of Emilie Vitet and Catherine's correspondence with Pierre about each of them. There are a lot of things that are interesting, I think, for the modern reader about the practices associated with marriage at the time. One is that. And yeah, that's why the subtitle of the chapter is the Most Important alliance is that marriage was too important of a relationship to allow a young person to just decide who they want to marry on their own. And so pretty much all marriages were arranged. But what's interesting about this period, and mostly we're talking about the first few decades of the 19th century. By this time, the model of the companionate marriage, a marriage based on true love and, or at least companionship, commitment to each other, to supporting each other emotionally and otherwise, also existed. And so, unlike earlier periods and unlike our kind of cliched imagining of aristocratic marriages, these couples were supposed to actually like each other, hopefully love each other and not, you know, we have this kind of cliched imagined idea of arranged marriages, especially among the aristocracy, that, you know, once the wife gives birth to a few legitimate couple, legitimate children, then each could go off and do what they like and seek love and passion elsewhere. And nobody would really blink an eye at that. And that's not the case among these middle class families of the early 19th century. And so you could see how it could seem almost contradictory, right, that the parents arranged the marriage. The young couple who are getting married typically only see each other once, briefly, before agreeing to go along with it. And technically they did have the right to say no, but that was extremely Rare especially. And girls especially were kept out of the loop until the last minute. And they were raised in a world where resisting the choice of their parents is just not something that would come to their minds in the vast majority of cases. We do know of a few handful of stories where women resisted and they could, but it was very unusual. And so we have two girls and a boy who get married in the course of this chapter. And with both the girls, they're kept completely in the dark until the last minute. And then they meet the man that their parents find for them. And they're okay with it, they're happy with it. And the marriage takes place about two weeks later. The boy I found was a slightly different story. He did have a little more agency in his case. He saw a young woman probably at a ball. Balls were very important social gatherings for finding spouses. And here we can imagine them. And a lot of my stories bring to mind Jane Austen novels. And you know, so he saw a. The expression that Catherine uses is he the girl on whom he threw his eyes. And so his family research, her family, decide that it's a good match. They reach out to the parents of the girl and takes a lot of negotiating and almost falls apart because there seems to be a misunderstanding about the amount of the dowry. But it does end up working out right. So one of the reasons that marriages were so important and the reasons that families always had a say pretty much no matter what, was that there was always an exchange of money and property and other goods. And they used the term dowry for this for both men and women. And both families, at least in the cases that I've studied, both families gave virtually exactly the same amount of money. And these families funds or goods were meant to create the kind of financial foundation for this family, this new family being created through the marriage to be able to live as their parents had among the families that I'm studying. And they were very wealthy, very wealthy non nobles. That's what. And so the book, the book is called Bourgeois Lives and Letters because part of it was about investing who really was the bourgeoisie. And what do we mean by bourgeois in these years, right after what was supposedly this bourgeois revolution, if we believe Marx. So part of the book is about bourgeois identity anyway. So these families are very wealthy non nobles. And so they typically gave a dowry of about 50,000, but it was often paid over a very long term as well. So they would give a certain amount in cash up front and then the rest in regular payments, say every year or every five years. With interest. And so it's typically mostly money, but they also gave lots of gifts. Both sides gave gifts. There were all kinds of traditional forms of jewelry that were exchanged. Typically the groom gave the bride very early on, when the agreement had been reached before the wedding, some kind of very nice piece of jewelry with diamonds and so on, either a necklace or a ring or something. And so often the girls trousseau, so collections of jewelry and things for the household, right. Would often be valued at something like another 5,000 leave. So these were very significant amounts of money. And the expectation was that both families would give the same. And so it was important before any agreement was reached, that both families could assure themselves that the other family was going to be able to provide the kind of support that would be expected of them.
- [25:18]
C
And so this is how it is an embarrassment to the bride's family when her husband, it becomes, goes bankrupt. Not only have, has, is this shameful, it's also a lot of their money, right? And in theory it's, it's supposed to be hers through the marriage.
- [25:35]
B
And this again, this was Catherine's niece. So this was Catherine's husband's brother's daughter. And she was an only child, so she had a very big dowry and they needed that in order to marry her to this man who was the brother of a very, very prominent military officer. And they're all from Lyon too. These are all pretty much everybody in these families. There's this incredibly powerful Lyone network that my research uncovered, even if they're not in Leo anymore. And so, yeah, it was a lot of money that we're talking about. And so it had very real financial consequences. And the woman's father. Here's one of the rare instances where we see some critical commentary in Catherine's letters. Apparently there's intimation in some of her letters that he had quite a temper and he was very resistant to giving up any of his capital in order to save his son in law. But the rest of the family pushed him to do it. And there it's not about the money, it's about honor. Because to have someone in the family actually go bankrupt would have dishonored everyone involved, not just the man himself. It would have kept his children from ever being able to marry honorably. So the whole family comes together and collaborates. The man's brother, the Marechal Suchet, gives a couple hundred thousand pounds to save his brother. And the man's father in law, who is also Catherine's brother in law, he contributes money and they sell some of his properties and he's in charge of the whole liquidation of his re. Of the, of the son in law's property and so on. And again all in the name of saving this man's honor and the honor of the family as a whole.
- [27:40]
C
So you show a lot of connection between like generational connection. Right. There is, this is not this, there is this idea and I think this might be interesting particularly from the bourgeoisie instead of these old ancestral noble families. So there's an idea of multi generational family honor that in there and a house that will continue into perpetuity.
- [28:04]
B
Yeah, they don't necessarily stay in the same houses for very, very long, but they do. There is definitely a sense of a multi generational family and, but there's very, and they're also very strong intergenerational, intra generational, emotional and more practical relationships that everyone relies upon. And you know, so one thing that my book is kind of arguing against is the idea that the French Revolution instituted the age of the individual and where all that matters is about individual success. And of course nobody argues that families never matter. But I think that my research, my argument, my argument based on this research is that no individual could ever succeed on his or her own. That family was absolutely essential and that anyone who was an individual success did it thanks to a support network they had around them of family and friends and allies. And so that even things like patronage that we think of as a more old regime kind of system, that those continue and they continue to the present day. I think that that's what's interesting, that in this, in my book, looking at these first few decades, the very first few decades of the 19th century, right after the French Revolution institutes all of these enorm changes that we think of associated with the modern world a lot. There's, there are a lot of continuities across the revolutionary divide and we can see their reverberations right up to today. You know, every self made man, quote unquote.
- [29:52]
C
Right.
- [29:53]
B
Has a lot of people to thank.
- [29:56]
C
Yeah. And this birth of the individual is something that we, you know, it can't have happened in the French Revolution because it happened in the Renaissance or the 12th century rather. You know, so this is an ongoing discussion of like when we became these people who are subject to no one else. And the answer is never. We have never stopped being separate from like our connections in our network.
- [30:23]
B
And then related to that is one of the other kind of larger arguments of the book which is that we associate the French Revolution and, and as well as the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes historians refer to these as the dual revolutions with the increasingly clear separation between the public and private spheres. And where the public sphere is about business and politics and the private sphere is about family and love and nurturing, whereas the public sphere is more about competition. And that the public sphere becomes associated as a. Where it becomes defined as a masculine sphere of activity and the private sphere, although men are certainly there, women kind of dominate the private sphere. That's their world. And while that may have been increasingly the case as the 19th century went
- [31:21]
C
on,
- [31:24]
B
maybe again, kind of with our cliches of, like the Victorian period and so on, for the period that I'm talking about, and I think probably this would be true for any period, women have a lot more influence than we think. And the private spheres. The distinction between the private and public spheres was much more blurry than we might assume as well. And so one of the points I make, and I say this, and I explore this more deeply in an essay that just appeared in a collection about an edited volume called the Age of Global Revolutions. Pierre Vitet, unlike his father, who was a very prominent public figure, and unlike his son, who was a very prominent public figure, he chose a domestic existence. He spent his life nurturing his wealth and his family. He was what the French call a rentier, someone who could live off their rents. He never had a job and, you know, he had enough property that if he took care of it and nourished it, he could live off the proceeds of the property. He inherited all of his father. Again, he also was an only child, so he inherited all of his father's property. And his father had invested in what were called bienationau lands, church lands that were put up for sale in the early years of the Revolution. And he held onto those for most of his life. They were outside of Lyon. They were agricultural properties. And I have letters of his. He had a property manager that he worked with a business, business agent in Lyon, instructing the peasants, you know, what to plant. One year, it was artichokes, like, you know. So he was really engaged in his properties and making sure that they were as rentable, as profitable as possible. But he didn't work a normal job. He didn't have a career. And he, based on the amount of letters, the amount of time he must have spent writing them, I think correspondence took up a good deal of his time. Every day, day to day, he maintained a correspondence journal that had over 3,000 entries in it from several decades of his life. It fizzles out in the 1830s. I'm guessing that he may have started losing his eyesight by then. He was in his 60s. But he would record an entry for every letter he wrote and, you know, the date and who he wrote to. And either a very, very brief summary or sometimes a more lengthy one, lengthier summaries. If he, if it was a more important topic, he wanted to remember the details. And so he treated correspondence in this very methodical manner that it suggests its importance. Right. That red letter writing was so important for the kinds of things. Again, that my book focuses on networking and making sure you have the right connections and the right allies in the right places. So that when your, you know, son or niece or nephew needs help, you know, finding the right spouse or getting into the right school or getting into the right job. Right. That there were people around to help them. So he, he was writing all the time, but he otherwise, like I said, he led a primarily domestic existence. And where his. Both his mother in law, Catherine, who he wrote to all the time, and his wife and one of his sisters in law, you know, yes, they, they didn't hold down a job, but neither did, like I said, neither did Pierre. But they were very engaged in politics. Many of their letters talk very knowledgeably about political debates, especially in the 1820s when there's this growing liberal opposition to the Bourbon Restoration that these families were very engaged with. And so, like his wife, attended debates in the legislature and Catherine read the newspapers all the time and commented on what she was reading about. So it's not as though men, again, in this period after the revolution, men are all focused on the, you know, cutthroat worlds of, of business and politics while women are sitting at home nurturing their children. Right. That there was a lot more interdependence and, and interconnection across the two spheres and across the genders. And then that gets back to, I think, where this started, the inter and intragenerational connections. You know, men and women alike loved to tell stories about the children in the families. They were kind of sources of amusement, telling stories about things that they said or did or sharing their progress in terms of education, learning to read and write, learning to play the piano, getting a prize at school. Like all of these stories were exchanged again, the men and women across generation, grandparents and so on. And again, it's not that different from families today, but it's clear that they really, really cared about maintaining these ties and keeping each other up to date, partly because, you know, of emotional connections again, but Also because it was so important to have those strong relations for the success of the family as a whole.
- [36:52]
C
And the success of the family as a whole, that means continued wealth, that means good marriages. Is that status? Is it just. Is the, the. Is it this kind of self iterating thing? Like a good family is a well connected family, is a successful family.
- [37:08]
B
Like yeah, it's all of the above and it's all connected. Yeah. So it's status, it's. And status happens through marriage and through the people that you socialize with. And it is a kind of self reinforcing system. Exactly. But they work really hard to make sure that each succeeding generation has the skills and the know how to continue that. That process. You know that we always joke about how the bourgeoisie is always rising. Right. Well there's a reason that they're rising because they're really carefully strategizing and making sure that again the children, both boys and girls, have the skills that they need to be. To be successful in that world. But you know when. And the book is called Surviving Revolution. And by surviving I mean both literal survival. Like both Louis Vitae and Catherine's husband whose name was Claude Arnaudison, both of them could have easily lost their heads. Pierre's maternal grandfather died in prison during the terror in Leo. You know, so it means literally surviving. But then by the early 19th century there's not this risk of literally dying because of one's political convictions, but it's this incredibly chaotic world that they have to try to negotiate and a new world. Right. And I think that's one of the things that's interesting about the story too is that Catherine and her husband Claude and his brother Pierre Marie, the one whose son in law later goes bankrupt, they were all raised in lyon in the 1750s and 60s and 70s and were very. The children of very successful wealthy families, families that had learned how to navigate the old regime. And you know, Pierre Marie and Claude's father, whose also name was Claude. Claude on a. The. The pair. The father, when he died in 1793, he left them nearly a fortune of nearly a million leave of a million pounds. It's a lot of money. They were extremely wealthy, successful textile manufacturing merchants in Leo and they knew how to work in this world of based on privilege and networking. Right. Of the old regime. And then the revolution happens and they are clearly supporters of the revolution. This is a good thing for them though they were probably on the cusp of nobility. Both families, the Vitae and the Annotizon, which was right and that's the other thing with scholars of 18th century France. When talking about the bourgeoisie, no one wanted to be bourgeois. They wanted to get rich and then find a way to get a title of nobility. And so they were heading in that direction as well. Then the revolution happens and they are die hard supporters of it. And they see this as an opportunity. I mean, I don't know, I don't have their direct words about how they interpreted the revolution because these letters are from later on and they never look back. That's another interesting thing. The letters never look back on the past. They're always about the present and the future. But, you know, the point is that this first generation that I talk about in my book were raised in the 18th century and knew how to navigate that. Then the revolution happens and changes everything. And one of the most important changes that the revolution introduced for these kinds of wealthy families who strategized everything in order to be as successful as they had been, was it completely transformed the inheritance system. And so they have to rethink how they handle all of that as well. And one of the things they end up doing is using marriages as an opportunity to pass on property. So marital contracts, marriage contracts. Like Pierre Vitae basically inherited all of his father's property when he married Emily in 1801. So anyway, so there's this new world that they have to negotiate, but they're looking at that new world through the lens of the ways they were educated before the revolution. And so I think that also helps to explain why there's so many continuities.
- [41:31]
C
And they're, they're still. I mean, this is one of the things, like we have these large scale debates. What's modernity? When does that start? What is like we, we want to make these big sexy, longter arguments, but at the, but we're still talking about people, right? Who are just people. And so they're. Maybe they have, they've had the trauma of the French Revolution, they've had like all of these changes, but they're still also just families who are trying to do the best for their children. Right. And. And largely just mostly just living.
- [42:09]
B
Right? Exactly. And that was something I kind of struggled with. It took me a long time to write this book because honestly, a lot of the letters are kind of boring, you know, so how do you tell a story that's interesting about kind of boring everyday events? And yet the boring everyday is what we have such a hard time getting access to. And it does, I hope, give a reader a sense of what it would have been like to live through that moment because we see it through the eyes of these letter writers and that
- [42:38]
C
is probably as good a place to stop here as any. We have taken up a bunch of your time and I feel like we've gotten at a lot of the questions, gender relations and if you want more information, listeners, read the book. It's enjoyable. It is an extremely enjoyable as well as edifying read. So I've just got one more quick and easy question. What's next?
- [43:04]
B
I am speaking to you from Paris, France right now, where I am on an exploratory research trip working in archives. I started in Marseille for a week or so. Now I'm in Paris. I've. I don't have a fully defined project yet, but I'm interested in again working on the French Revolution, but for the first time in my career studying a part of the world other than France, but still through the lens of France. So I've decided I'd like to work on French commercial and diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire during the period of the French Revolution. And I, I think I'm going to focus on a few cities in what is today Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, to try to get a sense of what the French people who lived in those basically these kind of trading communities that were established going back to the early 17th century. They were called Echel, how they saw the French Revolution, how they experienced it, but from outside of France. So I'm using French documents about French people, but not in France itself this time.
- [44:18]
C
Yeah, and it's still a little. Sounds like it'll still be very family network heavy, very. About sociability and how. And the interaction between families and people as well.
- [44:31]
B
Yeah, well, I'd love for that to be the case. Although from what I've found in the documents I have access to, it's going to be a lot harder to talk about that because it's a much more kind of top down, like diplomatic reports and so on, consular reports. But yeah, reading between the lines, you get some information. So I found some details on these like merchants who spent their whole careers living in Aleppo and you know, here and there references to their wives and children. So, yeah, so like I said, it's the very beginning. I'll see what I find. But it's been really fun. I'm learning everything. I am learning lots about part of the world that I have not learned that much about before the Ottoman Empire and the whole. The commerce across the Mediterranean, which is really interesting.
- [45:21]
C
Yeah, it's really interesting. Isn't it? I mean, I don't know it well, but everything I've read about it, it's stunning. Just the constant trade, the amount of goods that are moving constantly. So it sounds like this book is. I'm going to be really excited to read it. It sounds like it'll be pretty fun to write.
- [45:41]
B
Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure it's even going to be a book. For now, we'll just, we'll see. I'm digging around. We'll see. And it might end up being an article or two to start. We'll see. I'll get there when I get there. Right.
- [45:51]
C
Excellent. All right, listeners, once again, this is my conversation here with Denise Davidson from Georgia State University about her new book, Surviving Revolution, Bourgeois Lives and Letters just out with Cornell. You can find the link to buy it on our website and it's available
- [46:10]
B
as a free ebook.
- [46:12]
C
Oh, it's available as a free ebook. You'll find the link to that on our website as well. All right, Denise, thanks so much for joining me today.
- [46:20]
B
Thank you, Yana.
- [46:21]
D
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ebooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.