A History of Private Life, IV

Ftrom the Fires of Revolution to the Great War

The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a time when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and earlier eras took recognizable form, and the supreme individual, with a political, scientif ic, and above all existential value, emerged. Volume IV of this award- winning series chronicles this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I-a century and a quarter of rapid, ungovernable change culminating in a conflict that, at a stroke, altered life in the Western world.

“The new emphasis on the history of everybody has now been consecrated in [this] ambitious five-volume series… masterfully translated by Arthur Goldhammer… Copious illustrative materials-paintings, drawings, caricatures, and photographs, all cannily chosen and wittily captioned to display domestic life… Magnificent.” Roger Shattuck, New York Times Book Review