Death and Afterlife in Modern France
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A01=Thomas A. Kselman
After the Funeral
Ancien Régime
Armistice Day
Author_Thomas A. Kselman
Bernadette Soubirous
Bretons
Brideshead Revisited
Burial
Catafalque
Category=JHB
Category=NHD
Catholicism
Cemetery
Child mortality
Christianity
Clergy
Coffin
Council of Paris
Counter-Reformation
Death
Death (personification)
Deathbed
Deathbed conversion
Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution
Delacroix
Demography
Deregulation
Dieu
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Evocation
Folk religion
Franco-Prussian War
French philosophy
Funeral
Godfather Death
Grief
Gustave Courbet
Hearse
Infant mortality
Jacques Le Goff
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Meslier
July Monarchy
L'Assommoir
Laity
Literature
Louis Veuillot
Monuments aux Morts
Mortal sin
Mortality rate
Mourner
Mourning
Napoleon
Paris Basin (geology)
Peasant
Pierre Leroux
Pierre Nora
Politique
Presses Universitaires de France
Purgatory
Religion
Retour des cendres
Ridicule
Social disintegration
Spiritism
Tales of the Dead
The American Way of Death
The Dead Father
The Denial of Death
The Great Cat Massacre
The House of the Dead (novel)
The Mysteries of Paris
Tuberculosis
World War I
Product details
- ISBN 9780691602097
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Jul 2014
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Although today in France church attendance is minimal, when death occurs many families still cling to religious rites. In exploring this common reaction to one of the most painful aspects of existence, Thomas Kselman turns to nineteenth-century French beliefs about death and the afterlife not only to show how deeply rooted the cult of the dead is in one Western society, but how death and the behavior of mourners have been politicized in the modern world. Drawing on sermons preached in rural and urban parishes, folktales, and accounts of seances, the author vividly re-creates the social and cultural context in which most French people responded to death and dealt with anxieties about the self and its survival. Inspired mainly by Catholicism, beliefs about death provided a social basis for moral order throughout the nineteenth century and were vulnerable to manipulation by public officials and clergy.
Kselman shows, however, that by mid-century the increase in urbanization, capitalism, family privacy, and expressed religious differences generated diverse attitudes toward death, causing funerals to evolve from Catholic neighborhood rituals into personalized symbolic events for Catholics and dissenters alike--the civil burial of Victor Hugo being perhaps the greatest symbol of rebellion. Kselman's discussion of the growth of commercial funerals and innovations in cemetery administration illuminates a new struggle for control over funeral arrangements, this time involving businessmen, politicians, families, and clergy. This struggle in turn demonstrates the importance of these events for defining social identity. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.
The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
