From Subject to Citizen offers an original account of the Second
Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French political
culture: a period in which thinkers of all political persuasions
combined forces to create the participatory democracy alive in France
today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond well-known features of the
Second Empire, its centralized government and authoritarianism, and
reveals the political, social, and cultural advances that enabled
publicists to engage an increasingly educated public on issues of
political order and good citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in
particular as a remarkably intellectual decade during which
Bonapartists, legitimists, liberals, and republicans applied their
ideologies to the pressing problem of decentralization. Ideals such as
communal freedom and civic cohesion rapidly assumed concrete and lasting
meaning for many French people as their country entered the age of
nationalism.
With the restoration of universal suffrage for men in 1851,
constitutionalist political ideas and values could no longer be
expressed within the narrow confines of the Parisian elite. Tracing
these ideas through the books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, and
memoirs of the period, Hazareesingh examines a discourse that connects
the central state and local political life. In a striking reappraisal of
the historical roots of current French democracy, he ultimately shows
how the French constructed an ideal of citizenship that was "local in
form but national in substance."
Originally published in 1998.
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