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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, scientific, 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 fourth volume of this brilliant series arrives with the poignance of a letter that through some fluke of the postal system has been delayed 70 or 100 years and is read by descendants of the original addressee...A whole century’s cries and murmurs are here, reminding us that their echoes are with us still.”—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune


“General readers as well as academic specialists will revel in the wealth of historical detail and insight offered here. Aries saw three basic forces contributing to the profound social changes of the early modern era: the rise of state power, the spread of literacy, and new forms of religious piety. Together, the essays address each of these realms from several angles, providing glimpses at everything from cookbooks to charivaris, love letters to lettres decachet. The pattern that emerges is the creation of a sphere of private life, thought, and feeling that was unknown in the Middle Ages.”—Choice

Philippe Ariès

Philippe Ariès (1914-1984) - an important French medievalist , historical demographer and pioneering historian of collective mentalities Philippe Ariès is best known for his L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (1960, published in English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood ), the seminal study that launched historical scholarship on childhood and family life in the Western world. 

Georges Duby

Georges Duby (1919-1996), a member of the Academie francaise, for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the College de France. His numerous books include The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and The Three Orders.