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The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris

ISBN: 978-0-745-60693-4

November 1991

Polity

320 pages

Description
This lively new book examines the origins of modern intimacy and domestic life. Focusing on Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author explores the emergence and development of ideas such as 'sociability', 'comfort' and 'the home.

On the basis of extensive and original research, Pardailhé-Galabrun describes early modern Paris as a city of contrasts: between buildings constructed as rental properties with ordinary, cramped facades, and the townhouses of the nobility, with carriage entrances, standing on lots alongside spacious courtyards and gardens. She has produced a vivid picture of the texture and warmth of life in the domestic world of pre-Revolutionary Parisians.

About the Author
Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun worked closely at the CNRS with Professor François Crouzet and Professor Pierre Chaunu. Together with Victor-Lucien Tapie and Jean-Paul Le Flem, she wrote Retables Baroques de Bretagne (1970). She died in 1990.
Features
* An original and comprehensive study of the origins of intimacy and private life in early modern Europe.
* Based on extensive research.
* A fascinating account of life in seventeenth and eighteenth century Paris, the book is also accessible to the general reader.