The Politics of Appearances

Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France

By: Richard Wrigley

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Hardcover | 1 September 2010 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
328 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.4 x 13.4 x 1.3

Hardcover

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In the turbulent political and social landscape of Revolutionary France, dress played a major role in defining and displaying new identities. What people wore was, in fact, a vital symbol of their allegiances and beliefs. Drawing on a wide range of documentary and visual sources, this book offers a vivid picture of the highly charged politics of Revolutionary appearances. The author explores the dynamic complexity of the new socio-political world, where the identification of who stood for what was such an urgent, if vexed, issue: where identical items of dress could stand for opposing political ideologies, where a variety of institutions - from local societies to the national assembly - tried to define the meanings associated with clothing, and where the clothes a person wore could seal their fate. Tracing the stories surrounding the liberty cap, the different manifestations of official dress, the tricolore cockade and the sans-culotte provides a new and exciting insight into the complexities and uncertainties that made up life in Revolutionary France and the political culture that it created.

Industry Reviews

"Richard Wrigley's achievement in this absorbing study is to delve behind the stereotypes through which the dress of the French revolutionary period has customarily been interpreted. Through giving detailed attention to such privileged items as the cockade, the Phrygian bonnet and the revolutionary relic, he demonstrates conclusively that these features did not function as stable symbols, but revealed in their everyday use the deep contradictions of a society striving to reinvent its civil identity. " --S Bann, University of Bristol

"[A] fascinating study of the changing meaning of appearances from 1789 to the Napoleonic period." --London Review of Books

"One could leaf through this work for a long time ... erudite, clearly constructed and illustrative, Richard Wrigley's book will bring a great deal to all who specialise in the cultural history of French Revolution." --Annales Historiques de la Revolution Francaise

"The Politics of Appearances assembles the most detailed research to reveal the vulnerability of clothing associated with Revolutionary politics." --The Times Literary Supplement

"An exemplary work of scholarship." --History

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