Taste and power : furnishing Modern France / Leora Auslander.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 427-467) and indexes.

Print version record.

The courtly stylistic regime: representation and power under absolutism -- Negotiating absolute power: city, crown, and church -- Fathers, masters and kings: mirroring monarchical power -- Revolutionary transformation: the demise of the culture of production and the courtly stylistic regime -- The new politics of the everyday: making class through taste and knowledge -- The separation of aesthetics and productive labor -- The bourgeoisie as consumers: social representation and power in the third republic -- Style in the new commercial world -- After the culture of production: the paradox of labor and citizenship -- Style, the nation, and the market: the paradoxes of representation in a capitalist republic -- Epilogue: toward a mass stylistic regime: the citizen -- consumer.

Enlivened and enriched by Auslander's experiences as a cabinetmaker, this pathbreaking work demonstrates that in post-Revolutionary France, furniture and consumer goods became newly important means of constituting selves, social class, and, perhaps most significantly, the economy and society of the nation itself. The very style of the goods reflected these preoccupations: nineteenth-century bourgeois style was dominated by gendered versions of Old Regime-style furniture, while the working class was offered new furniture designed specifically for its needs. Tastemaking took on a sudden urgency, reflected in the creation of new schools, museums, expositions, libraries, magazines, and books designed to "improve" the taste of producers and consumers alike. As these institutions competed with furniture sellers, a fierce competition sprang up among government bureaucrats, private philanthropists, and distributors to control workers' and consumers' taste. Auslander melds the history of high politics - the formation of the state - with the history of the mundane - furniture - in order to examine how power was consolidated, reproduced, and even resisted in the small objects and gestures of everyday life in France.

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