Entitlement and Complaint: Ending Careers and Reviewing Lives in Post-Revolutionary France - Hardcover

Troyansky, David G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0197638759 ISBN 13: 9780197638750

Publisher: OUP USA, 2024

Synopsis

Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. David G. Troyansky tells two intertwined stories. He traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in “life reviews.” Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes. As employees aged and one cohort replaced another, their attempts to make sense of their careers and lives formed a larger story of post-revolutionary survival.

About this title

About the Author

David G. Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France and Aging in World History as well as numerous articles on the history of old age and aspects of French cultural history. He is co-editor of Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, The French Revolution in Culture and Society, and a six-volume Cultural History of Old Age.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0197638759
• ISBN 13: 9780197638750
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256