A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-century France Book

The Lamothes were an ordinary family in 18th century Bordeaux. Well-to do and well respected by their neighbours, they were local notables whose private and public lives suggest the importance of family, skin, and friendship networks, professional activities and cultural interests, as well as a desire to serve the public good. In this portrait of the Lamothes, Christine Adams explores the development of middle-class identity among urban professionals and reconsiders the role of their social group in the coming French revolution. This family history is based on more than three hundred personal letters that circulated among the Lamothes - parents and seven siblings - over a period of 25 years. Such a collection is rare for this period, and Adams makes the most of it. Her study lends texture to provincial middle-class life. She weaves these letters into every aspect of the Lamothes'experience - professional, literary, intellectual, asocial, and civic. She demonstrates a sustained mobilization of all family skills and resources to maintain the status of the males of the family and preserve (rather than risk) the family's emotional and material stability. While their conservative lifestyle suggests that the Lamothes were not "revolutionary", they were, nonetheless, a bourgeoisie. Adams thus taps into a potent debate about middle-class consciousness and identity in the 18th century, arguing against those historians who doubt that such a social class existed in France before 1789.Read More