Taste and Power

Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. Enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities.

Leora Auslander is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Representation, Style, and Taste: The Politics of Everyday Life
PART ONE The Paradox of Absolutism: The Power of the Monarch's Limits 
1. The Courtly Stylistic Regime: Representation and Power under Absolutism 
2. Negotiating Absolute Power: City, Crown, and Church 
3· Fathers, Masters, and Kings: Mirroring Monarchical Power 
PART TWO From Style to Taste:Transitions to the Bourgeois Stylistic Regime 
4· Revolutionary Transformation:
The Demise of the Culture of Production and of the Courtly Stylistic Regime 
5· The New Politics of the Everyday: Making Class through Taste and Knowledge 
6. The Separation of Aesthetics and Productive Labor
PART THREE The Bourgeois Stylistic Regime: Representation, Nation, State, and the Everyday 
7· The Bourgeoisie as Consumers: Social Representation and Power in the Third Republic
8. Style in the New Commercial World
9· After the Culture of Production:The Paradox of Labor and Citizenship
10. Style, the Nation, and the Market: EPILOGUE
The Paradoxes of Representation in a Capitalist Republic
Toward a Mass Stylistic Regime: The Citizen-Consumer
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Names