How the French, rich and poor, dressed, what they ate, how they educated their children, wore their hair, traveled, amused themselves, punished their malefactors-all this and much more comes under the probing eye of Paul Lacroix (1806-1884), Parisian library curator, historian, novelist, playwright, and master of historical detail and trivia. Here are chapters on the lives and courts of the three eighteenth-century kings of France: the last years of the opulent and absolutist Louis XIV, the decadent life of Louis XV, and the well-intentioned reign of the enlightened but blundering Louis XVI. Sections on society, charity, education, fashion, dining, and the theater illustrate the lives of the gentry and bourgeoisie, while street life and Parisian amusements give a picture of the working classes. Chapters on the nobility, the clergy, commerce, finance, and justice outline the functioning-and slow but relentless malfunctioning-of a state and system on the eve of a revolution that would change both France and the world forever.

Quotations from contemporary memoirs, diaries, and social commentary add vivid immediacy to Lacroix's portrait of a vanished epoch. This massive treasure of details, newly annotated to provide additional information for the twenty-first-century reader, is an invaluable reference for specialists in the period, for historical researchers, and for any lover of history.

This paperback book is an unabridged, fully proofread text of a long-out-of print book. It is not an overpriced facsimile of the original printing, or an unedited OCR scan full of strange misspellings and weirdly misplaced typographical characters. It has been edited to add explanatory footnotes for the 21st-century reader and proofed to eliminate misprints and errors so that it is as clear and readable as the original hardcover edition.