Nineteenth-century France was a society of apparent paradoxes. It is famous for periodic and bloody revolutionary upheavals, for class conflict and for profound religious disputes. Yet this period was also marked by relative demographic stability, gradual urbanisation and modest economic change. This new and ground-breaking history ranges widely. Alongside coverage of more 'traditional' themes of social history - class and class conflict, religion and anticlericalism, education and popular literacy - there are innovative chapters on crime and punishment, medicalisation, consumerism and gender. Incorporating much recent research, Roger Magraw draws both upon valuable insights derived from the new social history of the 1960s and upon more recent approaches suggested by gender history, cultural anthropology and the 'linguistic turn'. Each chapter contains a very extensive, up-to-date bibliography to direct students towards further reading. ROGER MAGRAW is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Warwick. He is the author of France, 1815-1914: The Bourgeois Century (1983) and A History of the French Working Class (1992).