A "theatre of rule?" Domestic service in aristocratic households under the Third Republic.

E. P. Thompson developed the notion of "cultural hegemony" to analyse the power of the ruling class over the working class in eighteenth-century England. This article examines the aristocracy's endeavour to maintain its cultural hegemony in the France of the Third Republic. Drawing on the private archives of noble families, it documents servants' roles in supporting the "conspicuous consumption" of their employers, the hierarchy and wages of male and female servants and the language and gestures used in employer-servant interaction. It then looks at working-class responses to nobles' hegemonic ritual of hunting and concludes with discussion of the post-war socio-economic climate in which the distinctive features of domestic service in aristocratic households were gradually abandoned.

Cake And Conversation: the women's jour in Parisian high society, 1880-1914.

At the end of the nineteenth century an upper-class Parisian hostess invited guests into her home on a fixed afternoon of her choice each week. Was this tradition, known as the jour, merely an occasion to partake of refreshments and chat? Or did it serve broader purposes for the women of High Society? This article investigates the process of invitation to a jour, the subtle nuances of etiquette at these gatherings, conversation between men and women, and what was consumed in the way of food and drink. By documenting social interaction in the space of the salon, this article analyses the way in which "power" was constituted through bodily practices. It then goes on to show what the exercise of this power reveals about gender roles, and the structure of social relationships among the Parisian upper class, in the decades before the First World War.