A History of Private Life

The author of Centuries of Childhood and other landmark historical works, Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) was a singular figure in French intellectual life. He was both a political reactionary and a path-breaking scholar, a sectarian royalist who supported the Vichy regime and a founder of the new cultural history—popularly known as l’histoire des mentalités— after the end of the Second World War. Ariès' biographer, Patrick Hutton, contends- rightly- that the originality of Ariès’s work and the power of his appeal derived from the way he drew together the two strands of his own intellectual life: his enduring ties to the old cultural order valued by the right-wing Action Française, and a newfound appreciation for the methodology of the leftist Annales school of historians. This led to some unlikely acolytes. As Walter Kendrick put it in a 1995 New York Times review, 

        Aries's lead was followed by Michel Foucault, whose immensely influential work proposed that all knowledge is mutable, that indeed the distant past may have known things that we do not and cannot know.       

        Foucault, however, preferred theory to research; he liked to erect byzantine theoretical structures on about six facts apiece. Recent historians, while acknowledging Foucault's importance and accepting his theories in their broadest outlines, have returned to Aries's meticulous method, sifting through the detritus of the past for hints to what the past knew. 

A demographer by training, Ariès pioneered a new route into the history of private life that eventually won him a wide readership and in late life an appointment to the faculty of the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At the same time, he fashioned himself as a man of letters in the intellectual tradition of the Action Française and became a perspicacious journalist as well as a stimulating writer of autobiographical memoirs.

Ariès's death in 1984 came in the early days of his general  editorship, with Georges Duby, of the magisterial five volume series, A History of Private Life. Copiously illustrated, the 3300-page set seeks to trace the development of personal privacy from Rome to the 2th century. Each volume divides the topic into half a dozen essays by leading scholars; and they make fascinating reading. St. Augustine, moving from wealthy North Africa, to Rome in 384, for example, was surprised to find that- even among the well-to-do- families usually shared one bedroom.

Wars, revolutions and the comings and going of the mighty rarely loom large in these books; the archives and libraries of Europe must have been turned upside down to find the accounts of individuals' lives and attitudes over the centuries. Particularly interesting is how homosexuality winds in and out of the times- almost as a footnote until the scientific crazes of the 19th century insisted on pathologizing it- and how remarkably at variance attitudes toward, and the consequences of, it are with the current orthodoxies of the American political right.

We have a very good complete set of the History; all are hardcover, with unclipped dust jackets. Volumes 4 and 5 are first printings; the first three volumes are later printings. This is the sort of long, satisfying read that will change one's view of...well, practically everything.

Details: 

Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, general editors, A History of Private Life, 5 vols, Belknap Press, Harvard, 1987-91.

Vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, 1987, 670 pp, 7th printing, ISBN 0-674-39975-7. Slight wear to dust jacket.

Vol. 2: Revelations of the Medieval World, 1988, 650 pp, 8th printing, ISBN 0-674-39976-5.

Vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, 1989, 645 pp, 2nd printing, ISBN 0-674-39977-3.

Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, 1990, 713 pp, 1st printing, ISBN 0-674-39978-1.

Vol. 5: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times, 1991, 630 pp, 1st printing, ISBN 0-674-39979-X.

Your price:US $100 the set.