Jay M. Smith, 1997–1998

Fellowship Work Summary

Jay M. Smith finished an article entitled “No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early‑Modern France,” for American Historical Review 102 (1997). He also wrote two essays on the concepts of honor and nobility in prerevolutionary France—”Recovering Tocqueville’s Social Interpretation of the French Revolution: Eighteenth‑Century France Rethinks Nobility,” slated to appear in a forthcoming festschrift; and “Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over Noblesse Commerçante.” He attended the annual conferences of the Group for Early‑Modern Cultural Studies held at Chapel Hill, N.C., where he chaired a session on aristocracy, and the Society for French Historical Studies (Ottawa), where he commented on a panel on politics, gender, and the court in the seventeenth century.