Jay M. Smith (NHC Fellow, 1997–98)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1997–98

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 pre-Revolutionary 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, NC, 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.