Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siecle France » (New Edition)

Lisa Tiersten is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College.

"Marianne in the Market is an original analysis of the relationship among consumerism, republicanism, and gender at the turn of the century. Tiersten persuasively argues that French cultural and commercial experts resolved the tension between republican civic-mindedness and the liberal free market by constructing the chic bourgeois woman.
In showing how 'marketplace modernism,' the new bourgeois aesthetic of everyday originality, came to replace the old aesthetic of aristocratic taste, this book suggests a new way of thinking about consumerism that invites a comparative perspective."—Whitney Walton, author of France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century

"Lisa Tiersten has deftly tracked the bourgeois housewives of fin-de-siècle France in their new roles as spenders, taste-setters, and overloaded carriers of cultural values. Marianne in the Market is a fine study, rich with insights, delivered in a beautiful prose package."—Joyce Appleby, author of
Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans

"A valuable and engaging account of the debate over consumption in turn-of-the-century France. The author convincingly portrays the ways in which tastemakers worked to redeem consumption as a social, political, and aesthetic contribution to the nation.
In the process consumers—female consumers, too—come to participate in an internal civilizing mission. "—Bonnie Smith, author of The Gender of History