MAZA, Sarah C. 1953-

PERSONAL:

Born April 12, 1953, in New York, NY; married, 1999; children: one. Education: University of Porvence, B.A., 1973; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1978.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, Northwestern University, 633 Clark Street, Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail—scm@northwestern.edu.

CAREER:

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, assistant professor, Jane Long Professor in the Humanities. Visiting professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, France, 1998.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Endowment for the Humanities fellow; National Humanities Center fellow; Woodrow Wilson Center fellow; John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow; David Pickney Prize, Society for French Historical Studies, for Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France.

WRITINGS:

Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1983.

Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

(Editor, with Lloyd Kramer) A Companion to Western Historical Thought, Blackwell Publishers (Malden, MA), 2002.

The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

In her books, historian Sarah C. Maza probes the virtually indefinable sphere of perception, drawing upon historical records to present her case. In Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France, she uses trial briefs written by young, ambitious, Enlightenment-educated lawyers of the 1770s during the last quarter of France's Old Regime. In the days before newspapers carried current affairs, the literate public virtually devoured the court proceedings described in such briefs: debt disputes between families of both the common and aristocratic classes; a death sentence handed down to a servant for killing an old man; a fraudulent and deceptive deal surrounding a necklace for the queen; a domestic dispute over a woman's abandonment by her husband. These trial briefs were published and distributed in the tens of thousands, and Maza uses these sources to form her interpretation of "the ways in which the writing and reading of sensational courtroom literature contributed to the birth of public opinion and a new public sphere" by translating "political tensions into social imagery." William Doyle, reviewing the book for the English Historical Review, wrote that "it was a cultural phenomenon of the first importance, and Maza offers thoughtful and convincing analyses of why and how it occurred, and how it fitted in with the end of the old regime and the character of what followed." Cynthia A. Bouton commented in her review for Journal of Social History that Maza "contributes significantly to our understanding of the dynamic role barristers played in shaping the prerevolutionary period," and Doyle called the book "a thorough pioneering survey that should convince even the most sceptical of the insights which the cultural historians of this period can provide at their best."

Maza's goal in The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 was to investigate the biases that resulted in what she calls the "myth" of the French bourgeoisie. A term with a long history, "bourgeois" predated the French Revolution and referred not to the middle class but to any citizen of any town. A country person, therefore, could not be bourgeois. In what John R. Hall in the American Journal of Sociology termed "synthetic, analytic, historical methods to deconstruct the presumed relationship between reality and its ideological representation," Maza proposes that the French bourgeoisie never even existed. "Only during the Revolution," commented David A. Bell in the New Republic, "when political radicals denounced the 'bourgeoisie' as a new and dangerous aristocracy of wealth, did the word start to acquire its modern meaning of middle class." For her book, Maza researched and analyzed memoirs, scholarly works, treatises, novels, plays, and histories to support her thesis. The bourgeoisie were depicted as self-interested, caring only about profit, accumulation of wealth, and family life to the exclusion of public interest. "In the final analysis," wrote Bell, "the 'bourgeois' was the dark opposite of the public-minded 'citizen.'" Jim Doyle, reviewing the book for Library Journal, explained that "it was the demonization of bourgeois values … that sustained political forces on both the Right and the Left." Hall called the book "a bold and radical reinterpretation of French history and an important exemplar for recasting political economy," while Bell stated that "Maza's book joins an impressive canon of works in the new 'history of narratives' … [and] enables the reader to see how French people—at least literate ones—understood the world around them and sought to order it. She helps us to understand what made France tick."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Sociology, January, 2004, John R. Hall, review of The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850, p. 1042.

English Historical Review, June, 1996, William Doyle, review of Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France, p. 740.

Journal of Social History, fall, 1995, Cynthia A. Bouton, review of Private Lives and Public Affairs, p. 180.

Library Journal, March 1, 2003, Jim Doyle, review of The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, p. 104.

New Republic, July 21, 2003, David A. Bell, review of The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, p. 32.

Reference Reviews, 2003, Simon Barrett, review of A Companion to Western Historical Thought, p. 44.*