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Entitlement and Complaint explores the history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. David G.Troyansky traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in "life reviews." Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One: Career and Retirement
- 1. Pensions as Favor and Pensions as Right
- 2. Careering Across the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Divide
- 3. Setting Rules from Old Regime to Midcentury
- 4. Restoration, Revolution, and Retirement: Ending Careers, 1814-1853
- Part Two: The Language of Retirement
- 5. Entitlement and Complaint: Creating a Rhetoric of Retirement
- 6. Changing Content and Expectations
- 7. Gender, Widowhood, and the Limits of Entitlement
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
About the author
David G. Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France and Aging in World History as well as numerous articles on the history of old age and aspects of French cultural history. He is co-editor of Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, The French Revolution in Culture and Society, and a six-volume Cultural History of Old Age.
Summary
Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. David G. Troyansky tells two intertwined stories. He traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in “life reviews.” Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes. As employees aged and one cohort replaced another, their attempts to make sense of their careers and lives formed a larger story of post-revolutionary survival.
Additional text
David Troyansky has written a wonderfully lucid, instructive, and sensitive study that illustrates changing conceptions of the life course, of old age, and of the state's social responsibilities in a time of political turmoil. Based on rich documentation, it sheds fascinating new light on the origins of the modern welfare state. This is a book that will be of great interest to anyone working on the history of modern Europe.
