History of Private Life, Volume IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War

If you only read one volume of this five volume set, volume IV is the book I would recommend. The History of Private Life, vols. I-V, is concerned with the project of demonstrating private life in the west (read: France) from its Roman origins to the present day. Volume IV concerns itself with the 19th century. The 19th century, with the emergence of industrialization, democratic feeling and the bourgeois, is where modernity begins. It should come as no surprise that the 19th century is also where the modern conception of "private life" began as well. After reading volume IV, I was left wondering whether this set of five books might have read better as a set of three books: Volume one would contain Roman life, the middle ages and the renaissance/early modern period, volume two would be this book and volume three would be the twentieth century. Not to say that I found vol's I-III irrelevant. However, those volumes were more concerned with antecedents of "private" life and it is only in this volume that "private" life takes center stage. I noticed a shift in the style of writing in this volume. Whereas the previous three volumes were straight forward with only occasional prose that lurched into the familiar (and oft incomprehensible) style of the "theorists of social control"(Foucalt, etc). This volume sometimes descends into the circular logic and incomprehensible theory of that school. None the less, this is the one book of the five that I would most recommend.