© 2020 Stefan Dmytro Kosovych
© 2020 Stefan Dmytro Kosovych NOURISHING THE POLITICAL BODY: BANQUETS IN EARLY THIRD REPUBLIC FRANCE, 1878 – 1914 BY STEFAN DMYTRO KOSOVYCH DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2020 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Emeritus Mark S. Micale, Chair and Director of Research Associate Professor Tamara Chaplin Professor Maria Todorova Professor Jean-Philippe R. Mathy ABSTRACT The most pressing issues of the day in France and in Europe – the place of workers in society, women’s rights, republicanism versus monarchy as the form of government, and expansion of the French empire – were advanced at banquets, ritualized gatherings over food and drink. Drawing on the key historical success of banquets as a means of political mobilization during the prelude to the Revolution of 1848, socialists/anarchists, royalists, imperialists, and feminists turned to the banquet to strengthen their political agendas during early Third Republic France. In Nourishing the Political Body: Banquets in Early Third Republic France, 1878 – 1914, I argue that banquets became a critical site for the construction of political and cultural power and identity by creating distinctive, tightly-knit communities that bolstered a diverse array of causes across the entire political landscape. Using police reports, government documents, accounts of banquet proceedings, newspaper articles, letters, and memoirs, my dissertation analyzes four prominent genres of banquets during late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France: commemorations of the Paris Commune, royalist, empire, and feminist. At these events, different political groups promoted specific agendas that were always ideological, oftentimes subversive, and even revolutionary.
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