Entitlement and complaint : ending careers and reviewing lives in post-revolutionary France

"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. While it tracks career patterns, with all their continuities and interruptions, it reveals the original ways that people were coming to understand the course of their personal, professional, and political lives in an era of revolutionary turmoil and how they reconfigured those lives in the half-century that followed. The book argues that a succession of political regimes and a shift from a world of favor and privilege to a world of right formed the context for changes in how people spoke of their own lives, careers, and desires and how they juxtaposed their own life histories with emerging narratives of a more public and national history. It uses the example of the magistracy to get at ideas of public service and entitlement, but it balances the development of state institutions with people's uses of those institutions, and it shows how people tried to make sense retrospectively of their experiences as they made themselves both heroes and victims on the French historical stage. As they aged and as one cohort replaced another, their narratives of self and career evolved into something increasingly formulaic and recognizably modern."