Includes bibliographical references (p. 675-704) and index.

Pt. 1. Times, Spaces, Powers. 1. Knowing France. 2. Mastery of Space. 3. Time and History. 4. Peasant France and Merchant France. 5. The Kingdom of Exchange: The Culture of Privilege and the Culture of Commerce. 6. The City, Crucible of Change. 7. The Regulated Kingdom: Paris and the Provinces -- Pt. 2. Powers and Conflicts. 8. The King and His Subjects. 9. The King and the People. 10. The End of Rebellion. 11. God, the King, and the Churches. 12. Elites and Nobilities. 13. Public Space. 14. Crises in State and Society -- Pt. 3. Enlightenment and Society. 15. Life Triumphant. 16. The Liberties of Individuals. 17. Consumption and Appearance. 18. Desacralization, Secularization, Illuminism. 19. Materializing the Intelligence, Abstracting Things. 20. Paris, Capital of the Enlightenment.

France in the Enlightenment brings the Old Regime to life by showing how its institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Daniel Roche begins with a map of space and time, depicting France as a mosaic of overlapping geographical units, with people and goods traversing it to the rhythms of everyday life. He fills this frame with the patterns of rural life, urban culture, and government institutions.

Here as never before we see the eighteenth-century French "culture of appearances": the organization of social life, the diffusion of ideas, the accoutrements of ordinary people in the folkways of ordinary living - their food and clothing, living quarters, reading material. Roche shows us the eighteenth-century France of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces, from the public space to the private home.