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When Champagne Became French
Kolleen M. Guy
Wine and the Making of a National Identity
Studies in Historical and Political Science
Johns Hopkins University Press
March 2003
On Sale: March 9, 2003
280 pages ISBN: 0801871646 EAN: 9780801871641 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
Winner of the Outstanding Manuscript Award from Phi Alpha
Theta, this work explains how nationhood emerges by viewing
countries as cultural artifacts, a product of "invented
traditions." In the case of France, scholars sharply
disagree, not only over the nature of French national
identity but also over the extent to which diverse and
sometimes hostile provincial communities became integrated
into the nation. In When Champagne Became French: Wine and
the Making of a National Identity, Kolleen M. Guy offers a
new perspective on this debate by looking at one of the
central elements in French national culture -- luxury wine
-- and the rural communities that profited from its production. Focusing on the development of the champagne industry
between 1820 and 1920, Guy explores the role of private
interests in the creation of national culture and in the
nation-building process. Drawing on concepts from social and
cultural history, she shows how champagne helped fuel the
revolution in consumption as social groups searched for new
ways to develop cohesion and to establish status. By the end
of the nineteenth century, Guy concludes, the
champagne-producing provinces in the department of Marne had
developed a rhetoric of French identity that promoted its
own marketing success as national. This ability to mask
local interests as national concerns convinced government
officials of the need, at both national and international
levels, to protect champagne as a French patrimony.
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