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chapter 7 N Why Paris? Barbara B. Diefendorf My Dutch grandmother explained my fascination with French history as the product of the small drop of French blood flowing in my veins from the seduction of one of my Dutch foremothers by a French soldier during the wars of the Revolution. She waited until I was in my mid-twenties to tell me this, presumably so as not to shock me, because at the same time she warned me not to be judgmental: “Times were different then.” The story came to mind as I pondered the paths this autobiographical sketch might take. I am acutely aware of how the narrative strategy I adopt at the outset of this account will shape the story I have to tell. One set of choices will make my career look like an accident, the result of a long series of fortuitous events; another will make it appear overdetermined, the product of an inevitable march of events. And yet, however much Dutch Calvinist blood still runs in my veins, I do not believe in predestination of either a spiritual or a worldly kind. It is tempting to recount my personal history as if each step led neatly to the next, but it simply would not be true. I can date my fascination with France—and especially with Paris—to a youthful infatuation; it is harder to explain why that interest took an academic turn. Never once as an undergraduate did I look up in class and imagine myself on the other side of the podium, as teacher instead of student, much less as a teacher and scholar focusing on the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, a period I did not even encounter until my second year of graduate school. I would like to take credit for careful planning and ambition, but in truth my career trajectory owes far more to happenstance and to choices made by following my heart with little thought as to where they might lead. In this I am a product of my generation as well as of my temperament. I graduated from college in 1968, a pivotal year but not a good one for career ambitions. Having never had a woman professor, I had no role models among my teachers, and, although I had read The Second Sex with interest one summer while still in high school, I did not see a connection to my own situation when, having graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley, I found that the only job for which I was qualified was as a glorified file clerk for an executive recruiting firm in San Francisco. Within a few months, I was pondering two choices: scrimp and save enough money for a plane ticket to Paris without worrying about what I would do when my money ran out or return to school in the hope of finding something more satisfying to do with my life. School won when my boss agreed to let me continue parttime while attending classes. I was nevertheless still uncertain enough about what I was doing that I would only have applied for the M.A. program had one of the professors I asked for a recommendation not advised me that I would not be taken seriously unless I applied for the Ph.D. I took his advice and applied to study nineteenth-century French history. Why France? Because it was the foreign language in which I was most proficient ; because it was the field of history for which I could write the strongest application; because I had spent my junior year there and wanted to go back; because I was still in the grips of a childhood fascination and did not even consider other possibilities. On some deeper level, this was a way of seeking out my European roots without the more painful confrontations with the past that would have come from going to the Netherlands, which my father had left on the eve of World War II and to which he had never returned. But I only realized this much later, at the same time that I recognized my preference for studying problems like religious violence and gender inequities at one remove, by locating my studies in the distant and not the recent past. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a town just north of Berkeley, where my mother was living when she met and married my father during the war...

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