Susanna Barrows, scholar of modern French history, dies at 65
BERKELEY — Susanna I. Barrows, a professor emerita of history at the UC Berkeley, and an authority on modern French history, died at her home in Berkeley on Wednesday, Oct. 27, after a suspected heart attack. She was 65.
A sparkling essayist whose work was widely published in French and English, Barrows wrote in a romantic tradition, going back to French historian Jules Michelet, in which "the people" are the heroes of their own liberation. She found their voices and their bodies, during prodigious hunts through French archives, in sources that included saved graffiti and police records of political gestures and whispered invective.
Barrows was working at the time of her death on the "Coup of 16 May 1877," a time, she said, when French President Patrice de MacMahon's "purge and relentless prosecution of the press moved politics back to the world of oral culture and re-infused political rituals with political meaning."...
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A sparkling essayist whose work was widely published in French and English, Barrows wrote in a romantic tradition, going back to French historian Jules Michelet, in which "the people" are the heroes of their own liberation. She found their voices and their bodies, during prodigious hunts through French archives, in sources that included saved graffiti and police records of political gestures and whispered invective.
Barrows was working at the time of her death on the "Coup of 16 May 1877," a time, she said, when French President Patrice de MacMahon's "purge and relentless prosecution of the press moved politics back to the world of oral culture and re-infused political rituals with political meaning."...