Entitlement and Complaint

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. David G. Troyansky tells two intertwined stories. He traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in "e;life reviews."e; Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes. As employees aged and one cohort replaced another, their attempts to make sense of their careers and lives formed a larger story of post-revolutionary survival.