Colin Jones: fox and hedgehog historian of France

Colin Jones is one of the most prolific and wide-ranging historians of France today. In the more than twenty books and sixty articles he has published thus far in his career, he has considered both Paris and the provinces; the lives of ordinary people and those of elites; social practices and material culture as well as discourses and the emotions. His work spans the early modern and modern periods, and the themes he has treated run the gamut from sex work, charity and consumption to medicine, art and gender. It is not only the breadth and interdisciplinarity of his work, however, that has attracted the attention of scholars and the general public. It is also the liveliness of his writing. The verve and sensitivity with which he approaches the past are reminiscent of the late eighteenth-century Parisian flâneur avant la lettre Louis-Sébastien Mercier and his ‘thick description’ of city life. Mercier’s Tableau of the capital provides a rich source for much of Jones’ writing, inflecting his microhistorical methodology and colourful approach to his many and varied subjects.