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The eighteenth century was a period ripe with challenges for hospitals in France. Denounced as ineffective, inefficient and even inhumane institutions, hospitals found themselves at the centre of a growing debate over the administration of health care and welfare. Although dismissing the hospital's traditional role as a refuge for the poor, the indigent and the sick, many reformers believed that this institution still could play a valuable social role. Thus, while contemporaries lashed out against the large, "abuse-ridden," hopitaux generaux and hotels-Dieu , small hospitals were seen in a more favourable light. For the growing number of contemporaries who argued that hospitalisation should be reserved exclusively for the sick, hospitals containing a small number of beds were promoted as better disposed and better equipped to meeting the health-care needs of the community. At the same time, contemporaries began calling for the decentralization of health care and welfare services. Instead of focusing these services in large regional poor-relief institutions, reformers argued that the poor and the sick would be better served by receiving assistance in their own community, either in small parish hospitals, or within their own home (secours a domicile). / This dissertation examines how hospitals and hospital services in the late eighteenth-century generalite of Rouen responded to this growing hospital reform movement. It shows that many of the policies adopted by the region's hospital administrators reflected the contents of the larger "national" debate on health care and welfare reform. More importantly, the military was behind many of the changes affecting hospital services in this region During the eighteenth century, military hospitals became a model to emulate towards making the "reformed" hospital a reality. However, imposing military-style health standards on the region's civilian hospitals proved to be a complicated process, one that often involved a great deal of negotiation and compromise.

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This thesis sets out to show that a philosophical reflection on history is, in the strongest possible way, an essential feature of Hume's project of a science of human nature: a philosophical investigation of human nature, for Hume, cannot be successful independently of an understanding of the relation of human beings to their history. Hume intended to criticize traditional metaphysics by referring all knowledge to experience. But it is almost always assumed that Hume means by "experience" the result of an individual's past sense perception or personal observation. Accordingly, Hume's criticism of traditional metaphysics is taken to lead to an individualistic conception of knowledge and human nature. In this thesis I claim that this picture of Hume's "empiricism" is simply wrong. He is not a philosopher who reduces "experience" to the merely private happenings within a personal psychology. On the contrary, Hume has a wider notion of experience, one that includes not only personal observation and memory, but, fundamentally, one that includes implicit knowledge of human history. Experience, so understood, brings about what I term a historical point of view, namely, the point of view of someone who seeks to extend his experience as far as it is possible in order to acquire the capacity to produce more nuanced and impartial judgments in any given practice. It is precisely this historical point of view that enables us to depart from the individualistic perspective that we would otherwise be bound to adopt not only in epistemology but, most significantly, in politics, in social life, in religion, etc. / Chapter 1 presents the historical background against which Hume elaborates his views of history's role in philosophy. Chapter 2 discusses and criticizes the individualist reading of Hume by showing that he had a satisfactory account of beliefs formed via human testimony. Chapter 3 presents a view of Hume on explanation that underscores his interest in practical and informal explanations as those of history. Chapter 4 provides a discussion of Hume's notion of historical experience in relation both to his theory of perception and to his project of a "science of man."

Taking as a case study the Theatre-Italien, here considered both as a particular theatrical practice and as a specific stage in Paris---one of the most popular at the time---this dissertation asks what role this theatre played in the novel competition of discourses which characterized political culture in the era of Revolutions. All too often, historians have overestimated print culture as the main medium through which discourses were produced in the eighteenth century, and this despite the fact that theatre played a fundamental role in the public life of this period. Furthermore, when theatre is studied, historians emphasize too often the written form of the plays. / The dissertation's structure seeks to underline the specificity of the cultural practice represented by the theatre. The discrepancies between the meaning of a play written by a particular author and the same play as it is performed on stage are emphasized. Political messages emerge out of the language of the actors and actresses without any possibility to control them, so that the players become, in effect, co-authors of the play. Similarly, the variety of the nature of the audience and the way in which it becomes at once judge, co-author and co-actor make the public, neither intangible nor invisible, but simply gathered, a crucial feature of this cultural practice which allows us to argue that theatre was actually a very bad instrument of propaganda. Instead, theatre can be seen at the time to be a public scene of immediate political debate. The conflicting opinions expressed there turn theatre not into the minor of political reality intended by various regimes confronted to the diversity of the polity---what some people have called "a school for the people"---but rather as the mirror of the reality experienced by a large number of Parisians at the time. It is in this sense that we relate the theatrical practices studied with the concept of public spirit, expressing the people's understanding of the general interest, instead of that of public opinion, expressing the unified message imposed by a dominant political group.

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