"Kari Weil's new book takes readers back to an era when horses were an inescapable part of daily life and when horse ownership became an increasingly realizable dream, not just for soldiers, but for middle-class (bourgeois) boys and girls. It charts the rise of the horse as an integral part of daily life in Paris (as work, sport, and food) and the social, political, and affective changes that brought about and followed from the presence of horses on streets and in parks, in the show ring and race track, and even on plates. It also ably traces a rise in "equestrian rhetoric," whose sexual, class, and racial inflections were influenced both by Anglomania and by colonialist attraction to the "hot-blooded" horses of Arab countries. Moving between literature, painting, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sport manuals, and tracts of public hygiene, this book seeks to understand the changing relations to horses who straddled conceptions of pet and livestock, existing between objects of affection, on the one hand, and material as well as symbolic capital, on the other"-- Provided by publisher.

Introduction : The most beautiful conquest of man? -- Heads or tails? Painting history with a horse -- Putting the horse before Descartes : sensibility and the war on pity -- Making horsework visible : domestication and labor from Buffon to Bonheur -- Let them eat horse -- Purebreds and Amazons : race, gender, and species from the Second Empire to the Third Republic -- "The man on horseback" : From military might to circus sports -- Animal magnetism, affective influence, and moral dressage.