The French Revolution and the Modernization of Germany

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. W. Blanning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
German History ◽  
River Flows ◽  
General Account ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
German People ◽  
The French Revolution

Historians of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have always been spoilt for choice when needing to recommend a good general account of their period. Until recently, their colleagues working on the eighteenth century and the revolutionary-Napoleonic period have been less fortunate. The second volume of Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany contains much that is original, penetrating, and powerful but is also decidedly uneven in quality, patchy in coverage, and not an easy read. A.J.P. Taylor's The Course of German History is a wild mixture of insight and perversity, immensely stimulating but marred by an extreme Germanophobia and distorted by a teleological perspective which sees all German history since the dawn of time heading inexorably for 1933: “it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea.” “Modern Germany” has usually been deemed to begin in 1815, so the period which immediately preceded the Vienna settlement has been studied with a view only to what it started.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

Hellenism in the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This article moves past the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and, in particular, to the French Revolution, which crystallized an important, if not fully understood, moment in the history of Hellenism. It shows how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration for so many of the French revolutionaries, were simultaneously proto-democratic and pro-Spartan. In this respect, Rousseau marks a complex breakthrough in the political traditions of Hellenism, which were, for much of European history until the eighteenth century, anti-democratic and pro-Spartan.

WHO WERE THE SANS-CULOTTES?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-455
Author(s):  
RUTH SCURR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Necessary Connections ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Who were the sans-culottes? What were their concerns and purposes? And what role did they play in the unfolding of events collectively known as the French Revolution? Michael Sonenscher first engaged directly with these questions in the 1980s (in an article for Social History 9 (1984), 303) when social historians were experimenting with the possibilities opened up by discourse analysis, and when the traditions of eighteenth-century civic, or republican, language seemed particularly exciting: The social history of the French Revolution owes much to the deepening insistence with which the discourse of the Revolution itself referred to, and postulated, necessary connections between everyday circumstances and public life. From Sieyes’ equation of aristocratic privilege with unproductive parasitism in 1788 to the Thermidorian caricature of the architects of the Terror as the dregs of society, the Revolution produced its own “social interpretation.” Sonenscher argued that while the identification of the figure of the sans-culotte with that of the artisan was “the achievement of the generation of historians—Richard Cobb, George Rudé and Albert Soboul—who reintroduced the popular movement into the historiography of the French Revolution”, there was always something problematic (or circular) in the underlying assumption that it was possible to equate the representation of artisan production found in the political language of the sans-culottes during the Revolution with what actually existed in the workshops of Paris or other towns of eighteenth-century France. Back in the 1980s what Sonenscher hoped was that a more accurate understanding of the actual dynamics of workshop production would produce “a better explanation of the meaning of the language of the sans-culottes”. His own expectation, as a social historian, was that the causality, in both explanatory and historical terms, would run from the social to the political sphere.

Gibbon's unfinished History: the French Revolution and English political vocabularies

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Womersley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Textual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractOn Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick. This article explains why Gibbon began this work, and why he laid it aside. Beginning by describing the nature and purpose of literature on Hanoverian genealogy in the earlier eighteenth century, and proceeding to relate the content of the Antiquities to the politics of Blackstone and Hume, the article identifies the Antiquities as a distinctively ancien régime defence of British political life and institutions which was elicited from Gibbon by the early months of the French revolution. The abandonment of the Antiquities is then explained as part of Gibbon's shocked response to the deepening gravity of events in France after the September massacres. In the polarized political atmosphere which ensued, the literary finesse of the Antiquities ran the risk of being confused with disaffection. That risk was increased when Gibbon and The decline and fall began to be used by radicals as auxiliaries in their attack on England's ancien régime. The textual history of the Antiquities allows us to perceive the rapidity with which the connotations and ownership of certain political vocabularies in England changed during the early 1790s.

Rights After the Revolutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Model State ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

Sans-Culottes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The French Revolution

This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, this book examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, the book opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.

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