Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Philip Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
True Nature ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

In attempting to explain the stability of eighteenth-century Britain, and in particular the maintenance of political, social and economic supremacy by the landed aristocracy, scholars have begun to pay attention to the role of ideology and opinion. They see this not merely as providing an explanation of the way things were, but justifying and reinforcing them. The dominant ideological interpretation of society had emerged from the political and constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, and in particular from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an interpretation which might be denominated ‘Whig’, and which faced its most serious challenge at the very end of the eighteenth century from the French revolution. Despite the more tangible threat of French arms, the ruling classes in Britain did not underestimate the danger to social order from the arguments advanced by adherents of the rights-of-man doctrine propagated by the revolutionaries. If, in reply to these views, the status quo could be shown not only to be necessary and inevitable, but also right and good, that is to say correspondent with the true nature of man, then the morality of the existing practices and institutions of civil society would be proven. The problem at its most fundamental level was ethical, and it was a problem which conservatives attempted to solve in a variety of ways.

THE VALUE OF DISPOSSESSION: RETHINKING DISCOURSES OF SELFHOOD IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLY J. COLEMAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Will ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Saint Martin ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
The French Revolution

In Enlightenment-era France, theologians, philosophers, and politicians contested the nature and prerogatives of human personhood with particular vehemence. Yet historians have tended to reduce these struggles to a narrative of ascendant individualism. This essay seeks to recover non-individualist formulations of the self in eighteenth-century France, and, in doing so, to offer a more nuanced account of subjectivity during the period. Out of debates over Christian mysticism, radical philosophy, and republican politics emerged two distinct and conflicting modes of formulating the self 's relationship to its ideas and actions. On one side, mainstream philosophes joined Descartes, Locke, and orthodox Catholic theologians in elaborating the individual's capacity to accumulate existential goods in terms of a discourse of self-ownership. Opposition to this view, in contrast, challenged such claims by employing a discourse of dispossession, which stressed the human person's resignation to, and ultimate identification with, a totalizing force outside the self. The essay traces a specific genealogy of this discourse in the writings of Fénelon, Rousseau, and the Illuminist theologian Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, in the context of intellectual polemics ranging from the role of self-love in Christian devotion to the virtues of self-sacrifice in a republican polity. If the Fénelonian doctrine of spiritual abandon called on believers to surrender their particular desires in the love of God, Rousseau likewise demanded that citizens place their property and their persons under the direction of the general will. Saint-Martin, for his part, applied Rousseau's politics of alienation to his vision of a theocratic republic in the wake of the French Revolution, thereby posing the mystic ideal of dispossession as a means of transforming the self and its world along communal, rather than individualist, lines.

Women and the Glorious Revolution

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The role of women in revolutions has recently excited a good deal of scholarly interest. Innovative studies have appeared on women in the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution that have not only rescued women from oblivion but also modified and enlarged understanding of the revolutions themselves. But for the English Revolution of 1688-89 there has been, aside from biographical studies of the two future queens, Mary and Anne, very little published work on the role of women. My purpose is to remedy that situation, and to broaden the inquiry by addressing four major questions: (1) what role did women from all social groups, lower, middle, aristocratic and royal, play in the Revolution: (2) why, in view of customary restraints, did they enter the public arena; (3) what influence did they have on the Glorious Revolution; and (4) what influence did the Revolution have on women? Underlying these queries is the basic question of what are the contextual conditions that encourage or even make possible women's participation in revolutions?Such a topic requires changes in the questions customarily used in studying political history. If politics is defined in traditional terms simply as the competition for and exercise of power by individuals through their office, voting, and decision making, then there is nothing to say about women in the Glorious Revolution. Women, whatever their social status, had no direct access to the levers of conventionally-defined politics. They did not vote, sit in either house of Parliament, or hold office on any level of government, unless they were queens. In a predominantly patriarchal society, females, except for widows, were customarily subordinate to their fathers or husbands and confined to the sphere of the family and household.

scholarly journals “The Bloody Assizes:” Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Zook
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
New Order ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Popular Memory ◽  
Street Literature ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

The Taxing of the Clergy in Eighteenth-Century France

1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Ravitch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Temporal Characteristic ◽  
Major Area ◽  
French Society ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

If after many years of scholarship and controversy, the French Revolution is to be seen, with Georges Lefebvre, as preeminently the revolution of equality, and its most important achievement the substitution of a bourgeois and individualistic social order for the former aristocratic and corporatist one, the nature of eighteenth-century corporate or “constituted bodies” becomes a major area for research. There are many questions which the historian would like to ask about these aristocratic institutions, but generally these questions fall into two groups: the relationship of these bodies to society as a whole, and their inner cohesiveness. By examining the taxation of the clergy in eighteenth-century France, we investigate the chief temporal characteristic of the ecclesiastical estate and are in a position to evaluate both its relationship to French society as a whole and its internal strengths and weaknesses.

The Russian “Glorious Revolution” of 1762 and the French “Bloodshed” of 1789 as Seen by Andrei Bolotov, a Russian Provincial Nobleman of the Eighteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-208
Author(s):  
Mikhail Pavlovich Miliutin ◽  
Aleksandra Iur’evna Veselova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Made In ◽  
The French Revolution

The article examines the political views of Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, as expressed in his memoirs and handwritten collections of news from 1792–1793, which described the events of the French Revolution, as well as in other writings and translations made in the 1760s–1790s. Bolotov’s sources of information (foreign press, François Pictet, Christian Friedrich Schwan and Christoph Girtanner), his range of communication, and the nature of his writings suggest that his political outlook was not determined solely by the class perspective of a provincial landowner. His political views, formed under the influence of the Catherine ii’s coup of 1762, which he called the Russia’s “Glorious Revolution,” combined ideas underpinning Catherine’s absolutism with notions of natural law and drawn from European intellectuals.

Unnecessary revolution: the case of France

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. G. Runciman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Eventual Outcome

For all the controversy that continues to surround the course of events in France between the summoning of the Estates-General and the fall of Brienne in the summer of 1788 and the summoning of the Convention and the fall of the monarchy in the summer of 1792, it is nowhere in dispute that they constituted a revolution— that is, in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. III.7), ‘a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it’. Indeed, they constituted such an overthrow in a manner and to a degree without precedent. Neither the English Civil War (and still less the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) nor the War of American Independence are properly comparable with them. In calling the French Revolution ‘unnecessary’, therefore, I am not seeking to minimize either its importance (of which more later) or its novelty. Nor do I maintain that the problems by which the ancien régime was confronted could have been resolved by any scheme of reform which would have preserved intact the existing forms and distribution of power. I mean only that the Revolution was unnecessary in two different senses: first, it only took place as it did because of a wholly unfore-seeable series of coincidences; second, its eventual outcome in terms of the broad difference in social structure between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France would have happened in any case. These assertions, moreover, are not—or so I hope to show—as controversial as they may seem: properly stated, both should be equally acceptable to ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ historians alike.

William ‘Bill’ Doyle and the Origins of the French Revolution

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Blanning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Marxist Interpretation ◽  
Breaking Work ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter discusses Bill Doyle's contribution to the study of the origins of the French Revolution. It shows how his early work delivered a powerful critique of the dominant Marxist interpretation, already under attack from revisionists led by Alfred Cobban. It examines the three editions of his book Origins of the French Revolution, with both continuities and changes identified. Particular importance is assigned to Doyle's ground-breaking work on the part played by venality in eroding the old regime monarchy. A second topic of major importance to which Doyle's researches have contributed a great deal is the role of the Parlements. This is placed in the context of Doyle's critique of the notion of an ‘aristocratic reaction’ in late-eighteenth century France. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his most recent work on aristocracy.

History and Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Lorenz
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
History Writing ◽  
True Nature ◽  
The Status ◽  
Current Return ◽  
Theoretical Reflection ◽  
Three Phases

This introductory chapter assesses the role of theory in history and traces the developments in the discipline of history. Theoretical reflection about the ‘true nature’ of history fulfils three interrelated practical functions. First, theory legitimizes a specific historical practice—a specific way of ‘doing history’—as the best one from an epistemological and a methodological point of view. Second, theory sketches a specific programme of doing history. Third, theoretical reflections demarcate a specific way of ‘doing history’ from other ways of ‘doing history’, which are excluded or degraded. The chapter then considers three phases of theoretical changes from analytical to narrative philosophy of history, and then on to ‘history from below’ and the ‘presence’ of history, ultimately leading to the current return of fundamental ontological and normative questions concerning the status of history and history-writing.

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