Bélisaire in South Carolina, 1768

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
John Renwick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
The Revolution

It has often been debated whether French opinion and enlightened philosophy could have influenced the Colonies between 1760 and 1773. Many students of eighteenth-century France accept the possibility. Many American historians have denied it, either because of their obsession with the purely economic causes of the Revolution or because of a semi-chauvinistic desire to ascribe the whole credit for the insurrection to the colonists alone. Mercantile dissatisfaction and national merit, though doubtless important as, respectively, a precipitant and a guarantee of ultimate victory, will hardly suffice to explain what was, after all, just as fundamentally a moral phenomenon.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

Franco Moretti as Satirist

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-685
Author(s):  
Bethany Wiggin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
New Left ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Shelf Space ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
The Revolution

My first encounter with Franco Moretti's work was “conjectures on world literature,” from which his book distant reading takes its title. The essay was first published in 2000 in the New Left Review, the original home of seven of the ten essays reprinted in Distant Reading. I happened across it in 2004 amid a fit of procrastination fueled by anxious uncertainty. I was unsure about how, or even whether, to revise a dissertation on popular novels in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, many of which had been translated from the French. No one really knew much about them. They were miserably cataloged; generations of Prussian librarians had been ordered not to collect them—and to throw away any that had managed to take up shelf space in the first place. In 1795 the reactionary, antirepublican Johann Georg Heinzmann opined, “So lange die Welt stehet, sind keine Erscheinungen so merkwürdig gewesen als in Deutschland die Romanleserey und in Frankreich die Revolution” (“Since the beginning of time nothing was more noteworthy than the revolution in France and the reading of novels in Germany”; 139; my trans.). But an awful lot of these novels are now gone. Critics sometimes say they were read to shreds. And whereas Heinzmann—and generations of state and church censors before him—cared a great deal about the republican potential of German Romanleserey (“reading of novels”), I wasn't confident anyone did today.

Contribution à l'étude des idées politiques de Napoléon Ier

Res Publica ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
André Cabanis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
To Come ◽  
Napoleon I ◽  
The Revolution

The writings of Napoleon I and his contemporaries' testimonies reveal the image of a statesman more taken up with action than theories and whom circonstances have made go through different stages in his political  convictions. During his youth, he takes up all the ideas of the eighteenth century, even to their contradictions, though the temper of the leader to come, sometimes shows through already. During the Consulate - a time of dissimulation - he tries to conciliate around him the most antagonistic ideas in order to strengthen his popular dictatorship. When at the height of his glory - about 1808-1811 - he longs to enter the «European Concert» white building a universal Empire, and he thinks of reviving the old regime society, white not admitting any intermediary between the Nation and himself. Defeated, then deported, he clearly analyses the causes of his failure and makes the most of future by reappealing to the ideas of the Revolution.

Le armi dotte e la Rivoluzione francese: riformismo, elitismo e meritocrazia

2012 ◽  
pp. 41-63
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Cuccoli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Services ◽  
The State ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
State Corporation ◽  
The Creation ◽  
École Polytechnique ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Revolution

The article focuses on the evolution of the military technical corps in France between the mid-Eighteenth century and the Restoration, and proposes for them the notion of "State corporation". This phase - an intermediate one between the corps de métier and the corps d'État - was attained first by the engineers and the artillery. These corps selected their officers by competitive examination, which functioned both as an intellectual filter and a social one. The distinction generated by this filter - nurtured by an elitist approach based on meritocracy was not overridden by the Revolution. On the contrary, it was further consecrated by the creation of the École polytechnique, which soon became controlled by the military technical corps. The "State corporation" model was then extended through the École polytechnique to the geographical engineers and the civil public services. The institutional conflicts among the technical corps during the National Constituent Assembly and those between them and the École polytechnique (1794-1799) are analyzed along these interpretative lines. While the former show their corporative resistance of geographical engineers in the name of equality, the latter bring out their corporative resistance to external education of candidates.

‘Second-Hand Superiority’: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the English

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Ward W. Briggs
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Research Institutions ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
American Research ◽  
Long Life ◽  
German System ◽  
The Revolution

The attitude of the American classical scholar Basil L. Gildersleeve toward the English may be taken as typical of Americans over the period of his long life. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, a city with deep economic and cultural ties to England, he found his youthful admiration for British scholarship offset by the sufferings of his ancestors in the Revolution and the War of 1812. At mid-century the allegiance of many American intellectuals had switched from England to Germany, viewed idealistically as a place of pure intellectual discovery and artistic creativity. British amateurism held little interest for those who were building the first American research institutions in the 1880s, but as the FirstWorldWar approached, the deficiencies of the German system and the exciting work being done by those around Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray brought Gildersleeve back to the respect for humane British scholarship that he had learned in his youth in Charleston.

From Servant of the King to ‘Idol of the Nation’

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
The Revolution

The absolute monarchy was a personal monarchy and during the reign of Louis XIV, the king established a tradition that the king should act as his ‘own first minister’, coordinating the work of his ministerial servants. In the course of the eighteenth century that tradition was undermined by a series of social, administrative, and cultural changes to such an extent that by the 1780s ministers were increasingly behaving as independent political figures, courting public opinion and claiming to act in the name of public welfare or even the nation. By examining these changes, this chapter argues that the political culture of the absolute monarchy was in constant transition and that the failure of Louis XVI, in particular, to manage its effects was one of the principal causes of his loss of authority in the period preceding the Revolution of 1789.

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