The French Revolution and the Jews: Assessing the Cultural Impact

AJS Review ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay R. Berkovitz
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Many ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

For the Jews of France, as for their fellow countrymen, the French Revolution came to constitute the myth of origin, the birthdate of a new existence. On September 27, 1791, two years after the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French National Assembly voted to admit the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine to citizenship. Subsequent generations would recall this momentous event as a turning point of extraordinary magnitude, and would view themselves as compelling evidence of its transformative power. Their memories tended to be dominated by images of celebration and glory, comparing the Revolution to the Sinaitic revelation and referring to it in messianic-redemptive terms. Not surprisingly, the many setbacks and misfortunes suffered by the generation of 1789 were largely absent from these recollections, while only meager appreciation for the complexities introduced into Jewish cultural life can be detected in the half-century following the Revolution. Even more significant was the ascendant historical view, undoubtedly colored by a pervading sense of optimism among leaders of French Jewry, that credited the Revolution with having put an end to centuries of humiliation, legal discrimination, and exclusion from the mainstream of society.

The Académie and Its Dictionary from the Beginning of the Revolution until the End of the Monarchy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Fitzsimmons
Keyword(s):  
Educational Reform ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Remarkable Change ◽  
Societal Transformation ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Continue Work ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The French Revolution ushered in a remarkable change in language, with both neologisms and new meanings for existing words. Supporters and critics of the Revolution often utilized a dictionary format for new or existing words to portray it in either a favorable or a pejorative manner. Provisionally funded in 1790, the Académie, rooted in the traditional high French of the court and elite, ignored the linguistic innovations, leading François-Urbain Domergue to attempt to form a body that would codify Revolutionary language, although it never came to fruition. Ultimately, partially because of its closeness with the monarch and in part because of the lateness with which Talleyrand presented a plan on educational reform, the Académie survived the reform agenda of the National Assembly, enabling it to continue work on the fifth edition. However, it disregarded not only linguistic innovations but also the societal transformation brought about by the National Assembly.

Patronage and Revolution: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and His Theory of Legislative Corruption

2014 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-67
Author(s):  
William Selinger
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
The Future ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractEdmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is most famous and controversial for Burke's opposition to the philosophy behind the Revolution. This essay examines Burke's more practical criticisms of the French National Assembly which pervade the pamphlet, and shows their connection to his earlier arguments about corruption in the House of Commons. Burke's insight into the future course of the French Revolution is based in his distinctive approach to thinking about the pathologies of legislative assemblies, which he initially developed in the House of Commons, and later applied to the French National Assembly.

Ninety Years Ago

Antiquity ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 23 (91) ◽  
pp. 115-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Societies ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
The Many ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

No one, so far as I know, has as yet made any particular study of the many local learned societies that were founded up and down France in the years after the French Revolution, and of their effect upon contemporary thought. These Sociétés d’Émulation differed from the local archaeological and historical societies of England in being more all-embracing ; they included in their scope pure literature, philosophy and science as well as the history and antiquities of the district, and often developed a philanthropic side as well. At the time of their foundation they were often of a free-thinking colour ; but as the balance of French life came to be restored after the Revolution this element was forgotten, and the more learned priests of the neighbourhood were often included among their members.These societies fostered a peculiar polymathic quality among those who regularly attended their frequent meetings. They were to a great extent self-supporting in the provision of papers and communications, and it would have been pure selfishness for any member with any claim to versatility to specialize too deeply. Their standards, too, were not those of the Metropolis, where a new professionalism was bringing higher and more exact criteria into every branch of knowledge and speculation. Rather, we can see in the Sociétés d’Émulation of the nineteenth century the continuance of the amateur spirit that in the eighteenth century had flourished in the aristocratic circles of Court and château : a spirit surviving in a less polished form among the lesser gentry of the provincial towns.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

Contemporary visions of France: the Revolution, Women and History: A Summary of the 1989 Fall Colloquia, New York University’s Institute of French Studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Studies ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The seven colloquia held at New York University’s Institute of French Studies during the Fall 1989 semester offered some new perspectives on the French Revolution, and took stock of various elements of French Society and history two hundred years after the taking of the Bastille.

Une idée monstrueuse: Bicameralism in the Early French Revolution

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Marrs
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Political Group ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Assembly Floor ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Constitutional Issue ◽  
The Revolution

In the spring of 1789, the members of the newly formed National Assembly tasked itself with the creation of France’s first Constitution. The Assembly set out to reform their country by incorporating enlightenment ideas and newfound liberties. Creating the constitution was not an easy process and the Assembly floor was home to many fierce debates, divides, and distrust amongst the Three Orders: the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons.  One Constitutional issue was deciding what form the legislature would take. Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, and Clermont-Tonnerre, members of the Committee of the Constitution, who formed a political group known as the ‘Monarchiens,’ proposed a bicameral system that mirrored the two legislative houses of England. Their political opponents fought instead for a single chambered system. When the vote came to the house, bicameralism was defeated in a landslide.  My research aims at discovering the motivations of the deputies; Why did they reject Mounier’s bicameralism? Much of the work done on this question so far, particularly that of Keith Michael Baker, argues that the deputies were faced with a choice between radically different conceptions of the purpose of the revolution. However, the work of Timothy Tackett points to the smaller, more contingent issues at play. My work involves the analysis of the assembly debates and the political publications being written by the deputies. Similar to Tackett, I conclude that the deputies were immediately motivated less by grand revolutionary narratives, but instead based their vote on a deep distrust of the aristocracy and political factionalism.  

Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

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