Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment

1994 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. S. Cockburn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The People ◽  
Cesare Beccaria ◽  
The Times ◽  
Public Executions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

“As punishments become more cruel, men become more ferocious.” That contention, voiced in this instance by a contributor to The Gentleman's Magazine in 1786, had been a respected tenet of Enlightenment penal theory since its articulation by Cesare Beccaria twenty years earlier. In the interim, commentators on both sides of the Channel had continued to theorize about the impact of public physical punishments on the temper of society. Repeated public executions, thought one contributor to The Times, led only to “a shameless apathy”; another cautioned that, “When the wantonness of oppression is made familiar to the eye, the sensibility of the people…degenerates into despondency, degeneracy and stupidity,…” and he repeated Montesquieu's sinister simile likening the tranquility of such a state to the mournful silence of a city that the enemy is about to storm. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, however, such speculation took on the chilling force of prophecy fulfilled, and for the next fifty years a chorus of increasingly alarmed English voices warned of the potential for insurrection inherent in physical punishments. Continued recourse to public executions, a “festival of blood, [was] calculated to shock or brutalize the feelings of man, [to] encourage ferocious habits in the people.” “Revolutions,” trumpeted the Morning Herald in 1835, “are always most bloody in countries whose laws have most familiarized the people with spectacles of vengeance.”

scholarly journals NATIONALHISTORIE EFTER MODERNISMEN - FOLKEBEGREBET I LYSET AF EUROPAS STORE FORTÆLLINGER

1970 ◽  
Vol 42 (117) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Michael Böss
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Main Role ◽  
National History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY AFTER MODERNISM: THE HISTORY OF PEOPLEHOOD IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES | The purpose of the article is to refute the recent claim that Danish history cannot be written on the assumption of the existence of a Danish people prior to 19th-century nationalism. The article argues that, over the past twenty years, scholars in pre-modern European history have highlighted the limitations of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism and the history of nations. For example, modernists have difficulties explaining why a Medieval chronicle such as Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum was translated in the mid-1600s, and why it could be used for new purposes in the 1800s, if there had not been a continuity in notions of peoplehood between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Of course, the claim of continuity should not be seen as an argument for an identity between the “Danes” of Saxo’s time and the Danes of the 19th-century Danish nation-state. Rather, the modern Danishness should be understood as the product of a historical process, in which a number of European cultural narratives and state building played a significant role. The four most important narratives of the Middle Ages were derived from the Bible, which was a rich treasure of images and stories of ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘God’, King, ‘justice’ and ‘kingdom’ (state). While keeping the basic structures, the meanings of these narratives were re-interpreted and placed in new hierarchical positions in the course of time under the impact of the Reformation, 16th-century English Puritanism, Enlightenment patriotism, the French Revolution and 19th-century romantic nationalism. The article concludes that it is still possible to write national histories featuring ‘the people’ as one of the actors. But the historian should keep in mind that ‘the people’ did not always play the main role, nor did they play the same role as in previous periods. And even though there is a need to form syntheses when writing national history, national identities have always developed within a context of competing and hierarchical narratives. In Denmark, the ‘patriotist narrative’ seems to be in ascendancy in the social and cultural elites, but has only partly replaced the ‘ethno-national’ narrative which is widespread in other parts of the population. The ‘compact narrative’ has so far survived due the continued love of the people for their monarch. It may even prove to provide social glue for a sense of peoplehood uniting ‘old’ and ‘new’ Danes.

PERANCANGAN KOMUNIKASI VISUAL PROMOSI KERAJINAN LAKER PALEMBANG

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Galang Sabillah Bahar
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Visual Communication Design ◽  
The People ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Era

<p><em>Laker is a typical Palembang handicraft in the form of all products or household utensils made of wood, rattan, bamboo or whatever is painted with black ink and then coated with varnish as an ingredient to beautify it as well as preservative. In this modern era the use of Crafts Laker in palembang is increasingly fading and it's not longer a culture in the City of palembang, especially the younger generation. The lack of promotion carried out on Laker handicrafts has made many of today's young generations not too familiar with Laker crafts, not even a few of them don’t know at all what laker craft is. Moreover, in the current development era, there is a fear of changing cultural heritage forms as a result of the impact of the development and progress of modern technology and other cultural elements that come from outside. To avoid this, visual promotion efforts are needed to the people of Palembang. This promotion was carried out to be able to invite the people of Palembang to cultivate laker crafts in daily life,especially the younger generation. Therefore the Visual Communication Design, Promotion of Laker Crafts is a form of persuasive effort to the people of Palembang, especially to get to know the Laker Crafts so that they can instill a sense of love and pride in Palembang Laker crafts that are known to the Palembang youth, and can invite Palembang people, especially the younger generation cultivate Laker crafts in daily life along with the trends of the times.</em></p>

Moderation and the “Intertwining of Powers”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Arbitrary Power ◽  
Special Place ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter examines political moderation in the writings of Jacques Necker, with particular emphasis on his views on constitutionalism. Necker occupies a special place in the history of political moderation. He defended the principles of constitutional monarchy successively against the king, the nobility, and the representatives of the people. Necker's works, composed at different stages of the French Revolution, articulated a political agenda revolving around the idea of moderation in opposition to arbitrary power and violence. The chapter first provides an overview of Necker's ideas before discussing his theoretical statements on reforming the Old Regime. It then explains Necker's trimming agenda and the consequences of immoderation before turning to the French constitution of 1791 and Necker's critique of the constitutions of 1795 and 1799. It also explores Necker's arguments regarding complex sovereignty, equality, and separation of powers.

Nothing Personal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Right ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.

Contravention and Creation of Law during the French Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 481-495
Author(s):  
Edward Kolla
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
The French Revolution

Moments of infraction of international law can generate new law. These can also be important examples of contingency in the history of international law, if the process occurs as an unintended consequence of actors’ aims. The French Revolution was just such an instance. The transmission of sovereignty from the person of the king to the collective populace of France was a central feature of the Revolution. Unplanned by revolutionaries, the principle of popular sovereignty bled into international law and became a new justification for claims to territory—a precept which, by the twentieth century, came to be called national self-determination. This chapter explores how the will of the people became a force in international law, inadvertently from the perspective of revolutionaries, as a result of changing public opinion, claims of jurisprudential and moral legitimacy, and military force.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document