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.

Bourgeoisie

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Maza
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
French History ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The concept of a group called “the bourgeoisie” is unusual in being both central to early modern and modern European history, and at the same time highly controversial. In old regime France, people frequently used the words “bourgeois” or “bourgeoisie” but what they meant by them was very different from the meaning historians later assigned to those terms. In the nineteenth century the idea of a “bourgeoisie” became closely associated with Marxian historical narratives of capitalist ascendancy. Does it still make sense to speak of a “bourgeoisie”? This article attempts to lay out and clarify the terms of the problem by posing a series of questions about this aspect of the social history of Ancien Régime France, with a brief look across the Channel for comparison. It considers first the problem of definition: what was and is meant by “the bourgeoisie” in the context of early modern French history? Second, what is the link between eighteenth-century economic change and the existence and nature of such a group, and can we still connect the origins of the French Revolution to the “rise” of a bourgeoisie? And finally, can the history of perceptions and representations of a bourgeoisie or middle class help us to understand why the concept has been so problematic in the longer run of French history?

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

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.

Chopin at the Funeral: Episodes in the History of Modern Death

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civic Character ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
Symbolic Practices ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract This essay seeks to shed fresh light on Chopin's all-too-famous Funeral March by exploring its relationship to the social history of death. Virtually from the day of its publication, the march has had a career independent of the Piano Sonata in B Minor, Op. 35, into which Chopin inserted it. It quickly became Western music's paramount anthem of public mourning, a role it played at funerals from Chopin's own to John F. Kennedy's. This civic character, however, at best represents only a fraction of the music's cultural resonance. By consulting the first context of the march, the treatment of death and burial in Chopin's Paris, it becomes possible to tell a different and a richer story. Responding to a historical crisis bequeathed by the French Revolution, France during the first half of the nineteenth century was engaged in renovating the culture of death literally from the ground up—and down. Three major institutions emerged in the capital to carry on this work, each with its own distinctive set of customs and symbolic practices: the catacombs of Paris, the Paris Morgue, and the modern cemetery, the prototype for which was Pere Lachaise. Each of the three can be said to have left a mark on Chopin's Funeral March; deciphering those marks is the project of this essay.

The Prospectus War of the 1790s

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-77
Author(s):  
David Duff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Effect ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
London Corresponding Society ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Prospectuses, a type of printed advertisement widely used in the eighteenth-century book trade, played a vital but previously unexamined role in the French Revolution controversy, attracting subscribers to political publications and encapsulating their message. Focusing on journal and newspaper prospectuses, which proliferated in the 1790s, this article analyzes examples from across the political spectrum, including the prospectus for the Argus by the radical journalist Sampson Perry, George Canning’s hugely influential prospectus to the Anti-Jacobin, and other examples by William Playfair, the London Corresponding Society, and other individuals and organizations. This article shows how prospectus writers exploited the distinctive resources of the genre, adapting its promissory rhetoric and hyperbolic language for political effect. It also investigates how prospectuses interacted with other forms of writing and publication, mirroring the techniques of pamphlets and contributing to the polemical intertextuality that was a feature of the Revolution debate. For all its ephemerality, the genre had a powerful impact, serving all sides of the dispute and marking a convergence of literature, politics, and advertising that typifies the innovative print culture of this period.

‘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.

Managing the Health of Chosŏn Kings: Illness and Treatment in the Daily Records of the Royal Secretariat

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wung Seok Cha
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Mental Status ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Korean Language ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Choson Dynasty ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light

TheSŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi (Daily Records of the Royal Secretariat)is one of the major chronicles of the events of the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910). Although the records prior to the year 1622 are no longer extant, the remaining records from the years 1623 to 1910 meticulously recount the daily activities of the reigning Chosŏn kings, including copious information on their physical and mental status. Because the king’s health was considered as important as other official affairs in many respects, detailed records were kept of royal ailments and how court doctors treated them. This article surveys the state of Korean-language scholarship on the medical content of theDaily Recordsand presents selected translations to demonstrate how this valuable historical source can shed light on both the social history of Chosŏn medicine and the political importance of kingly health at the Chosŏn court.

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.

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