CONFESSIONAL MODERNITY: NICOLA SPEDALIERI, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, C.1775–1800

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-705
Author(s):  
GLAUCO SCHETTINI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The French Revolution

This article reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, focusing on Nicola Spedalieri's On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri, a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. It was not modernity itself, he claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri's ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church's attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.

POLITICAL CULTURE, POLITICAL CLASS, AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-315
Author(s):  
D. L. L. PARRY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Community ◽  
French History ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
The French Revolution

The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited by Isser Woloch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Mona Ozouf et al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political culture, and by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather than through l'histoire événementielle of ministries and elections. The three books reviewed here all relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly in The past in French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon, artistic culture was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe was left to nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom. Yet whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make only passing references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary adjuncts to such an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which enables one to put l'histoire événementielle aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within the political class. The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures. What, though, creates these communities?

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Ries
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
State Terror ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

Hegel's Politics: Liberal or Democratic?

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Drydyk
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
The French Revolution

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that Hegel's political philosophy is difficult to interpret. But his political thought clearly poses problems which the rest of his work does not (especially), and these problems arise from apparent political ambivalence on his part towards the French Revolution, towards monarchy, towards the doctrine of popular sovereignty, towards public opinion and press freedom - well, there is scarcely a reader of Hegel who could not add some additional topic to this already lengthy list. For instance, Hegel sometimes noted how crucial it is for a state to be decisive; every state needs a reservoir of decisiveness, supplied preferably by a monarch, who ‘has become the personality of the state,’ who ‘cuts short the weighing of the pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” make its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.’

George's Hive and the Georgian Hinge

1986 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 37-69
Author(s):  
Robert L. Patten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
The People ◽  
Stable Class ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
The French Revolution

Victorian political and social thought was shaped to some extent in response to the French Revolution and the Regency. One widely circulated mid-nineteenth-century emblem of the State is George Cruikshank's The British Bee Hive, which he designed in 1840 during a second wave of Chartist agitation whose origins and program extend backward into the first decades of the century (Fig. I). The Bee Hive was not published, however, until twenty-seven years later, on the eve of the second Reform Bill, when Cruikshank's “Penny Political Picture for the People” gave him an opportunity to address his public one more time “with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform” and the constitutional subjects that had preoccupied him “for upwards of fifty years.” As an expression of populous enterprise and the stable class hierarchies of the British bourgeois monarchy, George Cruikshank's beehive embodies in its design and accompanying letterpress not only his notions about the second Reform Bill, but also ideas growing out of earlier political, social, and graphic controversies.

The New Elites. Questions about Political, Social, and Cultural Reconstruction after the Terror

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Chappey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Common People ◽  
Cultural Reconstruction ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The French Revolution

Was the French Revolution the victory of an all-conquering bourgeoisie that made up the foundation of the nineteenth-century France of the ‘notables’? How far did the older elites of the ancien régime succeed in taking part in the political, social and cultural reordering of the first decades of the new century? This chapter examines the significance of these questions in relation to the construction and legitimation of elite power after the fall of Robespierre. Exploring both political and intellectual developments, it reveals the dynamics which account for the major rupture between the dominance of a republican elite under the Directory, and the foundations of the power of the Empire’s so-called ‘Granite masses’. Study of the various components of elite domination involves not merely scrutiny of the role played by the state, but also of changing attitudes towards the common people, against whom the evolving position of the elite was constructed.

DEPUTIES, VOTERS, AND FACTIONS IN FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL CULTURE

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-283
Author(s):  
ISSER WOLOCH
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Third ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
French Experience ◽  
The French Revolution

Becoming a revolutionary: the deputies of the French National Assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture, 1789–1790. By Timothy Tackett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+355. ISBN 0-69-104384-1. $29.95.Elections in the French Revolution. By Malcolm Crook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+221. ISBN 0-521-45191-4. $35.00.The notion of a revolutionary change in collective psychology has long been present in certain master narratives of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre deployed this concept in his analysis of the psychodynamics that propelled revolutionary crowds. He also introduced the notion more casually in discussing the ‘patriot’ elites who experienced a psychological upheaval when the parlement of Paris ruled in September 1788 that the forthcoming Estates General should be organized as in 1614, meaning that the third estate would be submerged under the weight of the two privileged orders. While William Doyle's revisionist synthesis has plausibly argued that the parlement's intention was less nefarious (it wished to prevent the king from using new ground rules to pack the Estates with pliant deputies), it does not change the fact that public opinion would never be the same after that consciousness-raising event. More broadly, R. R. Palmer, in trying to convey the uniquely revolutionary thrust of the French experience in 1789 – having already contextualized it in relation to other European and American upheavals – wrestled with that issue in a section that he called ‘The formation of a revolutionary psychology’.

Learned Societies, Institutions, Associations, and Clubs

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Jeremy Dibble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter considers the ways in which music became the focus of organized bodies during the nineteenth century. One of the most significant outcomes of the French Revolution was the establishment of state institutions, and music was not immune from the secular mindset of utilité publique. State-financed “learned societies” and institutions, fueled by impulses of education, the public good, and most of all, a sense of prestige, became a national imperative, and music was an important part of the state-sponsored matrix. In a technologically innovative century which encouraged epistemological revolution, the need to share knowledge at all levels of society was inexorable. This is reflected in the proliferation of these “learned societies,” and how the need for differing organizational fora emerged throughout the century; the second part of this chapter focuses on how the concept of the “society” developed, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century invention of musicology.

1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat (deel 2)

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-321
Author(s):  
Lode Wils
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The South ◽  
Public Office ◽  
The North ◽  
Ministerial Responsibility ◽  
The Government ◽  
The French Revolution

In het tweede deel van zijn bijdrage 1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat, over de gebeurtenissen van 1830-1831 als slotfase van een passage van de Belgische protonatie doorheen de grote politiek-maatschappelijke en culturele mutaties na de Franse Revolutie, ontwikkelt Lode Wils de stelling dat de periode 1829-1830 de "terminale crisis" vormde van het Koninkrijk der Verenigde Nederlanden. Terwijl koning Willem I definitief had laten verstaan dat hij de ministeriële verantwoordelijkheid definitief afwees en elke kritiek op het regime beschouwde als kritiek op de dynastie, groeide in het Zuiden de synergie in het verzet tussen klerikalen, liberalen en radicale anti-autoritaire groepen. In de vervreemding tussen het Noorden en het Zuiden en de uiteindelijke revolutionaire nationaal-liberale oppositie vanuit het Zuiden, speelde de taalproblematiek een minder belangrijke rol dan het klerikale element en de liberale aversie tegen het vorstelijk absolutisme van Willem I en de aangevoelde uitsluiting van de Belgen uit het openbaar ambt en vooral uit de leiding van de staat.________1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation stateIn the second part of his contribution 1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation state, dealing with the events from 1830-1831 as the concluding phase of a transition of the Belgian pre-nation through the major socio-political and cultural mutations after the French Revolution, Lode Wils develops the thesis that the period of 1829-1830 constituted the "terminal crisis" of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands. Whilst King William I had clearly given to understand that he definitively rejected ministerial responsibility and that he considered any criticism of the regime as a criticism of the dynasty, the synergy of resistance increased between the clericalists, liberals and radical anti-authoritarian groups in the South. In the alienation between the North and the South and the ultimate revolutionary national-liberal opposition from the South the language issue played a less important role than the clericalist element and the liberal aversion against the royal absolutism of William I and the sense of exclusion of the Belgians from public office and particularly from the government of the state.

scholarly journals Culture, Strategy, and State-Centered Explanations of Revolution, 1789 and 1989

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Sharman
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Culture Strategy ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

Social scientists studying revolutions have increasingly argued that explanations of revolutions that do not include subjective factors, such as culture, are inadequate. The failure to explain the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 is forceful testimony to this inadequacy. But the way in which cultural aspects are being added to existing approaches tends to undermine past advances in studying revolutions. Recent historiography of the French Revolution provides an example of a more thorough-going approach to political culture. A productive synthesis that both preserves past advances and better explains the revolutions of 1989 is achieved by analyzing the effects of cultural change on state elites.

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