Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke'sReflections on the Revolution in France

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Lunatic Asylum ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
First Year ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
The Past ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Revolution

Throughout the first year of the French RevolutionThe Timesnewspaper could not decide who was the madder, Lord George Gordon or Edmund Burke. The former as a violent incendiary and convicted libeler had fortunately been safely locked in Newgate the previous year, but Burke was still loose. The newspaper had no doubt that he belonged in Bedlam; there could be no other explanation for his obsessive campaign to impeach Warren Hastings long after everyone else had lost interest in the case. A stream of reports suggested variously that he had checked himself into a lunatic asylum, been forcibly confined in a straitjacket, or become temporarily deranged through physical and mental exhaustion. On first readingThe Reflections on the Revolution in Francepublished in November the following year, many of his friends, as well as his foes, felt forced to agree.Even those who found things to like in the book were puzzled that Burke should have produced such a work. In the first place, how did one explain what Thomas Jefferson called “the revolution of Mr. Burke,” an abrupt political tack from advocating parliamentary reform, religious toleration, and American liberty to denouncing France's fledgling efforts at liberty. Why had he turned so violently against the Dissenters and radicals with whom he had often cooperated in the past? Why did he believe that the apparently innocuous revolution in France was unlike anything that had gone before? And even when events in that country began to move more in line with his predictions, there remained something embarrassing about the tone of the book.

scholarly journals Historical explanation, emotives, and emotional suffering

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Radenovic
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
French Society ◽  
Emotional Suffering ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
Objectively Measured ◽  
The Revolution

One of the main goals of the book ?The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions ? by William Reddy (Reddy, 2001) is to provide an explanation of the events that led to the French Revolution and the political regimes that followed the First Republic. What makes Reddy?s approach unique is that, unlike standard political, social, economic and similar approaches, it emphasizes the role that emotions and emotional suffering have in the change of political regimes. For this purpose Reddy introduces the concept of emotives. According to him, we use emotives to express and change the emotions we feel. By expressing and changing emotions, we reconsider the values we endorse, and in the times of crisis, we sometimes embrace new ones. In this way, emotives play important role not only in the emotional regulation but also in the formation of our identity. Reddy argues that in the strict emotional regimes in which the use of emotives is restricted individuals experience emotional suffering. Such suffering is not relative to culture and can be objectively measured. Thus, for Reddy some political regimes are better than others. Within this theoretical framework Reddy describes the emotional regime of the French society that preceded the revolution as strict. According to him, emotional suffering that was caused by such regime played substantial role in bringing about the revolution. In this paper I will argue that the emotional regime of the 18th century France was not as strict as Reddy argues. What was strict were the rules for how to behave not for the emotional expressions, i.e. for the use of emotives. Thus, his analysis of the emotional pre-revolutionary regime is not without weakness. I will conclude with some problems that Reddy?s analysis of the acute emotional suffering characteristic of the revolutionary period faces.

The aesthetics of Burke’s constitutionalism: A dialectical reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372091314
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rustighi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Partial Representation ◽  
Constitutional Thought ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

I propose taking the beautiful and the sublime in Edmund Burke not just as aesthetic but also as theoretical categories which can help us read his constitutional thought in dialectical terms. I suggest indeed that his usage of these categories in the Reflections on the Revolution in France points to a consistently held argument concerning the aporias of early-modern contractarian theories and their influence on the French Revolution. My hypothesis is that for Burke the Revolution is unable to think of any concrete relation between beauty and sublimity, insofar as they can be associated, respectively, with particularity and universality. Furthermore, I underscore how Burke’s defence of partial representation against contractarian representation aims to overcome this impasse. My goal is to demonstrate that Burke raises decisive questions as to the intrinsically anti-democratic effects of the contractarian concept of democracy and is still useful to confront the contemporary crisis of democratic participation.

The Journée du Dix AoÛt as Witnessed by a Yankee Merchant

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
WILLIAM L. CHEW
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Street Scene ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
John Trumbull ◽  
The Revolution

James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.

The Debate over Theory Before Malthus and Ricardo

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter establishes a new context for reading the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo. It is the extended debate over the role of theory and practice in politics and political reform, a contest that Edmund Burke launched by publishing his hostile response to the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In attempting to defend theory, both Mackintosh and Stewart engaged in sophisticated rhetoric that attempted to portray Burke’s veneration of custom and usage as philosophically naïve at the same time as they insisted on the necessity of theory for a science of politics. It is in these defensive postures that both Mackintosh and Stewart came to articulate the idea of a ‘theorist’ of politics.

Remembering and Forgetting the French Revolution: Memories and Memoirs

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-180
Author(s):  
Jeff Horn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

For Rousselin, one of the chief lessons of the French Revolution was that fundamental change took time. He believed that it was the speed and the depth of the crisis of 1793–94 that led to violence. What helped a Revolutionary become a liberal was an acceptance of a slower pace of change. Rousselin used his position and then his time in retirement to try to refine his legacy and avoid further controversy. His choices about what to write and what to publish aimed to propagate a particular vision of the Revolution and his role in it. He wanted to be remembered as a victim not a perpetrator of the Terror. But he could not stop challenges to that vision from appearing; it was love for family that convinced him to retire from the spotlight to contemplate the past and hope for the future.

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.

Ideological aspects: a revaluation of ritual

1966 ◽  
Vol 251 (772) ◽  
pp. 443-446
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Classical Myth ◽  
The Times ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Revolution

Ritual ‘tends to be derided or discarded as the rationalization of society develops’ (Dr Bernstein). Probably to most people in our own society the word suggests what goes on in church or the starchy behaviour of stuffed shirts or gleams of the picturesque and remote woven quaintly into the routine of established institutions. That is to say, it suggests the marginal or the irrelevant, or else the Catholic tradition of religious worship. However, it might be more realistic to think instead of the Chinese in the contemporary act of translating into myth the saga of the revolution: ‘The long battle of the Chinese, first against their foreign enemies and then in the communist phase in three successive civil wars, has been made into a long musical epic which is now to be filmed. It is displayed in exhibits in the new museum of the revolution; it makes the background for songs and stories, the reference point for exhortations and reproach. The past is deliberately kept fresh in the public mind and it is presented with two sides. The embattled, slow triumph of the revolution, and the long prostration of China, mauled and humiliated, the masses wretched and silenced; that too is real to the Chinese.’ ( The Times , 27 April 1965). Here is the classical myth-ritual complex in current idiomatic form.

scholarly journals Edmund Burke and the First Stuart Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-494
Author(s):  
Philip Connell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThis essay reconsiders the character and significance of Edmund Burke's attitude to the seventeenth-century civil wars and interregnum. Burke may have venerated the “revolution principles” of 1688–89 over those of the 1640s, not least in the Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he notoriously compares English dissenting radicals to regicidal Puritans. Yet his response to the first Stuart revolution is more complex than has commonly been allowed and is closely bound up with Burke's earlier parliamentary career as a prominent member of the Rockingham Whig connection. The revival of an anti-Stuart idiom within the extra-parliamentary opposition of the 1760s, together with the mounting conflict with the North American colonies, gave renewed prominence to the memory of the civil wars within English political discourse. The Rockinghamites attempted to exploit this development—without compromising their own, more conservative reading of seventeenth-century history—but they were also its victims. In the years that followed, Burke and his colleagues were repeatedly identified by their political opponents with the spirit of Puritan rebellion and Cromwellian usurpation. These circumstances provide a new perspective on Burke's interpretation of the nation's revolutionary past; they also offer important insights into his writings and speeches in response to the French Revolution.

scholarly journals The French Revolutionin Then-Contemporary Philosophical Consciousness: The Divergent Lines of Interpretation

2018 ◽  
pp. 61-77
Author(s):  
A. A. Krotov
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Saint Martin ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Revolution

The author examines the alternative interpretations of the French revolution, which were offered by outstanding thinkers, its contemporaries. For philosophical consciousness, a revolution is always an occasion to express the most common social problems, to outline this or that vision of history as such. The article reviews the main features of Barnave’s and SaintMartin’s theories, which present naturalistic and theological interpretations of the revolutionary events. While Barnave considered the revolution in light of the theory of progress, Saint-Martin understood it through the concept of original sin. Saint-Martin saw the revolution as means for religion renovation, Barnave interpreted the revolution as a phase in the course of fading of religion’s social role. While Barnave’s philosophical methodology was substantially based on Enlightenment sensationalism, the position of Saint Martin relied on its denial. Despite all the differences between Barnave’s and Saint-Martin’s points of view, they shared similar intentions, analogous motives. First of all, there was a belief in need of revolution, in its justice and importance for mankind. The revolution was not understood by them as the collapse of common sense and foundations of society. On the contrary, the revolution was inevitable payment for abuses of the past, and it symbolized the beginning of a path to the better life awaiting mankind. The more the revolution receded into the past, the more proponents of its secular interpretation appeared. The primary focus was on the interests of social estates and classes, the issues of distribution of property and formation of social hierarchy. The providential approach to history lost its popularity, looked less and less feasible in the opinion of very numerous group of scholars. Nevertheless, the various elements of this approach remain in culture, they are present in the breath, rhythm and development of culture, they are reproduced again and again.

Ideology or History as “Idéologie:” C. F Volney and the Uses of the Past in Revolutionary France

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-196
Author(s):  
Alexander Cook ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Ministry Of Education ◽  
French Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics Of Nature ◽  
The Revolution

The French Revolution had a complex relationship with historical thought. In a significant sense, the politics of 1789 was built upon a rejection of the authority of the past. As old institutions and practices were swept away, many champions of the Revolution attacked conventional historical modes for legitimating authority, seeking to replace them with a politics anchored in notions of reason, natural law and natural rights. Yet history was not so easily purged from politics. In practice, symbols and images borrowed from the past saturated Revolutionary culture. The factional disputes of the 1790s, too, invoked history in a range of ways. The politics of nature itself often relied on a range of historical propositions and, as the Revolution developed, a new battle between “ancients” and ‘moderns’ gradually emerged amongst those seeking to direct the future of France. This article explores these issues by focusing on a series of lectures delivered at the École Normale in the Year III (1795), in the wake of Thermidor and the fall of Robespierre. The lectures, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, were designed to lay out a program for historical pedagogy in the French Republic. Their author, Constantin-Francois Volney (1757–1820), was one of a group of figures who sought, during these years, to stabilise French politics by tying it to the development of a new form of social science—a science that would eventually be labelled “idéologie.” With this in mind, Volney sought to promote historical study as an antidote to the political appropriation of the past, with particular reference to its recent uses in France. In doing so, he also sought to appropriate the past for political purposes. These lectures illustrate a series of tensions in the wider Revolutionary relationship with history, particularly during the Thermidorian moment. They also, however, reflect ongoing ambiguities in the social role of the discipline and the self-understanding of its practitioners.

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