4. What it ended

2019 ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Vested Interest ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The French Revolution began as a destructive force. The revolutionaries wanted to abolish anything associated with the old order. ‘What it ended’ describes how the French Revolution had begun as an attack on despotism, aristocracy, old-style corporatism, and privilege. It provided an opportunity to dispense with the old and replace with new. However, although the Revolution symbolized the assertion of political will against the constraints of history, circumstance, and vested interest, the revolutionaries soon realized that will alone is not enough to destroy the old. The old fought back. But these attempts were always problematic as concerns with the old regime remained. No true restoration was ever possible.

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.

Reckoning with Terror

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The events of 9 Thermidor marked not only the end of the Reign of Terror but also the beginning of a long process of coming to terms with its legacies. This chapter examines this process. It argues that in the aftermath of the Terror, contemporaries of the revolutionary era grappled with a series of novel dilemmas around retribution, redress, and remembrance, confronting a wide range of issues about responsibility, loss, and individual, familial and social identity as a result. What made these dilemmas new is that they would have been unthinkable under the old regime. They emerged from the democratizing thrust of the Revolution. In this sense, the French Revolution transformed how modern societies face the consequences of massive violence.

Why Moderation?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This book explores moderation in French political thought during the period 1748–1830 by focusing on a wide range of political, historical, sociological, and philosophical writings related to the French Revolution. Arguing that moderation is the quintessential political virtue, the book discusses two main themes: moderation under the Old Regime, when moderate agendas were used as means of criticizing a rigid and inefficient hierarchical structure and proposing concrete blueprints for political reform; and various attempts at institutionalizing moderation during the revolution and its aftermath, when it was primarily interpreted and used as a means of “ending” the revolution. It suggests that moderation has intrinsic substantive political orientations and values of its own and is related to constitutionalism, a politics of skepticism as opposed to a “politics of faith” and of absolute ends. This prologue provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

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.

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.

PROTESTANTISM AND PROGRESS IN THE YEAR XII: CHARLES VILLERS'SESSAY ON THE SPIRIT AND INFLUENCE OF LUTHER'S REFORMATION(1804)

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL PRINTY
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Broad Interest ◽  
The French Revolution

This article examines Charles Villers'sEssay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation(1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.

NOVEL NARRATIVES, NEW RESEARCH: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AFTER THE BICENTENNIAL

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-252
Author(s):  
GARY SAVAGE
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Duke University ◽  
New Research ◽  
The French Revolution

Revolution and political conflict in the French navy, 1789–1794. By William S. Cormack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 343. £40.00.The family romance of the French revolution. By Lynn Hunt. London: Routledge, 1992. Pp. 213. £19.99.The French idea of freedom: the old regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789. Edited by Dale Van Kley. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. 436. £35.00.A rhetoric of bourgeois revolution: the Abbé Sieyes and What is the third estate ? By William H. Sewell, Jr. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. 221. £10.95.The genesis of the French revolution: a global-historical interpretation. By Bailey Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 268. £12.95.The new regime: transformations of the French civic order, 1789–1820s. By Isser Woloch. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994. Pp. 536. £27.50.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document