‘In the name of humanity’: redefining socio-economic assistance in the revolutionary marketplace

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 520-536
Author(s):  
Katie Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Civic Duty ◽  
Market Women

Abstract Most studies of socio-economic rights in the French Revolution have focused on how officials and other deliverers of aid struggled to redefine assistance, rather than on how recipients themselves contributed to the idea. In contrast, this article centres on poor Parisian market women called the Dames des Halles to bring to light the voices, discourses, and actions of individuals demanding rights and assistance. The Dames had relied on charity and privilege to conduct their commerce during the Old Regime, but the Revolution upended their advantages. Balancing discourses of humanity and utility, the Dames sought to recalibrate their place in the body politic in order to maintain occupational exemptions, favourable commercial positions, and exceptional access to public space. Their battles reveal how everyday citizens and the National Assembly first struggled to reinterpret socio-economic assistance as corrupt privilege, as the state’s civic duty, or as exemptions earned by poor working citizens.

Occupying the Marketplace

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
Katie Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Utility ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Private Company ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
National Domain

This chapter analyzes the economically crucial and conceptually volatile debates over public space in the marketplace. It traces how the king’s public domain became national domain and how this transformation affected the ways that citizens pursued particular interests in les Halles. During the Old Regime, the king had issued an edict that permitted some especially indigent Dames to secure market spots before other retailers. He had also granted one company the privilege of renting shelters to these qualified Dames before others. However, when the private company attempted to renew its royal contract during the Revolution, clashes arose over the right to and regulation of public domain. During the disputes, the Dames who were not advantaged by the king’s edict seized new practices of citizenship to claim shelters and trading places. They harnessed revolutionary discourses to mark the earth as national property, attack monopoly-holders as privileged leeches, and secure economic exemptions based on their work’s public utility. As they justified their personal profits on public space, the Dames staked out their place in the body politic.

scholarly journals ‘The Face of Evil’: The Discourse on ISIS and the Visual Complexities in the ISIS Beheading Videos

Politik ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kanar Patruss
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Western Discourse ◽  
The Face ◽  
Politically Motivated Violence ◽  
The One ◽  
Opening Up

This article deals with ISIS’s beheading videos of Western victims from 2014 and inscribes itself into an emerging body of literature on visuality in IR. The paper contends that the image of ISIS beheadings has been mobilized in a Western political discourse that classifies ISIS as evil, and has hereby helped shape the conditions under which international politics operate. The article offers a Nietzsche-inspired critique of the value judgment of evil in the Western discourse and, in extension, seeks to nuance the assessment of ISIS through a ‘re-reading’ of the beheading image. For this purpose, the article proposes to expand Lene Hansen’s concept of inter-iconicity to capture how an icon’s meaning is produced in relation to other icons and, in this light, explores the inter-iconic relations between the image of ISIS beheadings, on the one hand, and the decapitations of the French Revolution and the image of the ‘body politic’, on the other. The inter-iconic reading draws out alternative meanings of the image of ISIS beheadings that counter the classification of ISIS as evil, thereby expanding the conditions for political speech and action regarding ISIS and opening up space for a broader critique of politically motivated violence. 

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Katie Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Free Market ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Socioeconomic Issues ◽  
Market Women ◽  
The Right

This chapter introduces the over 1,000 Parisian market women known as the Dames des Halles and outlines how Politics in the Marketplace changes understandings of work, gender, and citizenship in the French Revolution. First, this book insists that marketplace actors shaped the nature of nascent democracy and capitalism through their daily commerce. As the revolutionaries overhauled Old Regime privileges in les Halles, they confronted the tensions between socially egalitarian projects and free market aspirations in everyday trade. Second, this book expands recent non-Marxist inquiries to reconsider the socioeconomic issues at the heart of the Revolution. It proposes the concept of economic citizenship to consider how an individual’s economic activities such as buying goods, selling food, or paying taxes position him/her within the collective social body and enable him/her to make claims on the state. Third, Politics in the Marketplace intervenes in the dominant narrative of gender and modern democracy. Instead of defining citizenship by electoral rights, this book explores how the Dames and fellow revolutionaries invented multiple notions of citizenship in its embryonic stages, some of which did not immediately divide citizenship by gender. Fourth, this book argues that, in their words and actions, the Dames conceptualized their citizenship through useful work. According to the market women, their occupational, civic, and gendered work served society and earned them the right to make claims on the state in return. The Dames’ notion of citizenship thus included gendered components but did not take gender as its cornerstone. Finally, the introduction describes the sources used to tap into the Dames’ world.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.

scholarly journals The Air-conditioned Nation under Global Warming – An Exploratory Study of the Speech and Assembly Freedom and Politics of Space in Singapore

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (SI) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Hei Ting Wong
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
Economic Stability ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Politics Of Space ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship

Singapore is known to have a citizenry loyal to its one-party dominated government. Cherian George refers Singapore as the “Air-conditioned Nation,” wherein free speech is sacrificed for economic stability in this metaphorical or virtual greenhouse and fostered a controlled and docile politic. Dissent from members of registered opposition parties or ordinary citizens, however, has been voiced during “illegal gatherings” in public places. Many of these attempts, both purposeful and accidental, challenge rules designed to limit the citizenry’s ability to voice publicly. In this paper, I examine these civil disobedient acts under the framework of construction and politics of socially- and mentally-constructed space in connection to the laws of Singapore. Utilizing the ideas of space as defined by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, I analyze three separate accounts of assembly and/or procession. I identify the relevant laws of Singapore and examine how these laws are interpreted and applied by law enforcement, revealing a tension between space and the body politic. Politics of space is a concept usually connected to social class; yet, class consciousness is what the Singaporean government strives to eliminate through the control of ideology and by limiting the freedom of speech in public spaces. My contribution examines the relationship between space and politics, reflecting the conflicts between the government, which has the power over the use of places and citizens who would like to express ideas differently from governmental-led ideologies physically and publicly in these places, and the opposition’s actions in this virtually-caged public space named Singapore.

The Académie and Its Dictionaries under the Old Regime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Fitzsimmons
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Language ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Berlin Academy ◽  
The French Revolution

Because of criticism of its dictionary, the Académie decided to revise the work rather than begin work on a grammar. It adhered to this pattern throughout the eighteenth century and produced new editions in 1718, 1740, and 1762. The dictionary became the definitive instrument of the French language and enacted changes in it, especially in new spellings introduced in the fourth edition in 1762. Early in the eighteenth century, after he published a pamphlet that criticized Louis XIV, the Académie expelled the abbé de Saint-Pierre, who had wanted the body to assume a larger public policy role. By the latter part of the century, however, its membership included many philosophes. In 1784 Antoine de Rivarol won the prize of the Berlin Academy for his essay on the universality of the French language, heightening the importance of the dictionary, but the fifth edition had not appeared when the French Revolution began in 1789.

The Drift in French Politics

1913 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-394
Author(s):  
J. Salwyn Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
French Tradition

It is generally considered a sort of natural law in the political world for conservatives to govern and for radicals to criticize. In France the opposite is true; there the Left and Right have changed functions, as it is the former, not the latter, which controls the destinies of the nation. This is due primarily to the fact that conservatism in France has neither a habitation nor a name; for the French Revolution, by cutting the jugular vein of the inherited traditions of the country, had established revolution itself as a tradition. So completely has the radical spirit taken possession of the French people that even the reactionaries are dominated by it; for what is a coup d'état if not a revolutionary method of establishing a conservative government? The aristocratic spirit, driven from the body politic, has found refuge in literature; there French tradition still rules, unbroken and unchallenged. Anatole France, Socialist in politics, is yet the hardest and straightest of classicists and a legitimate descendant of the eighteenth century masters. France is unique in harboring at the same time the two master-spirits of aristocracy in arts and letters, and democracy in society and politics.Revolutionary traditions have made France the protagonist of of political progress. To her history has assigned the rôle of proclaiming the newly-born thought of the world, for it is now accepted as a truism that what France thinks today the world will think tomorrow. And because new ideas always take on strange forms and speak a Quixotic language, France has been decried as fantastic when she has been only original. The history of the nation since the great Revolution has been a constant struggle between ideas and conditions.

Sacred hearts and pumps: cardiology and the conflicted body politic (1500–1900)

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-361
Author(s):  
Therese Feiler
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
State University ◽  
Sacred Heart ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Normative Appeals ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Two Sides

This article examines how conflicting notions of the body politic between the natural and the spiritual have contextualised the evolution of cardiology. After a brief look at the place of the heart in biblical, patristic and medieval notions of the church, the article turns to the Reformation period. While Martin Luther moved theological gravity to the individual’s heart and conscience, his contemporary Michael Servetus described the pulmonary cycle in the context of an antitrinitarian theology condemned as theological and political heresy. In the early modern period, nature conceived as creation grounded sovereign political authority, which science could then align with. Whereas William Harvey still adhered to an Aristotelian teleology, René Descartes and subsequent mechanistic contributions to cardiology were flanked by an intense ‘cardiolatry’. Both, it is argued, are two sides of the same, almost non-corporeal coin. The emerging Enlightened epistemology allowed for a position distinct from both sovereign and ecclesial powers. The French Revolution was a paradigm shift: the ancien régime falls, and its Sacred Heart devotion is mocked; the new ‘Erastian’ state-university emerges as the context of cardiology. These developments are reflected in the life of René Laënnec and in cultural interpretations of the heart later in the 19th century. It is shown that the heart as a doubly inscribed, both biological and spiritual organ, played a central role in theological, and therefore political and scientific notions of the body politic. These continue to haunt the present, allowing us to interpret normative appeals to the heart particularly in political contexts.

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