The Strange History of the Right to Bear Arms in the French Revolution

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-479
Author(s):  
Noah Shusterman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Social Domination ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract French Revolutionaries shared many of the same beliefs as their American counterparts about the relationship between citizenship and bearing arms. Both nations’ leaders viewed standing armies as a threat to freedom, and both nations required militia participation from a portion of the citizenry. Yet the right to bear arms is a legacy only of the American Revolution. The right to bear arms came up several times in debates in France’s National Assembly. The deputies never approved that right, but they never denied it either. During the first years of the Revolution, the leading politicians were wary of arming poor citizens, a concern that was in tension with the egalitarian language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Moreover, militias thrived during the early years of the French Revolution and became instruments—albeit unstable ones—for maintaining a social domination that played out along class lines. In response to the contradictions in their positions, French revolutionary leaders remained silent on the issue. In France as in the United States, the question of whether or not there was a right to bear arms was less important than the question of who had the right to bear arms.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

scholarly journals Duty as a defence between civil disobedience and criminal law

2021 ◽  
pp. 547-562
Author(s):  
Laura Ciccozzi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The United States ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

The history of civil disobedience begins in the United States in the 17th century and has evolved during the centuries. The most modern type of civil disobedience, whistleblowing, is emblematic of how the concept has changed over the last decades.The question of which circumstances justify disobedience to the law is one of the most debated in the history of legal thought. The article analyses the relationship between morality and criminal law or, in other words, between the right (and duty) to disobey certain laws and its consequences.

Languages of Democracy in America from the Revolution to the Election of 1800

2013 ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Cotlar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Weight ◽  
Newspaper Editors ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
The French Revolution

Before and during the American Revolution, ‘democracy’ was relatively rarely invoked in American political discourse, and when it was, usually had negative weight. By contrast, in 1800, candidates who called themselves Democrats won control of the Federal Government. This chapter charts the emergence of the first advocates of democracy in the United States. During the Constitution debates, attacks on aristocracy were much more common than positive accounts of democracy. After 1790, a group of radical newspaper editors sympathetic to the French Revolution promoted the term as a political slogan. Its entry into mainstream political discourse thereafter was however accompanied by the shearing away of some of its more radical associations.

Rights After the Revolutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Model State ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

Two Neoclassical Monuments in Modern France: The Panthéon and Arc de Triomphe

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVNER BEN-AMOS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Fifth Republic ◽  
Modern France ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The Panthéon and Arc de Triomphe are two neoclassical Parisian monuments that were created in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, respectively, and which have ever since been main sites of French official memory. However, they never had the same share of the stage: when one was prominent, the other was marginal, and vice versa. This chapter delineates the parallel histories of these monuments and analyses the relationship between them, from the French Revolution to the Fifth Republic. Although they are usually ascribed to different political camps – the Pantheon to the left and the Arc de Triomphe to the right – a close reading of the context of various commemorative acts that were performed inside and around these monuments shows that their identity was more complex.

Authority without Foundations: Arendt and the Paradox of Postwar German Memory Politics

2014 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Matthew Hoye ◽  
Benjamin Nienass
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Foundations ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Present View ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractHannah Arendt argued that the American Revolution revealed for the first time that all regimes require a reference to an absolute, while the French Revolution revealed that not all absolutes are equal. The American Revolution took as its absolute the act of founding itself, upon which the authority of the constitution could be grounded. By contrast, the failure of the French Revolution to establish an authority stemmed from its reference to the transcendental absolute of the nation. Beginnings, for Arendt, are historically determining. How then are we to explain the present view of authority in Germany which takes as its absolute referent the Holocaust? And how does this inform our understanding of the relationship between absolutes and new foundations? We argue that the key to understanding the German case is found in the particular nature of postwar German memory politics and that authority is not statically related to positive foundations.

The Sublime Turn Away from Empire: Wordsworth's Encounter with Colonial Slavery, 1802

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kelly Persyn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract "The Sublime Turn Away from Empire" argues that the Haitian Revolution—and Toussaint l'Ouverture's role in it—heavily influenced Wordsworth during his early years and that the1802 sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture epitomizes the poet's development of the "sublime turn." The Wordsworthian sublime, often interpreted in part as a reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, thus appears in this article as a reaction to the frightening and incomprehensible facts of colonial slavery and revolution—the very realities responsible for L'Ouverture's capture, imprisonment, and eventual death in France's Fort de Joux. In this context, the poet formulates his sublime turn as a turn away from the recognition of material slavery and bondage and toward an imaginative freedom nationed specifically English. In pursuing the argument, the article reviews the history of the Haitian Revolution together with the history of Wordsworth's poetic development from 1790 to 1802. In paying special attention to the 1802 sonnets, the article highlights Wordsworth's juxtaposition of French slavery and English liberty and draws on work by Laura Doyle and Alison Hickey to argue that Wordsworth's valorization of nature and nation has the effect of sublimating his own, and his reader's, recognition of empire and race. Ultimately, though Wordsworth speaks of l'Ouverture in a markedly admiring tone, he counsels him to submit to Napoleonic tyranny anyway—while taking comfort in the material sublime. The article explores this paradox and concludes by postulating that such a contradiction is characteristic of Romantic-era attitudes toward race and the sublime.

Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-25
Author(s):  
Merrill D. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The French Revolution

The meeting of this conference at the University of Virginia inevitably calls to mind the first public occasion in the history of the institution 163 years ago. General Lafayette, on his year-long triumphal tour of the United States, came to Charlottesville for a tearful reunion with his old friend, Thomas Jefferson. They had met in the perilous days of 1781 when Jefferson was governor of Virginia and Lafayette marched a small army into the state to repel the British invaders. Jefferson was grateful to the spirited young general, whose zeal for the American cause seemed scarcely less than his own. Three years later, in France, they became friends, and, in 1789, their friendship personified the historical nexus between the American and the French Revolution. Thereafter, they corresponded intermittently but did not meet again until 1824. Lafayette, though he had long since ceased to be a hero in France, remained a hero in America -- in itself a poignant commentary on the contrasting fates of the two great democratic revolutions. The University fathered by Jefferson was still unfinished in 1824. The Rotunda, commanding the Lawn, was still under scaffolding, and the massive Corinthian capitals imported from Carrara had yet to be raised atop the columns of the portico. But over 400 people crowded into the Dome Room for the great public dinner in honor of the “nations’s guest.” There were many toasts, of course; and Jefferson, who was 81 and in poor health, made a little address, through the voice of another, extolling Lafayette’s services in war and peace and closing with a prayer for “the eternal duration” of the nation’s freedom.

scholarly journals Hegel, Islam and liberalism: Religion and the shape of world history

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372090940
Author(s):  
Thomas Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
World History ◽  
Problem Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Hegel’s philosophy is in tension with liberalism, containing both liberalizing tendencies and rejecting liberal norms. I explore this tension by investigating the relationship between religion, fanaticism and world history in Hegel’s discussion of Islam. Drawing on recent work that considers Hegel’s treatment of race and world history, I show that he views Islam as a form of fanaticism that is antithetical to Christian Europe. This rejection of Islam stands in contrast to his treatment of the French Revolution, which is a fanaticism that can be incorporated into world history. I conclude that Hegel does not provide resources for narrating a history of a more inclusive Europe, but that interrogating his philosophy offers strategies for thinking askew the liberal ‘problem-space’ and reconsidering identities formed in opposition to the Islamic fanatic. Such an interrogation reveals the assumptions at work in contemporary debates about the liberalization of Islam.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document