The Politics of Popularity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Lilti
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter will explain how celebrity, which appeared in the eighteenth century as a new characteristic of cultural life became, during the French Revolution, a key mechanism of political life as well. It will start by outlining the specific features of celebrity, which is based on the curiosity of contemporaries about individuals and on sentimental empathy, and is distinguished from traditional forms of renown such as glory and reputation. It will then discuss how traditional forms of power were transformed, at the end of the eighteenth century, both by the new figure of the “public” and by changing means of communication (especially the periodical press and engraved portraits). Finally, the article will examine the highly ambivalent relationship that the French Revolutionaries negotiated with the new demand for “popularity”—that is, the affective attachment to an actor that introduces the mechanisms of celebrity into the heart of political action.

The case of the undying debt

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
François R. Velde
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Public Finances ◽  
The Public ◽  
French Government ◽  
Debt Contract ◽  
The French Revolution

The French government currently honors a very unusual debt contract: an annuity that was issued in 1738 and currently yields €1.20 per year, payable to the descendants of its original recipient. I tell the story of this unique debt, which serves as an anecdotal but symbolic summary of French public finances since the eighteenth century. Created by a powerful nobleman for one of his servants, it survived the turmoil of the French Revolution, became part of the public debt and has been scrupulously honored to this day, even though its value has been eroded away by decades of inflation.

Preaching, a Ponytail, and an Enthusiast: Rethinking the Public Sphere's Subversiveness in Eighteenth-century Prussia

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sauter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Reading Clubs ◽  
The French Revolution

Recent work on the eighteenth-century public sphere has recast the debate about the Enlightenment's responsibility for the French Revolution. Historians have argued that the print public sphere and its concomitant forms of sociability, such as salons, reading clubs, and coffee houses created social spaces from which criticism of the state emerged. This elite criticism corroded the Old Regime's foundations and the revolutionary crash of 1789, if it was not directly the intellectuals' fault, was sufficiently related to their mental labors to show that enlightened publicness had consequences.

Gibbon's unfinished History: the French Revolution and English political vocabularies

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Womersley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Textual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractOn Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick. This article explains why Gibbon began this work, and why he laid it aside. Beginning by describing the nature and purpose of literature on Hanoverian genealogy in the earlier eighteenth century, and proceeding to relate the content of the Antiquities to the politics of Blackstone and Hume, the article identifies the Antiquities as a distinctively ancien régime defence of British political life and institutions which was elicited from Gibbon by the early months of the French revolution. The abandonment of the Antiquities is then explained as part of Gibbon's shocked response to the deepening gravity of events in France after the September massacres. In the polarized political atmosphere which ensued, the literary finesse of the Antiquities ran the risk of being confused with disaffection. That risk was increased when Gibbon and The decline and fall began to be used by radicals as auxiliaries in their attack on England's ancien régime. The textual history of the Antiquities allows us to perceive the rapidity with which the connotations and ownership of certain political vocabularies in England changed during the early 1790s.

scholarly journals Sette scritti politici liberi

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Immanuel Kant
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Open Access ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public University ◽  
The Public ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Open Access Publication ◽  
Creative Commons ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The French Revolution

At the end of the eighteenth century, before and during the French Revolution, Kant wrote intensively about politics. This book brings together the translations of his principal philosophical-political works, with the editor's annotations, from the essay on Enlightenment through to the writing on progress. The texts are subject to a Creative Commons licence, so that they can be amended without restrictions, retaining the same rights. Open access publication alone can achieve freedom in the public use of reason. The decision to free a classic work from economic monopoly and censure is intended to demonstrate that open access is not an academic theory but a reality that can give value and meaning to the establishment of a public university. Making Kant read means much more than merely reading him.

scholarly journals De lykkelige skatteborgere

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
The French Revolution

The article offers a contextualized reading of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s forbidden bestseller The Year 2440 (1771). It focuses on Mercier’s financial politics as these are presented both in the novel and in the author’s intervention in the public debate immediately prior to the outbreak of the French revolution. Based on a reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the article argues that there is a link between happiness, rights and fiscality, which has rarely been examined. Intervening in this field of discourse, Mercier is co-responsible for the establishment of the unhappiness/happiness-dichotomy that characterizes much of the French late eighteenth century thought on happiness.

Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, F. R. S. (1737-1816) and his relations with British scientists

1967 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-130 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Guyton De Morveau ◽  
The City ◽  
The French Revolution

Most of the eminent French scientists of the eighteenth century lived in Paris and were members of the Académie Royale des Sciences. But academies also flourished in twenty or more provincial cities, and in Dijon there was a chemist who achieved during his lifetime an international reputation equal to that of any of his compatriots. Louis Bernard Guyton was born at Dijon on 4 January 1737 (1). Like his father he studied law, and from 1756 to 1762 he practised as an advocate. Dijon was the ancient capital of Burgundy and the seat of one of the French provincial parliaments, or royal courts of law, in which offices carrying social prestige and exemption from certain taxes could be bought and sold, and in 1762 Guyton’s father obtained for him the office of avocat-général du roi , one of the public prosecutors. Guyton then added to his name ‘de Morveau’, from a family property near the city, and he retained this name, sign ing himself simply ‘De Morveau’ until the French Revolution, when, like many Frenchmen, he dropped the ‘de’ and became ‘Guyton-Morveau’, then ‘Guyton’ and finally ‘Guyton-Morveau’ again.

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