The Voters’ Choice

Author(s):  
Malcolm Crook

Designated candidates seeking office play a central role in elections today, so it is a surprise to discover that in the past voters were free to name whom they wished on their ballot papers. In France, their choice was only restricted when declared candidatures were required for election to the Chamber of Deputies after 1889, though this liberty lasted much longer when it came to local elections. This raises the question of how individuals aspiring to office put themselves forward, in the absence of manifestos or publicity, when their talents were supposed to speak for themselves. Indeed, before the French Revolution, and even afterwards, to openly seek election was regarded as a disqualification, though this created confusion as votes were widely dispersed and those elected often declined to serve. Yet the reluctance to abandon this approach was not simply attachment to tradition, rather it constituted an assertion of the voters’ sovereign right to exercise an unfettered electoral choice, and to reject those offered to them as official candidates by the government or as the nominees of political parties.

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-321
Author(s):  
Lode Wils

In het tweede deel van zijn bijdrage 1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat, over de gebeurtenissen van 1830-1831 als slotfase van een passage van de Belgische protonatie doorheen de grote politiek-maatschappelijke en culturele mutaties na de Franse Revolutie, ontwikkelt Lode Wils de stelling dat de periode 1829-1830 de "terminale crisis" vormde van het Koninkrijk der Verenigde Nederlanden. Terwijl koning Willem I definitief had laten verstaan dat hij de ministeriële verantwoordelijkheid definitief afwees en elke kritiek op het regime beschouwde als kritiek op de dynastie, groeide in het Zuiden de synergie in het verzet tussen klerikalen, liberalen en radicale anti-autoritaire groepen. In de vervreemding tussen het Noorden en het Zuiden en de uiteindelijke revolutionaire nationaal-liberale oppositie vanuit het Zuiden, speelde de taalproblematiek een minder belangrijke rol dan het klerikale element en de liberale aversie tegen het vorstelijk absolutisme van Willem I en de aangevoelde uitsluiting van de Belgen uit het openbaar ambt en vooral uit de leiding van de staat.________1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation stateIn the second part of his contribution 1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation state, dealing with the events from 1830-1831 as the concluding phase of a transition of the Belgian pre-nation through the major socio-political and cultural mutations after the French Revolution, Lode Wils develops the thesis that the period of 1829-1830 constituted the "terminal crisis" of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands. Whilst King William I had clearly given to understand that he definitively rejected ministerial responsibility and that he considered any criticism of the regime as a criticism of the dynasty, the synergy of resistance increased between the clericalists, liberals and radical anti-authoritarian groups in the South. In the alienation between the North and the South and the ultimate revolutionary national-liberal opposition from the South the language issue played a less important role than the clericalist element and the liberal aversion against the royal absolutism of William I and the sense of exclusion of the Belgians from public office and particularly from the government of the state.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-158
Author(s):  
Erindi Bejko

Abstract Political parties in Albania on several occasions during the past two decades have won the election in certain areas over 3 times in a row. While victory and governance of the same area, for sure creates a margin consumption which has affected the dynamics of the bastions at least in the recent national election. Parties are consumed in their strongholds if they decide the same candidates, either as a political force. In the focus of this article, will be the consuming steps of political parties in their stronghold areas, either reflecting the fall results during the election process. Will we have a final rupture in Albania consumption bastions of political parties and how would be the future of dynamic bastion, will be the question of this article scientific research. A fracture would have strongholds in shqipare perfuindimtare the consumption of political parties and how will be the future of dynamics will be bastions of this artikulil question scientific research. Bastion’s consumption occurs mainly from major political forces on the left if either of right on the study will be taken 4 constituencies which voted for the same party in three elections one by one. In our focus will be general elections, not local elections.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 553-584
Author(s):  
Michał Chaberek

This paper elaborates upon the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom in the period from The French Revolution to The Second Vatican Council. Based on quotations from the original documents, the author presents the evolution of the Church’s position that switched from the initial rejection to the final acceptance of the religious freedom over past two centuries. The fact of this dramatic change begs the question about the continuity of tradition and credibility of the contemporary position of the Church. Based on the document by the International Theological Commission, “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” as well as the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, the author demonstrates that – in contrast to some contemporary interpretations – the hermeneutics of continuity is possible regarding Church’s teaching on religious freedom.


Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Sachs

Coleridge’s comparison between Napoleonic France and imperial Rome seeks to understand “revolutionary time,” that ostensibly new sense of time considered as a product of the French Revolution that sees the future as freed from past precedent. In the context of this seeming rupture between past and present, Coleridge associates the Roman transition from republic to empire with a particular pace and rate of change, and with slowness generally, a slowness that serves as a marked contrast to the apparent speed of his present moment. This chapter shows how Coleridge’s slow time is inextricable from the seeming speed and acceleration with which events were understood to develop in the aftermath of the French Revolution, in modernity. Coleridge returns processes of slow and gradual change into the French Revolution’s seeming rupture with the past.


2018 ◽  
pp. 167-211
Author(s):  
Craig Bruce Smith

From the aftermath of Yorktown through the rise of political parties in the early republic, this chapter shows that legislation and policy (from the Treaty of Paris to the Constitution to attempts at abolitionism) were based on these new concepts of honor and virtue. It also shows the institutionalizing of egalitarian honor in schools, organizations (like the Society of the Cincinnati), occupations, and politics. It charts the development of business ethics in the form of professional honor for lawyers, doctors, and even job applicants. Most importantly, this chapter engages the new conceptions of honor that developed during the early republic, including the rise to prominence of Franklin’s ascending honor (which in part was adapted into the notion of republican womanhood) and Thomas Jefferson’s version that made honor entirely internal and akin to modern ethics. The chapter examines how these new ideals impacted all classes of society including women and African Americans. While most citizens agreed that honor and virtue were defining elements, they differed greatly on how these concepts related to governance, policy (especially the French Revolution), and society. Contestations over the interpretation of national and personal honor would in turn spark in-fighting, dissention, and revival belief systems, highlighted by the development of political parties.


PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.


PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.


1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-307
Author(s):  
Harvey G. Simmons

WHATH AS HAPPENED TO THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY? ONCE ONE of the largest and most influential political parties in France, heir to a tradition dating back to the French Revolution, a party with deep roots in local and national politics, the SFIO decided to dissolve itselfin 1969 and to reconstitute a new socialist party. This new party is to be built on the foundations of the old SFIO in co-operation with a number of clubs, most notably the Convention des Institutions Républicaines (CIR), a federation of clubs recently emerged from the now defunct Federation of the Left (Fédération de la gaucbe démocrate et socialiste, FGDS).


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