Remembering and Forgetting the French Revolution: Memories and Memoirs

For Rousselin, one of the chief lessons of the French Revolution was that fundamental change took time. He believed that it was the speed and the depth of the crisis of 1793–94 that led to violence. What helped a Revolutionary become a liberal was an acceptance of a slower pace of change. Rousselin used his position and then his time in retirement to try to refine his legacy and avoid further controversy. His choices about what to write and what to publish aimed to propagate a particular vision of the Revolution and his role in it. He wanted to be remembered as a victim not a perpetrator of the Terror. But he could not stop challenges to that vision from appearing; it was love for family that convinced him to retire from the spotlight to contemplate the past and hope for the future.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽

10.1632/003081203x47796 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 118 (3) ◽

pp. 502-520 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Kari Lokke

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Mary Shelley ◽

George Sand ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

Spirit World ◽

Historical Agency ◽

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.

François-René de Chateaubriand

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.3 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Jean-Marie Roulin

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Literary History ◽

Modern Literature ◽

The Future ◽

Benjamin Constant ◽

New Literature ◽

The French Revolution ◽

Chateaubriand’s seminal debate with de Staël at the dawn of the nineteenth century around perceptions of literary history and the orientations of modern literature was largely focused on what aspects of this Enlightenment legacy should be retained or rejected. A contemporary of Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand was marked, like them, by the experience of the French Revolution. This sets him apart from the Romantics of the ‘battle ofHernani’ (1830), for whom the Revolution was a pre-existing narrative. For Chateaubriand’s generation the Revolution was crucial, posing ontological, political, and metaphysical questions—how could that ‘river of blood’ be crossed, to borrow one of his recurrent metaphors? What should the new literature be like, and for what type of society in revolutionized France? Chateaubriand’s Romanticism was first of all an answer to these questions, an elegiac adieu to a past forever lost and an uneasy questioning of the future.

Introduction

The Afterlives of the Terror ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501739248.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-16

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Transitional Justice ◽

Recent Literature ◽

The Past ◽

Revolutionary Violence ◽

The Future ◽

The Subject ◽

The introductory chapter opens up the question of how to approach the aftermath of the Terror. Most of revolutionary historiography is focused on the origins of the event, not on its aftermath. This chapter argues that there is much to learn about the French Revolution and its relevance to our own times by studying the aftermath of the Terror. In articulating the book’s approach to the subject, the chapter draws on the recent literature on transitional justice and trauma, as well as on the much earlier ideas of Edgar Quinet. Approaching the aftermath of the Terror invites us to consider how those who had experienced revolutionary violence faced the past in the context of a movement oriented toward the future.

Revolutionary Lyric

Mandelstam's Worlds ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198857938.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 102-156

Author(s):

Andrew Kahn

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Lyric Poetry ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

This chapter examines a set of four poems, written between 1921 and 1924, that combine a certain abstraction of language with visceral violence. Mandelstam develops a set of techniques for his lyric poetry that will permanently enrich his poetics in exploring new themes such as guilt and violence; in another poem he creates an emblem to represent generational warfare, combining the highly pictorial and the abstract, and reflecting on questions of whether the ends justify the means; in a third, Mandelstam uses allegory and emblems to represent, in his own way, the analogy between the French Revolution and the Terror widespread in early Bolshevik culture, interrogating the historiography to see whether the past is of any use in predicting the future. In a eulogy to Lenin, the question of Russia’s direction remains acutely open-ended.

Patronage and Revolution: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and His Theory of Legislative Corruption

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670513000880 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 76 (1) ◽

pp. 43-67

Author(s):

William Selinger

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

House Of Commons ◽

National Assembly ◽

The Future ◽

Insight Into ◽

The French Revolution ◽

AbstractEdmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is most famous and controversial for Burke's opposition to the philosophy behind the Revolution. This essay examines Burke's more practical criticisms of the French National Assembly which pervade the pamphlet, and shows their connection to his earlier arguments about corruption in the House of Commons. Burke's insight into the future course of the French Revolution is based in his distinctive approach to thinking about the pathologies of legislative assemblies, which he initially developed in the House of Commons, and later applied to the French National Assembly.

Looking at the French Revolution through Ottoman eyes: Ebubekir Ratib Efendi's observations

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x07000432 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 70 (2) ◽

pp. 283-304 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Fatih Yeşil

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Eastern Mediterranean ◽

Political Order ◽

Fundamental Change ◽

The French Revolution ◽

AbstractReceived wisdom has always held that the Ottomans took little interest in events beyond their borders except when they were likely to affect them. Previous scholars have suggested that it was only when French revolutionary forces occupied the Eastern Mediterranean that the Ottomans took an interest in and then condemned the revolution. From the despatches and reports of Ebubekir Ratib Efendi, ambassador to Vienna, we discover that at least one Ottoman diplomat was sending detailed accounts of events in Paris and the reactions of governments throughout Europe. Ratib Efendi's diplomatic activities would suggest that reforms were already taking place in 1793, at least in the field of gathering intelligence. This signals a fundamental change in the psyche of the Ottoman political order.

From the Revolution to Liberalization

Government and Opposition ◽

10.1111/j.1477-7053.1976.tb00006.x ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 257-272 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Ernest Gellner

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Political Authority ◽

Definite Article ◽

Philosophical Logic ◽

Moral Rightness ◽

The Past ◽

The French Revolution ◽

J-P. SARTRE HAS WRITTEN AT LENGTH ON THE QUESTION OF HOW THE myth of the French revolution is possible. The intelligibility, let alone the truth, of his answer need not detain us unduly. But the question is a good one. The past two centuries or so have indeed been the age of myth of the Revolution. As in philosophical logic, the definite article has distinctive and powerful implications and gives rise to very interesting problems. In this case, they are not merely logical, but also, and above all, moral, epistemic and political. The definite article seems to imply existence; and it also seems to imply uniqueness. Even more disturbingly, it seems to suggest, in this case, moral rightness and political authority. The Revolution is necessary, unique and inevitable, legitimate and authoritative. But to claim these traits, it must also be identifiable; and it can only be identified, hailed and revered, if it carries some manifest stigmata. But what are they? Can they not be counterfeited? Are there not peddlers of fake stigmata, or, worse still, of false theories concerning what constitutes the stigmata?

Romanticism and Realism among Czechs and Slovaks

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670500002345 ◽

1952 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 25-46 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hans Kohn

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

French Revolution ◽

Sense Of Self ◽

Young Generation ◽

Napoleonic Wars ◽

The Past ◽

Romantic Movement ◽

The Future ◽

The Middle Ages ◽

In the 1820's and 1830's the romantic movement was at the height of its influence throughout Europe* In its origins, among the Lake poets in England and in the circle around the brothers Schlegel in Germany, romanticism opposed the libertarian and rationalist tendencies of the French Revolution. In its later stage romanticism presented a more complex attitude, its imagination turned simultaneously to the fascination of the past and the Middle Ages and to the appeal of the future happiness of free men. Under the quiet surface of the Biedermeier the unrest of the Napoleonic wars continued to arouse in the educated young generation a longing for change, for activity, for a new sense of self-fulfillment.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

10.23943/princeton/9780691161280.003.0017 ◽

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 ◽

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’

10.1093/oso/9780198737827.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ruth Scurr

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Historical Record ◽

Thomas Carlyle ◽

History Of ◽

Dramatic Narrative ◽

The French 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.