Afterword

The Past ◽

Chronological Change ◽

Key Issues ◽

Political Interpretation ◽

This expansive afterword reflects upon the whole volume’s arguments and contents. The focus is upon the concept of the miscellaneous: an eighteenth-century mode of organization and appreciation of culture, increasingly contested in the early nineteenth century. The author discusses issues of patriotism and audience reception, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of political loyalism and dissent in Britain in the period following the French Revolution. Questions of identity and identification are seen as crucial, and as being formed at least in part within theatrical spaces. The author considers the difficult political interpretation of affective tropes such as humour and sentimentality, deftly relating them to the key issues of the day, while also paying attention to chronological change, and the need to recover ways of seeing and feeling that have been lost over the past two centuries.

Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic

PMLA ◽

10.2307/458028 ◽

1932 ◽

Vol 47 (1) ◽

pp. 191-199 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Harry T. Baker

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

The Past ◽

William Hazlitt ◽

Political Views ◽

Literary Fame ◽

When William Hazlitt died, in 1830, his literary fame was obscured by his political views. The man who admired Napoleon and wrote a biography of him and who championed the radical creed of the French Revolution could hardly have been expected to be popular among Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. During the past twenty-five years, however, several volumes containing selections from his essays have been issued; and most editions of Shakespeare enrich themselves by quoting his opinions. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, printed in 1817, is still very much alive. Heine, in his volume Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen (1838), declared: “With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no Shakespearean commentator of any consequence.” And this verdict, though decidedly exaggerated, gains new interest when we append the Teutonic explosion: “It takes the very heart out of me when I remember that Shakespeare is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in his wrath ever created.”

Early-Nineteenth-Century Reactions to Benthamism

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society ◽

10.2307/3679125 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 34 ◽

pp. 47-69 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

J. R. Dinwiddy

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

House Of Commons ◽

Controversial Subject ◽

IN 1965 a very distinguished Bentham scholar read a paper to this society on Bentham and the French Revolution. During the period dealt with by that paper Bentham became an honorary citizen of France (largely through his friendship with Brissot), but he remained little known either in Britain or on the Continent. Thirty years later, he was world-famous. In 1825 members of the Colombian Congress in Bogot were quoting Bentham at each other much as eighteenth-century Englishmen had quoted Cicero in the House of Commons; and among the leaders of the Decembrist mutiny of the same year in St Petersburg were men who confessed to having been influenced by Bentham's works. In 1829 a weekly newspaper was appearing at Boston, Massachusetts, which carried his phrase the greatest happiness of the greatest number as its motto, while a journal called L'Utilitaire was being published at Geneva to propagate his ideas. This paper will not tackle the large and controversial subject of the extent and significance of Bentham's influence. It will address itself to questions that are more limited, though they have some bearing on the larger topic. These questions are: how did those outside the circle of his followers react to his ideas, and what attempts were made to challenge or refute them?

German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity

Church History ◽

10.1017/s0009640719000544 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 88 (1) ◽

pp. 87-119

Author(s):

Doron Avraham

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

French Revolution ◽

Political Authority ◽

Religious Devotion ◽

Alternative Meaning ◽

Christian Conservatives ◽

Prevailing View

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x00010295 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 209-224 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

J. Majeed

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Cultural Identities ◽

Jeremy Bentham ◽

British India ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

History Of ◽

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

“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.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽

10.2307/461866 ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 93 (3) ◽

pp. 448-462 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Albert D. Hutter

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

The Novel ◽

Generational Conflict ◽

The Past ◽

Two Cities ◽

Critical Model ◽

The Individual ◽

Critical Methods ◽

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.

POLITICAL CULTURE, POLITICAL CLASS, AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x97007760 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 41 (1) ◽

pp. 311-315

Author(s):

D. L. L. PARRY

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Political Culture ◽

French Revolution ◽

Political Community ◽

French History ◽

New Haven ◽

Yale University ◽

Political Class ◽

The Past ◽

The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited by Isser Woloch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Mona Ozouf et al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political culture, and by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather than through l'histoire événementielle of ministries and elections. The three books reviewed here all relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly in The past in French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon, artistic culture was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe was left to nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom. Yet whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make only passing references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary adjuncts to such an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which enables one to put l'histoire événementielle aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within the political class. The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures. What, though, creates these communities?

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858569.013.008 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Klaus Ries

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Strong Influence ◽

The State ◽

Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽

State Terror ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Mikhail Bakunin ◽

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454193.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 112-139

Author(s):

Luis de Miranda

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Similar Model ◽

French Society ◽

National System ◽

Nation States ◽

Nineteenth Century France ◽

The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

The Nature of Nationalism

American Political Science Review ◽

10.2307/1948728 ◽

1939 ◽

Vol 33 (6) ◽

pp. 1001-1021 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Hans Kohn

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

The Other ◽

European Countries ◽

Dynamic Force ◽

The Past ◽

Long Time ◽

Political Economic ◽

Nationalism as we understand it is not older than the second half of the eighteenth century. Its first great manifestation was the French Revolution, which gave the new movement an increased dynamic force. Nationalism had, however, become manifest at the end of the eighteenth century almost simultaneously in a number of widely separated European countries. Its time in the evolution of mankind had arrived, and although the French Revolution was one of the most powerful factors in its intensification and spread, it was not its date of birth. Like all historical movements, nationalism has its roots deep in the past. The conditions which made its emergence possible had matured during centuries before they converged at its formation. These political, economic, and intellectual developments took a long time for their growth and proceeded in the various European countries at different pace. It is impossible to grade them according to their importance or to make one dependent upon the other. All are closely interconnected, each reacting upon the other; and although their growth can be traced separately, their effects and consequences cannot be separated otherwise than in the analysis of the scholar; in life, they are indissolubly intertwined.