The Initial Reception of the French Revolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Jay Bergman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Practically from its inception, the French Revolution prompted educated Russians, regardless of their politics, to form an opinion of it. As the revolution progressed, instead of changing minds, it froze them, turning assumptions into beliefs and beliefs into dogma. Chapter 1 shows this to be true especially for Russians on opposite ends of the political spectrum. This was not true, however, of liberals such as Pushkin whose politics, by contrast, fluctuated greatly. The chapter concludes with analysis of ‘gentry-revolutionaries’ such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who applied to the actors in the French Revolution the same requirement of ‘moral wholeness’ that was an essential aspect of the Russian revolutionary movement as a whole.

The Prospectus War of the 1790s

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-77
Author(s):  
David Duff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Effect ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
London Corresponding Society ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Prospectuses, a type of printed advertisement widely used in the eighteenth-century book trade, played a vital but previously unexamined role in the French Revolution controversy, attracting subscribers to political publications and encapsulating their message. Focusing on journal and newspaper prospectuses, which proliferated in the 1790s, this article analyzes examples from across the political spectrum, including the prospectus for the Argus by the radical journalist Sampson Perry, George Canning’s hugely influential prospectus to the Anti-Jacobin, and other examples by William Playfair, the London Corresponding Society, and other individuals and organizations. This article shows how prospectus writers exploited the distinctive resources of the genre, adapting its promissory rhetoric and hyperbolic language for political effect. It also investigates how prospectuses interacted with other forms of writing and publication, mirroring the techniques of pamphlets and contributing to the polemical intertextuality that was a feature of the Revolution debate. For all its ephemerality, the genre had a powerful impact, serving all sides of the dispute and marking a convergence of literature, politics, and advertising that typifies the innovative print culture of this period.

scholarly journals Revolutionen i Sæby

Kulturstudier ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Mührmann-Lund
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Town Hall ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Abuse Of Power ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Town ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The revolution in Saeby   In 1790, the citizens of the tiny town of Saeby in northern Jutland demanded a meeting at the Town Hall to confront the town bailiff about his abuse of power as chief of police, but the bailiff refused to obey any “self-made national assemblies”. In Denmark at the time, such examples of popular local unrest were often compared with the French Revolution. However, in later Danish historiography, these disturbances have been seen as “reactive” defences of traditional rights that do not carry the same historical significance as the bourgeois revolution in France, for example. Inspired by an interactional approach to popular unrest, this article argues that the Saeby citizens’ collective protest did indeed have some revolutionary traits: a micro-historical analysis of the conflict as a process shows that the unrest began as a reaction to enclosure and police reforms, and when the town bailiff was suspected of embezzlement, demands for democracy and more transparency grew. Descriptions of the bailiff’s rule as “despotic” show that the citizens of Saeby were inspired by contemporary ideals of democratic absolutism. Thus, the article concludes that popular local disturbances such as these should be seen as part of the revolutionary movement that was taking place elsewhere at that time.

The Debate over Theory Before Malthus and Ricardo

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter establishes a new context for reading the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo. It is the extended debate over the role of theory and practice in politics and political reform, a contest that Edmund Burke launched by publishing his hostile response to the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In attempting to defend theory, both Mackintosh and Stewart engaged in sophisticated rhetoric that attempted to portray Burke’s veneration of custom and usage as philosophically naïve at the same time as they insisted on the necessity of theory for a science of politics. It is in these defensive postures that both Mackintosh and Stewart came to articulate the idea of a ‘theorist’ of politics.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

II. Carlyle and the French Revolution

1958 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-135
Author(s):  
H. Ben-Israel
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Wide Reading ◽  
Political Principle ◽  
John Wilson ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Carlyle entered the field of Revolutionary studies when the Revolution was transforming itself from politics to history, and he himself played an important part in this transition. His older contemporaries belonged to the Revolutionary generation and his younger friends, like John Mill, were products of it. William Smyth was at that time lecturing on the French Revolution in Cambridge and looking out upon it ‘as from a College window’. Smyth was extricating himself from the spirit of the pamphleteers through wide reading and a conscious training in academic impartiality. John Wilson Croker, from the midst of the political scene, was fighting the phantom of the Revolution, and at the same time delving deep into the Revolutionary sources. For him the Revolution had become a subject of historical inquiry only in the sense that he was able to investigate it from records. Alison's book came out after Carlyle had begun his studies. It stole Croker's thunder but left Carlyle unmoved. Alison knew the sources but not how to use them. His bibliographical prefaces are now the best part of his book, which Carlyle had not read when Mill asked whether it was worth reviewing.1 Carlyle glanced at it, saw that the ‘margin bears marks of great enquiry’, knew that Alison had been to France, and advised Mill to review it but to tell his own story, without fear or favour.2 ‘It is a thing utterly unknown to the English and ought to be known.’ When Mill read the book himself, he found that Alison was ‘inconceivably stupid and twaddling...has no research’,3 and that the references were to compilations. Alison's book, pervaded by political principle, tried to throw ‘ true light’ on the Revolution, was tremendously successful and is now forgotten. His sort of history is soon superseded. As he modestly realized, his success was due to his being first in the field.

WHO WERE THE SANS-CULOTTES?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-455
Author(s):  
RUTH SCURR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Necessary Connections ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Who were the sans-culottes? What were their concerns and purposes? And what role did they play in the unfolding of events collectively known as the French Revolution? Michael Sonenscher first engaged directly with these questions in the 1980s (in an article for Social History 9 (1984), 303) when social historians were experimenting with the possibilities opened up by discourse analysis, and when the traditions of eighteenth-century civic, or republican, language seemed particularly exciting: The social history of the French Revolution owes much to the deepening insistence with which the discourse of the Revolution itself referred to, and postulated, necessary connections between everyday circumstances and public life. From Sieyes’ equation of aristocratic privilege with unproductive parasitism in 1788 to the Thermidorian caricature of the architects of the Terror as the dregs of society, the Revolution produced its own “social interpretation.” Sonenscher argued that while the identification of the figure of the sans-culotte with that of the artisan was “the achievement of the generation of historians—Richard Cobb, George Rudé and Albert Soboul—who reintroduced the popular movement into the historiography of the French Revolution”, there was always something problematic (or circular) in the underlying assumption that it was possible to equate the representation of artisan production found in the political language of the sans-culottes during the Revolution with what actually existed in the workshops of Paris or other towns of eighteenth-century France. Back in the 1980s what Sonenscher hoped was that a more accurate understanding of the actual dynamics of workshop production would produce “a better explanation of the meaning of the language of the sans-culottes”. His own expectation, as a social historian, was that the causality, in both explanatory and historical terms, would run from the social to the political sphere.

A New Look at the French Revolution of 1830

1961 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Pinkney
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
New Look ◽  
The Revolution

Among the revolutions in France since 1789 one, the Revolution of 1830, has been singularly neglected by historians in this century, and neither in this century nor the preceding one has it attracted much attention from any but the political historians. No monograph on the whole story of the Revolution has ever been published, and the standard account, in Lavisse's Histoire de France contemporaine, appeared nearly forty years ago. The economic and sociological dimensions of the event have been generally ignored. Consequently, the Revolution of 1830 is ordinarily seen as a political movement arising out of the unpopularity of Charles X and his ministers and out of their attempt to arrogate the sovereign power to the crown.

From Caterpillar to Butterfly and Back: A Waistcoat of the French Revolution

Costume ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper analyses the construction, colour and enigmatic embroidered motifs of an extremely rare Revolutionary-era waistcoat or gilet, recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Though the garment’s provenance is unknown, it must have belonged to a noble convert to the Revolutionary cause; through his clothing, he declared his allegiance to the political and sartorial ideology of the Revolution. The gilet provides a snapshot of a man and a nation in the midst of a metamorphosis.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

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 ◽  
The 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.

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