Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-220
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter confronts the question of the politics of Gothic architecture in the long eighteenth century. Exploring manifestations of its Whiggish appeal, the argument also points to a number of notable Tory appropriations of the revived Gothic style. If the political significance of the Gothic was thus open to dispute, notions of improvement and repair were almost uniformly inflected with intimations of political radicalism, particularly after the French Revolution of 1789. Exploring the political meanings of improvement, repair, and ruination in the work of John Carter, the discussion extends this into a reading of political discourse of the 1790s, tracing political writers’ extensive appropriations of architectural metaphor. The chapter concludes with a reading of 1790s political Gothic fiction, showing how radical writers of the decade engaged with the politics of Gothic architecture while questioning the extent to which chivalry, romance, and other aesthetic ‘remains’ of the Gothic past could serve the needs of the present.

Exile, Imprisonment, or Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
The French Revolution

Between the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 and the French Revolution of 1789, thousands of French nobles, including members of the royal family, courtiers, bishops, generals, and judges suffered internal exile, imprisonment, or even death for having displeased their sovereign. For most that punishment was independent of the legal system and was the result of a simple royal command or a written order, known as a lettre de cachet. Yet rather than protest, the victims were willing to obey, spending months, even years in disgrace without any knowledge of when, or even if, their ordeal would end. Their punishment was for many a terrible personal blow, striking at the heart of their own identity and relationship to the king, and it threatened the future of their families, friends, and political allies. This book is the first in-depth study of political disgrace, which was intrinsic to the exercise of royal power, drawing on the mystique of monarchy and the ideologies of divine right, patriarchy, and justice that underpinned royal authority. It explores the rise and consolidation of a new model of disgrace amongst the nobility for which obedience to the king gradually replaced the rebellious attitudes fostered during the years of religious and civil strife. Yet for all the power of royal disgrace, it was always open to challenge and in the course of the eighteenth century it would come under a sustained attack that tells us much about the political and cultural origins of the French Revolution.

Diplomacy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamish Scott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
De Re ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The French Revolution

The era of the French Revolution, and specifically the later 1780s and 1790s, saw the modern meanings first of “diplomatic” and then “diplomacy” become established in the political lexicon. A century before, when the Maurist monk Jean Mabillon wrote De re diplomatica (1681), his masterpiece devoted to the science of documents and the historical method, the term still retained its traditional meaning: relating to the study of diplomas or other documents. At this period the peaceful conduct of relations between states was known as “negotiations” (négociations ), a term which long continued to be employed. During the later eighteenth century, however, the terms “diplomatic” and “diplomacy” took on their present-day meaning both in French and in English. The Irish political journalist and British MP, Edmund Burke, did most to make the word familiar to Anglophone readers. In the Annual Register for 1787 he wrote of “civil, diplomatique [sic] and military affairs,” while a decade later, in one of his celebrated Letters on a Regicide Peace, he spoke of the French regime's “double diplomacy.” By shortly after 1800, the term was becoming established.

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.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

Hellenism in the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This article moves past the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and, in particular, to the French Revolution, which crystallized an important, if not fully understood, moment in the history of Hellenism. It shows how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration for so many of the French revolutionaries, were simultaneously proto-democratic and pro-Spartan. In this respect, Rousseau marks a complex breakthrough in the political traditions of Hellenism, which were, for much of European history until the eighteenth century, anti-democratic and pro-Spartan.

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.

The Russian “Glorious Revolution” of 1762 and the French “Bloodshed” of 1789 as Seen by Andrei Bolotov, a Russian Provincial Nobleman of the Eighteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-208
Author(s):  
Mikhail Pavlovich Miliutin ◽  
Aleksandra Iur’evna Veselova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Made In ◽  
The French Revolution

The article examines the political views of Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, as expressed in his memoirs and handwritten collections of news from 1792–1793, which described the events of the French Revolution, as well as in other writings and translations made in the 1760s–1790s. Bolotov’s sources of information (foreign press, François Pictet, Christian Friedrich Schwan and Christoph Girtanner), his range of communication, and the nature of his writings suggest that his political outlook was not determined solely by the class perspective of a provincial landowner. His political views, formed under the influence of the Catherine ii’s coup of 1762, which he called the Russia’s “Glorious Revolution,” combined ideas underpinning Catherine’s absolutism with notions of natural law and drawn from European intellectuals.

Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Taylor-Leduc
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Hot Air ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fireworks Displays ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The French Revolution

During the French Revolution, resourceful entrepreneurs seized properties on the outskirts of Paris to create jardins-spectacles, urban pleasure grounds that merged the former aristocratic practices of picturesque strolling with popular entertainments. Visitors paid entrance fees to explore the artfully contrived sensorium and watch astonishing performances, including fireworks displays and hot-air balloon launchings, while strolling. Simon Charles Boutin’s development of Tivoli, one of the most popular of the approximately twenty jardins-spectacles built from 1795 until 1820, reveals how these venues became places to perform embodied spectatorship. The ephemerality of the jardins-spectacles has marginalized their contribution to the history of visuality in the long eighteenth century.

Incriminating Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57
Author(s):  
Gregory Mole
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The Many ◽  
French Nation ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract This article explores the political fallout from the 1766 execution of the comte de Lally, who oversaw the failed defense of France's Indian colonies during the Seven Years' War. Accused of treason by administrators of the French East India Company, Lally emerged as a source of controversy in the final decades of the Old Regime. As critics and apologists clashed over the legality of Lally's execution, questions about the nature of his “crime” gave way to a broader debate over the meaning and limits of company sovereignty under France's absolutist state. This conflict remained unresolved into the French Revolution. The Lally affair provides a window into the nebulous relationship that developed between the crown, the company, and the emergent French nation, laying bare the many faces of empire that confronted France during the eighteenth century. Cet article explore les retombées politiques de l'exécution du comte de Lally, l'homme qui commandait les colonies des Indes orientales françaises durant la guerre de Sept Ans. Accusé de trahison par la Compagnie des Indes, Lally représentait une source de controverse à la fin de l'Ancien Régime. Tandis que les critiques et les apologistes contestaient la légalité de son exécution, la question de la culpabilité de Lally incita un débat plus général sur la nature de la souveraineté de la Compagnie sous l'Etat absolutiste. Ce débat restait non résolu durant la Révolution française. L'affaire Lally souligne les liens nébuleux parmi la Compagnie, la monarchie, et la nation française. Elle révèle également les multiples incarnations de l'Empire français au cours du dix-huitième siècle.

The "Religious Secularism" of Lebanon and the United States: A Discussion between Lebanon's Secular Debate and Madison's "Principles of Pluralism"

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-57
Author(s):  
David D. Grafton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
American Rhetoric ◽  
Muslim Scholars ◽  
The French Revolution

Within the current discussions of Jslam and democracy, the issue of secularism has now become one of the most important themes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main premise put forward by Jslamic scholars in various forms has been that secularism is atheistic and, therefore, incompatible with £slam. This article investigates one Islamic debate on the issue of secularism in order to find the root elements of the Muslim argu­ment. In looking at the 1976-77 secularism debate in Lebanon we argue that, like Lebanon, most Muslim scholars use the French Revolution and its Jacobist views as the standard for understand­ing secularism. Rather, the Lebanese context is better suited to the eighteenth-century American context and its development of a "religious secularism." The conclusion here is that Lebanon would be better off using eighteenth-century American rhetoric in its social political discourse for a vision of its own future, and that Musi im minority communities (primarily in the United States) can recover the issues involved in the American secular debates that saw secularism as "freedom for religion" in multi­communal states rather than the enemy of religion.

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