1759 and 1794

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-69
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Britton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Far East ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The French Revolution

Adam Smith’s mid-eighteenth-century account of sympathy begins with an imagined scene of torture. After the excesses of the French Revolution, such speculative scenarios of political and juridical violence prompt more explicit articulations of sympathy. This chapter identifies an urgent clarification of sympathy’s abstract, imaginative, and potentially transgressive features in the post-Terror philosophical work of Smith’s French translator, Sophie de Grouchy, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. De Grouchy’s translation highlights the same aspects of Smith’s work—fraternity, abstraction, and physicality—that are fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sympathy. In its figures of the brother on the rack and a natural disaster in the Far East, Smith’s Theory initiates a transformation of visual perception into imaginative perspective that Godwin’s Caleb Williams explores in narrative form.

Introduction: “One of the Most Interesting Pairs of Breeches Recorded in Modern History”

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter discusses the phrase, sans culottes, and its key role within the larger context of the French Revolution. The phrase has a bearing on the sequence of events that led from the fall of the Bastille to the beginning of the Terror. This is because the name sans-culottes was actually a neologism with a rather curious history. Although it can be taken initially to refer to someone simply wearing ordinary trousers, rather than the breeches usually worn in eighteenth-century public or professional life, the words themselves also had a more figurative sense. In this latter usage, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, had to do with the arrangements and values of eighteenth-century French salons. In this setting, the condition of not having breeches, or being sans culottes, was associated with a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century salon society joke.

Taxonomies of Yellow

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Far East ◽  
East Asians ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The People ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
French Physician

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new sorts of human taxonomies as well as new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, during the course of the eighteenth century, as well as their racial implications. It first considers the theory advanced in 1684 by the French physician and traveler François Bernier, who proposed a “new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of man which inhabit it.” One of these races, he suggested, was yellow. Then in 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema naturae, in which he categorized homo sapiens into four different skin colors. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, also a physician and the founder of comparative anatomy, declared that the people of the Far East were a yellow race, as distinct from the white “Caucasian” one.

Square pianos and piano-organs

Erard ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 19-23
Author(s):  
Robert Adelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cast Iron ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
String Tension ◽  
Wing Shape ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
French Court ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The French Revolution

Today the word ‘piano’ connotes a large instrument with a powerful sonority, capable of doing battle with an entire orchestra in a romantic concerto. There are various features of the modern piano responsible for this image, including a case with a long wing shape reinforced by a cast iron frame, and the high degree of string tension that this frame makes possible. None of these features were present on pianos in eighteenth-century France, where the most common model was the rectangular-shaped piano carré (square piano), whose sound was scarcely more powerful than that of a harp. Before the French Revolution, the Erard firm produced square pianos and hybrid piano-organs. During this period, the Erards strengthened their ties with the French court, which resulted in several exceptional instruments made for Marie-Antoinette.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

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.

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