From ‘La Grande Chartreuse’ to The British Album

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-57
Author(s):  
Samantha Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Origin Myth ◽  
The French Revolution

By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, the chapter offers an exemplary instance of the issues at stake in album culture. The book was instrumental in promoting the elite practice of inscribing occasional texts in albums. In 1789 fashionable newspapers the World and the Oracle publicly fought over ownership of a transcript from the album and of ‘Della Cruscan’ poetry. The quarrel gave rise to scurrilous journalism, satirical prose, and parodic verse in which the term ‘album’ and its occasional and heterogeneous aesthetic was claimed and contested. In William Gifford’s attack on the Della Cruscans, Bell’s poetry anthology The British Album (1790) became shorthand for poetry’s debasement through cultural feminization. The Grande Chartreuse album disappeared during the French Revolution, but created a grand origin myth for the Romantic album.

scholarly journals Being Immortal in Paris: Violence and Prophecy during the French Revolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (02) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ramón Solans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Emotional Needs ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

This article uses the case of Catherine Théot and her prophetic activity in late eighteenth-century Paris to reflect on the relationship between event and prophecy in the era of the French Revolution. Despite appearing fixed and immobile, Théot's prophecies were constantly changing and evolving, giving rise to hybrid discourses influenced by various currents including both Jansenism and revolutionary discourses. The Théot affair thus provides an occasion to reflect on contemporary supernatural interpretations of the French Revolution. In this context, her prophecies can be read as a response to the emotional needs triggered by political instability, the fear of war and political violence, and religious changes. In conclusion, the article points to a religious discourse that existed on the margins of the dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution, but was nevertheless closely linked to it though the effects of the Revolutionary Wars and the Terror.

William ‘Bill’ Doyle and the Origins of the French Revolution

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Blanning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Marxist Interpretation ◽  
Breaking Work ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter discusses Bill Doyle's contribution to the study of the origins of the French Revolution. It shows how his early work delivered a powerful critique of the dominant Marxist interpretation, already under attack from revisionists led by Alfred Cobban. It examines the three editions of his book Origins of the French Revolution, with both continuities and changes identified. Particular importance is assigned to Doyle's ground-breaking work on the part played by venality in eroding the old regime monarchy. A second topic of major importance to which Doyle's researches have contributed a great deal is the role of the Parlements. This is placed in the context of Doyle's critique of the notion of an ‘aristocratic reaction’ in late-eighteenth century France. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his most recent work on aristocracy.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT INFLUENCE: ASSESSING EDMUND BURKE'S CONSERVATIVE LEGACIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
CLAIRE RYDELL ARCENAS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Open Question ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.

scholarly journals De lykkelige skatteborgere

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
The French Revolution

The article offers a contextualized reading of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s forbidden bestseller The Year 2440 (1771). It focuses on Mercier’s financial politics as these are presented both in the novel and in the author’s intervention in the public debate immediately prior to the outbreak of the French revolution. Based on a reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the article argues that there is a link between happiness, rights and fiscality, which has rarely been examined. Intervening in this field of discourse, Mercier is co-responsible for the establishment of the unhappiness/happiness-dichotomy that characterizes much of the French late eighteenth century thought on happiness.

The Time of the Trap Door

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Trap Door ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

Learning Conservatism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
English Literature ◽  
General Level ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Students

The construction of Burke as the ‘founder of conservatism’ was also a product of developments in education. The increasing study of Burke arose out of several converging movements: in publishing and technology; in philosophical thought; in the increasing disposable income and leisure time of greater portions of the population; and in education movements for men and women at all levels. The popularity of topics such as the French Revolution, Romanticism, and late eighteenth-century history meant that Burke became a feature of lectures and examinations. At university, Burke was of particular interest to philosophical Idealists, English literature professors and students, and a generation of historians who taught increasingly modern courses. By analysing how Burke was studied at this much more popular, general level it is possible to pinpoint how Burke’s ‘conservative’ political thought was taught to swathes of new students—it took more than gentlemanly erudition to establish a scholarly orthodoxy.

Carl Schmitt's Vattel and the 'Law of Nations' between Enlightenment and Revolution

Grotiana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Nakhimovsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Total War ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Of International Law

AbstractThis article questions the status of Vattel's Law of Nations as an exemplary illustration of eighteenth-century developments in the history of international law. Recent discussions of the relation between eighteenth-century thinking about the law of nations and the French Revolution have revived Carl Schmitt's contention about the nexus between just war theory and the emergence of total war. This evaluative framework has been used to identify Vattel as a moral critic of absolutism who helped undermine the barriers against total war, as well as an architect and defender of those very barriers. Neither of these opposing readings is corroborated by late-eighteenth-century commentators on Vattel's treatise. To its late-eighteenth-century critics and defenders alike, Vattel's Law of Nations was distinguished by the weakness of its derivation of the law of nations from principles of natural law. Insofar as these readers did link Vattel to justifications of relatively unrestrained forms of warfare, they did so in connection with the perceived weakness of Vattel's moral position rather than with its strength. This late-eighteenth-century consensus on the defining features of Vattel's approach to the law of nations sits uncomfortably with Schmitt's evaluative framework, and indeed with other assessments of Vattel that limit themselves to orienting his treatise along fault lines in the historiography of international law.

scholarly journals Otherness and Self in Latvian Theatre: Changes at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Pauls Daija
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Hill

In the article, political and historical interpretations of the first play in Latvian, an adapted translation of Ludvig Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill (1723, Latvian version 1790) are explored. Although the play has been often interpreted as a work of anti-alcohol propaganda, the article argues that the political motives of the play are no less important. Translated into Latvian during the time of the French revolution, the play mirrors the tense atmosphere of the revolutionary years and reflects changes in Latvian peasant identity. While translating, Baltic German pastor Alexander Johann Stender changed the play’s setting to the late eighteenth century Courland and added new details, emphasizing the social conflict of the play as an ethnic one. It has been argued in the article that since ‘class’ in the Baltics was divided along national lines, the difference between peasants and masters was also the difference between Latvians and Germans, so class and ethnicity merged. When the peasant and the nobleman switch places in the play, this symbolizes a change in the Latvian-German colonial relationship. The colonial interpretation allows for a characterisation of the protagonist as a desperate imitator – a colonial subject who loses his identity as a serf and is not able to form a new identity in any way other than by copying the colonialist op- pressor. But this mimicry turns into ridicule, hence the play acquires a political meaning as it implicitly shows the disastrous consequences of revolutionary pro- test. Therefore, the play can be read as a part of the discussions about the Baltic Enlightenment emancipation project and as a hidden debate on serfdom and the colonial framework of the Courland society

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Stow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter explores the transformation in Jewish life that failed to occur in late eighteenth-century Rome. The French Revolution and the U.S. Constitution had established that Jews were citizens with full and equal legal rights. But in Rome, the capital of the then Papal State, no such proclamation occurred. Although Rome's Jews possessed rights in civil law, the discrimination determined by canon law was great. Roman Jews were forced to live in the ghetto decreed by Pope Paul IV in 1555, as part of a vigorous conversionary drive. People were taken to an institution known as the House of Converts, where they were held for periods of time, and most eventually converted. However, some did not, most notably Anna del Monte, who not only remained a Jew but also left a diary recounting her thirteen days in the Catecumeni, as Rome's Jews called the place.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document