The French Revolution in the Atlantic Ports

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-146
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Municipal Politics ◽  
Street Violence ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
Merchant Community ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The chapter traces the course of the Revolution in the port cities and discusses the response of the merchant community to political change. The Revolution was initially widely welcomed, as it opened careers to talent, allowed freedom of religion, and abolished legal estates, which all appealed to the mercantile elites, who quickly took charge of municipal politics. But things quickly worsened with street violence in Paris, the federalist crisis in several of the ports, and the Vendean insurrection on Nantes’ doorstep. The Jacobin government and the Terror brought new threats for the merchant community, for whom surviving the revolutionary years took a degree of guile, as trade could easily be confused with speculation and an act of selfishness that rendered merchants instantly suspect.

Germany: The Revolution of the Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on Germany during the revolutionary decade. The years of political change coincided with the supreme efflorescence of German thought and culture. It was the age of Goethe and Schiller, of Mozart and Beethoven, of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher, and the Humboldts. Under the influence of such masters, a new German national consciousness was beginning to take form. An ambivalent attitude to revolution entered into the national outlook. The Germans neither rejected revolution in the abstract, nor accepted it in its actual manifestations. Nothing was more characteristic, in Germany before 1800, than to continue to hail the principles and goals of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and to believe that in French hands, thanks to French faults, these principles had miscarried.

scholarly journals Evolving Loyalties: A Provincial Printer in Revolutionary Bordeaux1

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane McLeod
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The author examines the career of Simon Lacourt, a Bordeaux printer who was guillotined during the French Revolution, and explores the ways in which printers’ milieu and patrons determined their printing choices. Lacourt -- the last in a long line of King’s printers in Bordeaux -- was one of the most privileged and connected printers in the reign of Louis XVI when he made the move into revolutionary printing and became a newspaper printer and the official printer for the Department of the Gironde. His printing business prospered until the summer of 1793 when he became the official printer of the commission populaire, the body that led the federalist revolt in Bordeaux, a fateful decision dictated by his social, familial and political milieu and one that left him vulnerable after the revolt failed. During his trial he was accused of trying to destroy his country and his fate raises questions about printer responsibility during the Revolution.

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.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

Contemporary visions of France: the Revolution, Women and History: A Summary of the 1989 Fall Colloquia, New York University’s Institute of French Studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Studies ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The seven colloquia held at New York University’s Institute of French Studies during the Fall 1989 semester offered some new perspectives on the French Revolution, and took stock of various elements of French Society and history two hundred years after the taking of the Bastille.

Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

scholarly journals Danton. Wektory interpretacji filmu Andrzeja Wajdy

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Włodzimierz Szturc
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Current Model ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Andrzej Wajda ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In this paper, the author presents the final period of the French Revolution as interpretated by Andrzej Wajda. The screenplay was prepared by Jean-Claude Carrière based on Stanisława Przybyszewska’s drama (also used by Wajda as a screenplay in many dramas). It helped the director to describe the reality of the intense time of Robespierre’s terror and Jacobin efforts to guillotine Danton and his allies. Wajda reveals the same mechanisms of crime, manipulation and lies which became the backdrop for political events in Poland between 1981-1983 (especially with the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981). The model of Danton’s fall and the strengthening of totalitarian rule are considered the current model of history, which is based on cruelty and the struggle for power. The film forms the basis for a broader view of history as the tragic entanglement of events, which is the result of hubris and the desire for material goods, and is the origin of totalitarian rule. References to the emblems of the revolution, allegories, and the symbolism of art (paintings of David) are the fundamental ekphrasis of meanings set by the film. Wajda’s analysis of Danton shows some typical ways of understanding and interpreting the signs of culture and history.

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