Learned Societies, Institutions, Associations, and Clubs

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Jeremy Dibble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter considers the ways in which music became the focus of organized bodies during the nineteenth century. One of the most significant outcomes of the French Revolution was the establishment of state institutions, and music was not immune from the secular mindset of utilité publique. State-financed “learned societies” and institutions, fueled by impulses of education, the public good, and most of all, a sense of prestige, became a national imperative, and music was an important part of the state-sponsored matrix. In a technologically innovative century which encouraged epistemological revolution, the need to share knowledge at all levels of society was inexorable. This is reflected in the proliferation of these “learned societies,” and how the need for differing organizational fora emerged throughout the century; the second part of this chapter focuses on how the concept of the “society” developed, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century invention of musicology.

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Ries
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
State Terror ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
David Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Private Benefits ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Electoral Defeat

In the great nineteenth-century British world cycle of gold rushes, individualist wealth seeking became associated with democratic politics, and views about the public rather than private benefits of gold became increasingly the preserve of conservatives. In Georgia, governor George Gilmer declared in 1830 that the gold diggers were “appropriating riches to themselves, which of right equally belong to every other citizen of the state,” but he soon suffered electoral defeat. In 1850s California and Australia, individual miners were rapidly associated with a democratic and egalitarian future, even with the public good. This helps explain the oddly uncontested decisions to allow mining on public—and, in many places, private—land and use of public resources such as timber and water. This chapter is by David Goodman.

George's Hive and the Georgian Hinge

1986 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 37-69
Author(s):  
Robert L. Patten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
The People ◽  
Stable Class ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
The French Revolution

Victorian political and social thought was shaped to some extent in response to the French Revolution and the Regency. One widely circulated mid-nineteenth-century emblem of the State is George Cruikshank's The British Bee Hive, which he designed in 1840 during a second wave of Chartist agitation whose origins and program extend backward into the first decades of the century (Fig. I). The Bee Hive was not published, however, until twenty-seven years later, on the eve of the second Reform Bill, when Cruikshank's “Penny Political Picture for the People” gave him an opportunity to address his public one more time “with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform” and the constitutional subjects that had preoccupied him “for upwards of fifty years.” As an expression of populous enterprise and the stable class hierarchies of the British bourgeois monarchy, George Cruikshank's beehive embodies in its design and accompanying letterpress not only his notions about the second Reform Bill, but also ideas growing out of earlier political, social, and graphic controversies.

Preaching, a Ponytail, and an Enthusiast: Rethinking the Public Sphere's Subversiveness in Eighteenth-century Prussia

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sauter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Reading Clubs ◽  
The French Revolution

Recent work on the eighteenth-century public sphere has recast the debate about the Enlightenment's responsibility for the French Revolution. Historians have argued that the print public sphere and its concomitant forms of sociability, such as salons, reading clubs, and coffee houses created social spaces from which criticism of the state emerged. This elite criticism corroded the Old Regime's foundations and the revolutionary crash of 1789, if it was not directly the intellectuals' fault, was sufficiently related to their mental labors to show that enlightened publicness had consequences.

The New Elites. Questions about Political, Social, and Cultural Reconstruction after the Terror

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Chappey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Common People ◽  
Cultural Reconstruction ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The French Revolution

Was the French Revolution the victory of an all-conquering bourgeoisie that made up the foundation of the nineteenth-century France of the ‘notables’? How far did the older elites of the ancien régime succeed in taking part in the political, social and cultural reordering of the first decades of the new century? This chapter examines the significance of these questions in relation to the construction and legitimation of elite power after the fall of Robespierre. Exploring both political and intellectual developments, it reveals the dynamics which account for the major rupture between the dominance of a republican elite under the Directory, and the foundations of the power of the Empire’s so-called ‘Granite masses’. Study of the various components of elite domination involves not merely scrutiny of the role played by the state, but also of changing attitudes towards the common people, against whom the evolving position of the elite was constructed.

CONFESSIONAL MODERNITY: NICOLA SPEDALIERI, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, C.1775–1800

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-705
Author(s):  
GLAUCO SCHETTINI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The French Revolution

This article reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, focusing on Nicola Spedalieri's On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri, a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. It was not modernity itself, he claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri's ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church's attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.

Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Experimental Community ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
Republican Virtue ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
United Irishmen

In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. This book tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire. The book brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion, and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights, and the public good. The book shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets — in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.

Ninety Years Ago

Antiquity ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 23 (91) ◽  
pp. 115-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Societies ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
The Many ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

No one, so far as I know, has as yet made any particular study of the many local learned societies that were founded up and down France in the years after the French Revolution, and of their effect upon contemporary thought. These Sociétés d’Émulation differed from the local archaeological and historical societies of England in being more all-embracing ; they included in their scope pure literature, philosophy and science as well as the history and antiquities of the district, and often developed a philanthropic side as well. At the time of their foundation they were often of a free-thinking colour ; but as the balance of French life came to be restored after the Revolution this element was forgotten, and the more learned priests of the neighbourhood were often included among their members.These societies fostered a peculiar polymathic quality among those who regularly attended their frequent meetings. They were to a great extent self-supporting in the provision of papers and communications, and it would have been pure selfishness for any member with any claim to versatility to specialize too deeply. Their standards, too, were not those of the Metropolis, where a new professionalism was bringing higher and more exact criteria into every branch of knowledge and speculation. Rather, we can see in the Sociétés d’Émulation of the nineteenth century the continuance of the amateur spirit that in the eighteenth century had flourished in the aristocratic circles of Court and château : a spirit surviving in a less polished form among the lesser gentry of the provincial towns.

1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat (deel 2)

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-321
Author(s):  
Lode Wils
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The South ◽  
Public Office ◽  
The North ◽  
Ministerial Responsibility ◽  
The Government ◽  
The French Revolution

In het tweede deel van zijn bijdrage 1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat, over de gebeurtenissen van 1830-1831 als slotfase van een passage van de Belgische protonatie doorheen de grote politiek-maatschappelijke en culturele mutaties na de Franse Revolutie, ontwikkelt Lode Wils de stelling dat de periode 1829-1830 de "terminale crisis" vormde van het Koninkrijk der Verenigde Nederlanden. Terwijl koning Willem I definitief had laten verstaan dat hij de ministeriële verantwoordelijkheid definitief afwees en elke kritiek op het regime beschouwde als kritiek op de dynastie, groeide in het Zuiden de synergie in het verzet tussen klerikalen, liberalen en radicale anti-autoritaire groepen. In de vervreemding tussen het Noorden en het Zuiden en de uiteindelijke revolutionaire nationaal-liberale oppositie vanuit het Zuiden, speelde de taalproblematiek een minder belangrijke rol dan het klerikale element en de liberale aversie tegen het vorstelijk absolutisme van Willem I en de aangevoelde uitsluiting van de Belgen uit het openbaar ambt en vooral uit de leiding van de staat.________1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation stateIn the second part of his contribution 1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation state, dealing with the events from 1830-1831 as the concluding phase of a transition of the Belgian pre-nation through the major socio-political and cultural mutations after the French Revolution, Lode Wils develops the thesis that the period of 1829-1830 constituted the "terminal crisis" of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands. Whilst King William I had clearly given to understand that he definitively rejected ministerial responsibility and that he considered any criticism of the regime as a criticism of the dynasty, the synergy of resistance increased between the clericalists, liberals and radical anti-authoritarian groups in the South. In the alienation between the North and the South and the ultimate revolutionary national-liberal opposition from the South the language issue played a less important role than the clericalist element and the liberal aversion against the royal absolutism of William I and the sense of exclusion of the Belgians from public office and particularly from the government of the state.

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