Religion and Revolution in Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-155
Author(s):  
Bryan A. Banks ◽  
Erica Johnson Edwards
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Political Hierarchy ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
The French Revolution

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire altered the religious landscape of France, Europe, and the wider world. Revolutionaries reduced religion to a matter of opinion in the 10th Article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), legitimizing their seizure of Catholic lands and disavowal of the religious and political hierarchy of Old Regime France and its empire in the process. This in turn ignited a dechristianization campaign, local conflicts between Catholics, Protestants, and Jewish communities, and counter-revolutionary war in France. The violence reverberated well beyond France’s borders, both throughout Europe and in imperial and non-imperial spaces. From Prussia to Portugal to Port-au-Prince, revolutionaries inspired violence against and in defence of religion, drove les religieux across borders and into the borderlands, and sparked debates over secularization (laïcization, in France) and the rights of individuals and collective, religious bodies for generations.

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.

PROTESTANTISM AND PROGRESS IN THE YEAR XII: CHARLES VILLERS'SESSAY ON THE SPIRIT AND INFLUENCE OF LUTHER'S REFORMATION(1804)

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL PRINTY
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Broad Interest ◽  
The French Revolution

This article examines Charles Villers'sEssay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation(1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.

NOVEL NARRATIVES, NEW RESEARCH: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AFTER THE BICENTENNIAL

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-252
Author(s):  
GARY SAVAGE
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Duke University ◽  
New Research ◽  
The French Revolution

Revolution and political conflict in the French navy, 1789–1794. By William S. Cormack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 343. £40.00.The family romance of the French revolution. By Lynn Hunt. London: Routledge, 1992. Pp. 213. £19.99.The French idea of freedom: the old regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789. Edited by Dale Van Kley. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. 436. £35.00.A rhetoric of bourgeois revolution: the Abbé Sieyes and What is the third estate ? By William H. Sewell, Jr. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. 221. £10.95.The genesis of the French revolution: a global-historical interpretation. By Bailey Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 268. £12.95.The new regime: transformations of the French civic order, 1789–1820s. By Isser Woloch. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994. Pp. 536. £27.50.

Moderation and the “Intertwining of Powers”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Arbitrary Power ◽  
Special Place ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter examines political moderation in the writings of Jacques Necker, with particular emphasis on his views on constitutionalism. Necker occupies a special place in the history of political moderation. He defended the principles of constitutional monarchy successively against the king, the nobility, and the representatives of the people. Necker's works, composed at different stages of the French Revolution, articulated a political agenda revolving around the idea of moderation in opposition to arbitrary power and violence. The chapter first provides an overview of Necker's ideas before discussing his theoretical statements on reforming the Old Regime. It then explains Necker's trimming agenda and the consequences of immoderation before turning to the French constitution of 1791 and Necker's critique of the constitutions of 1795 and 1799. It also explores Necker's arguments regarding complex sovereignty, equality, and separation of powers.

Review of J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960)

2021 ◽  
pp. 325-326
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The World ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The French Revolution

Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.

A Fiction of the French Nation

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ashburn Miller
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
French Nation ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
The French Revolution

This article examines fictional representations of the emigration of the French Revolution. It focuses on the novels Eugénie et Mathilde, Les Petits émigrés, and Le Retour d’un émigré, which were published in France between 1797 and 1815 as émigrés were seeking to return to the nation they had fled. It argues that these novels should be interpreted as making claims about the ability of émigrés to reintegrate within the nation. The sentimental novels responded to two key anxieties about the émigrés’ return by demonstrating that émigrés had not been transformed into foreigners during their time abroad and that they were not seeking to reconstitute Old Regime France. These novelists redefined the émigré as an isolated and pitiable wanderer, and redefined France as a nation bound by common suffering and sentiment.

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