Revolution

Author(s):  
Michael Rapport

This article describes many facets of the French Revolution. The French Revolution introduced parliamentary government to France, but it was only “an apprenticeship in democracy,” the first step towards modern, democratic politics, not its consummation. François Furet has controversially argued that the values and practices of democracy were not definitively embedded in France until the consolidation of the Third Republic in the 1870s, which he describes as “the French Revolution coming into port.” A continuing focus of research, therefore, are the ways in which the people entered politics outside the formal processes, namely in the dramatic expansion in civil society, which had been developing since the mid-eighteenth century, but which in the Revolution flowered with the collapse of censorship, empowering a wide cross-section of French society.

1997 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-501
Author(s):  
Brian Brennan

Statuary groups, countless illustrations, and colorful stained glass all preserve for us the most famous medieval image of the charitable soldier-saint, Martin of Tours (336–397). The young Martin is depicted seated on his horse dividing his soldier's cape to share it with Christ disguised as a freezing beggar at the gate of Amiens. After abandoning the Roman army, Martin became a monk, an ascetic “soldier of Christ,” and was chosen by the people of Tours as their bishop. Renowned in his lifetime as a wonderworker, Martin's tomb remained for centuries an important pilgrimage center. The later Carolingian kings carried a fragment of Martin's cape into battle as a victory-giving talisman, and French monarchs invoked the saint as their patron. Because of its royalist associations, Saint Martin's basilica at Tours was almost completely destroyed in the French Revolution, and subsequently houses and new municipal streets encroached on the sacred space.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jessica Whyte

Around 1882, the photographer Albert Fernique photographed a group of Parisian workers gathered around trestles and benches inside a workshop. The floor is strewn with piles of wood and the ceiling beams tower above the workmen. Even so, the space is dwarfed by a massive, sculpted shoulder, draped in Roman robes, which dominates the background of the photograph; two workers watching the scene from a beam just below the roof appear to be perched on it like sparrows. The shoulder belonged to the statue, Liberty Enlightening the World—a gift to the United States from the France of the Third Republic. Work on the statue began here, in the workshop of the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, only a year after the suppression of the Paris Commune. More people were killed in that one Bloody Week (la semaine sanglante) in 1874 than were executed in the entire Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. If the statue was supposed to symbolize liberty, this was to be an orderly liberty far removed from the license of the armed Parisian workers and their short-lived utopian government. Unlike her ancestor Marianne, immortalized by Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, the statue does not wear the red cap that, since ancient Rome, had symbolized freedom from slavery. In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Third Republic banned the cap and sought to banish the unruly freedom it represented.


1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Ravitch

If after many years of scholarship and controversy, the French Revolution is to be seen, with Georges Lefebvre, as preeminently the revolution of equality, and its most important achievement the substitution of a bourgeois and individualistic social order for the former aristocratic and corporatist one, the nature of eighteenth-century corporate or “constituted bodies” becomes a major area for research. There are many questions which the historian would like to ask about these aristocratic institutions, but generally these questions fall into two groups: the relationship of these bodies to society as a whole, and their inner cohesiveness. By examining the taxation of the clergy in eighteenth-century France, we investigate the chief temporal characteristic of the ecclesiastical estate and are in a position to evaluate both its relationship to French society as a whole and its internal strengths and weaknesses.


1986 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-132
Author(s):  
Felicia Hardison Londré

Repeatedly throughout French theatre history two subjects have aroused the passions of the French theatregoer: art and politics. The famous opening-night riots at Le Cid in 1636, Hernani in 1830, and Ubu roi in 1896 all resulted in the overthrow of stale artistic conventions by the new art that each of these works represented. Examples of productions that had political repercussions are abundant – like the historical dramas of Marie-Joseph Chénier that did so much to promote the French Revolution (until his Caius Gracchus in 1792 caused a backlash demonstration), or the 1943 Comédie-Française production of Claudel's mystico-religious Soulier de satin that was gleefully interpreted by the French in German-occupied Paris as ‘resistance theatre’. One noteworthy theatrical event that succeeded in arousing both artistic and political passions was not even a French play – nor was it contemporary, although the most often-repeated comment about it was: ‘It seems to have been written just yesterday.’ This was a production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Comédie-Française in the 1933–4 season, just at the time when the Third Republic was nearly toppled by the public's response to press revelations of the Stavisky scandal.


1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo

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.


Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher

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.


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