Citizenship, Mass Mobilization, and Masculinity in a Transatlantic Perspective, 1770s–1870s

2020 ◽  
pp. 200-224
Author(s):  
Stefan Dudink
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
French Model ◽  
The French Revolution

The chapter explores the interrelationship between the emergence of new ways of mass mobilization with volunteers, militias, and universal conscription; the rise of notions of gender as a universal, natural binary opposition; and the rise of men as universal male political subjects in the periods of the wars of revolution and wars of nation-building and nation-keeping from the 1770s to the 1870s. One important theme is the nexus between male military duties and citizenship rights. This nexus was introduced in the French Revolution and later used and transformed in several other contexts. Where it was rejected, it nevertheless made its presence felt in what became a conscious refusal of the French model of the modern citizen-soldier. Always controversial and never fully implemented, even in contexts where it was supposedly fully endorsed, the model of universal conscription loomed large in the background of all nineteenth-century debates over military reform and political citizenship.

The Glut of Doctors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The West ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Attraction ◽  
The French Revolution

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France

1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
North Americans ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Iconography ◽  
The Many ◽  
The French Revolution

Maurice Agulhon, in his classic French historical study, revealed how the changing political fortunes of Republicanism were reflected in the many metamorphoses that statues of the Republic had undergone in the century after the French Revolution. This study and a number of important works by North Americans, like those of James Leith and Lynn Hunt, are also important in making us understand French political iconography.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
George Sand ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Historical Agency ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Class and political action in nineteenth-century England: Theoretical and comparative perspectives

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Sociology ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The French Revolution

Political sociology has from its very inception had an overriding concern with the nature of political order and stability, and the threats to that stability. Ever since ‘the entry of the masses on to the stage of history’, at the time of the French Revolution, one source of that threat has regularly been seen as the industrial working class. That has been so, whether the threat was perceived by the liberal centre and conservative right; or whether is was converted, by the left, into a definite promise to overthrow ‘bourgeois’ stability. In both cases, in the anxious speculations of Mill and Tocqueville as much as the triumphant predictions of Marx and Engels, a key role was marked out for the developing working class of nineteenthcentury Europe.

François-René de Chateaubriand

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marie Roulin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Future ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
New Literature ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Chateaubriand’s seminal debate with de Staël at the dawn of the nineteenth century around perceptions of literary history and the orientations of modern literature was largely focused on what aspects of this Enlightenment legacy should be retained or rejected. A contemporary of Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand was marked, like them, by the experience of the French Revolution. This sets him apart from the Romantics of the ‘battle ofHernani’ (1830), for whom the Revolution was a pre-existing narrative. For Chateaubriand’s generation the Revolution was crucial, posing ontological, political, and metaphysical questions—how could that ‘river of blood’ be crossed, to borrow one of his recurrent metaphors? What should the new literature be like, and for what type of society in revolutionized France? Chateaubriand’s Romanticism was first of all an answer to these questions, an elegiac adieu to a past forever lost and an uneasy questioning of the future.

POLITICAL CULTURE, POLITICAL CLASS, AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-315
Author(s):  
D. L. L. PARRY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Community ◽  
French History ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
The French Revolution

The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited by Isser Woloch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Mona Ozouf et al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political culture, and by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather than through l'histoire événementielle of ministries and elections. The three books reviewed here all relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly in The past in French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon, artistic culture was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe was left to nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom. Yet whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make only passing references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary adjuncts to such an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which enables one to put l'histoire événementielle aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within the political class. The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures. What, though, creates these communities?

Romantic Generations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Taste ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Generational Succession ◽  
The French Revolution

The concept of generation continues to influence how Romantic writing is read and interpreted. While ‘the Romantics’ and ‘Romanticism’ are retrospective organizational terms, emerging in later nineteenth-century criticism, the Romantic generations are not back-formations of this kind: Romantic writers constructed themselves and others within loose but coherent groups based on age, affiliation, aesthetic taste, and, above all, their stance in relation to the sublime historical moment, the French Revolution. It is in the poetry of the period that generational succession is most keenly articulated. There are two widely recognized generations of Romantic writers: that of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and the younger generation of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. To this traditional pairing can be added a third Romantic generation of the 1820s and ’30s, including often overlooked writers such as Beddoes, Darley, Hood, and Landon, who extended Romantic themes of imaginative creativity into the commodity culture of the mid-nineteenth century.

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