The Religious Language of Russian Poets in 1812

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
James N. Class
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
National Myth ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Contemporary Climate ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution

Russian poets during the reign of Alexander I widely employed images and stories from Old Testament Scriptures to describe the ongoing wars with Napoleon, especially regarding the invasion of 1812. Their ideas are collected in a body of patriotic literature, which has received little attention for its literary merits but provides insight into the contemporary climate of opinion and the ways in which Russians responded to the French Revolution and Napoleon. Across Europe, other writers and intellectuals exhibited millenarian tendencies, seeking a renewed world with the old order swept away. While Russian writers exhibited similar concerns with finding a way to regenerate the decadent European world, they did so by appealing to their own experience as expiation for Europe’s sins. This study argues that the Napoleonic Wars catalyzed the development of Romantic Nationalism and the development of a messianic national myth, which arose primarily in Moscow after its destruction in 1812.

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.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Tyger of Wrath

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (7) ◽  
pp. 540-551
Author(s):  
Morton D. Paley
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Young Men ◽  
New Age ◽  
First Principle ◽  
Henry V ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Divine Wrath ◽  
The French Revolution

In peace there's nothing so becomes a manAs modest stillness and humility,But when the blast of war blows in our ears,Then imitate the action of the tiger:Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;Then lend the eye a terrible aspect:Let it cry through the portage of the headLike the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm itAs fearfully as doth a galled rockO'erhang and jutty his confounded base,Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.Henry V in.i.3-14 How would an ideal contemporary reader of Blake—one of those “Young Men of the New Age” whom he addressed in Milton—have regarded “The Tyger”? To such a reader certain aspects of the poem which modern critics have ignored would be obvious. In the rhetoric and imagery of the poem he would recognize an example of the sublime, appropriately Hebrew and terrifying. He would recollect analogues to the wrath of the Tyger in the Old Testament Prophets and in Revelation, and being an ideal reader, he would not need to be reminded that Blake elsewhere views the French Revolution as an eschatological event. He would also know that Blake characteristically thought of divine wrath as an expression of what Jakob Boehme calls the First Principle. His understanding of the poem would thus be affected by his connecting it with the sublime, the Bible, and Boehme. We later readers may also discover something about the meaning of “The Tyger” by considering it in relation to these traditions. That such an approach has something new and valuable to offer will be seen if we begin with what has previously been said about the poem.

The Journée du Dix AoÛt as Witnessed by a Yankee Merchant

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
WILLIAM L. CHEW
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Street Scene ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
John Trumbull ◽  
The Revolution

James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.

Religion and the doctrine of nationalism in England at the time of the French revolution and Napoleonic wars

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 381-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Stafford
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Pressure ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Made In ◽  
The French Revolution

The Maxim my country right or wrong is unquestionably difficult and perhaps impossible to justify; certainly no Christian can easily regard the nation as the supreme object of loyalty. Yet during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars intensive efforts were made in press and pulpit, through the courts and through informal social pressure, to enhance patriotism. Patriotism almost certainly became stronger and more widely diffused. How did the denominations respond to this dilemma? My aim is to suggest some links between denominational affiliation and attitudes to nationalism. The topic is an important one; at this time religion usually set the terms of the debate about loyalty.

4. The emperor, 1804–1812

Napoleon ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
David A. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Military Forces ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
The French Revolution

‘The emperor, 1804–1812’ describes the imperial expansion after Napoleon became Emperor. It explains how the new political and military forces unleashed by the French Revolution, which had made possible Napoleon’s astonishing conquests and reforms, did not allow him to consolidate and preserve them. Instead, a different geopolitical dynamic took shape. On the level of grand strategy, Napoleon felt increasingly forced into incessant war and annexation, above all because of his inability to overcome his greatest and most supremely frustrating enemy, Great Britain. The brutal Napoleonic wars are described, including the battles at Trafalgar and Austerlitz, defeat of Prussia, and the shortcomings of the French navy. Napoleon was finding it difficult to control events.

Metternich’s Europe

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter explores the childhood of Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900) and the political climate in which he had grown up. He was born in Steingrub, Bohemia in 1890. Of the first twenty-seven years of the man who said that he became a naturalized American amid these surroundings, very little is known, save that he was born into a fettered society; and its chains were heavier because they had been reimposed after a period of near freedom. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had spread throughout Europe the aspiration for popular sovereignty and the rights of nationalities: the Congress of Vienna gave scant recognition to the new forces and set about restoring the ancien régime. The genius of those who set themselves to thwart the allied forces of liberalism and nationalism was Clemens von Metternich, Austrian Foreign Minister from 1809 till 1848. It was in the Austrian Empire where Wise lived that, despite Metternich’s awareness of the need for reform, his system operated to the worst effect.

“An Alien to my Country”: Migration and Statelessness in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
British Nationalism ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter five argues that Frances Burney’s final novel The Wanderer (1814) uses the familiar plight of the French émigré to critique insular British nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel’s protagonist Ellis seeks safety from the violence of the French revolution in her native England, where she attempts to re-make her identity by inhabiting a range of socioeconomic positions and geographical spaces that mediate her relationship to the broader British community. By figuring Ellis’s socially liminal position in geographic terms, Burney engages with a trend in literature of the 1790s that politically re-maps Britain in the revolutionary context. Her wanderings highlight the conflict between her allegiances to multiple social groups and her interior self, as her constant motion severs the connections by which she is bound to these communities and leaves her stripped of any sense of national belonging..

scholarly journals Francis John Worsley Roughton, 1899-1972

1973 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 562-582 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Family Tradition ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The French Revolution

Francis John Worsley Roughton was born on 6 June 1899 at Kettering, and died suddenly at Cambridge on 29 April 1972. His only sister died in 1933. His father was the fifth consecutive Roughton to practise medicine in Kettering, and his family had numerous connexions among the merchants and farmers of the area Perhaps the most colourful of his forebears was Thomas Sturgeon, footman to the Duke of Rockingham who, about 1775, eloped with the Duke’s daughter, the Lady Henrietta Wentworth. Using her fortune, he set up a china factory in Rouen, in which he introduced the use of coal for firing his products (the local industry had used wood), but the venture was not a financial success and became insolvent two or three years before the beginning of the French Revolution. Sturgeon, however, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, applied for a large sum in compensation for the loss of the business, and did in act receive some £6000, a small fraction of his original claim for £40 000, but still a stately sum in those times. He showed great perseverance in pressing the claim and the papers show that the matter finally engaged the attention of the Duke of Wellington who suggested settlement to be rid of the affair. The connexion with Sturgeon was that a daughter of his was one of Roughton s great-great-gran mothers. There was an oral family tradition, roughly as described, and about 1955 it occurred to Roughton to pursue the story. The project expanded into a continuing hobby which occupied his leisure hours for some years, and led to expeditions to Rouen to consult the voluminous French archives, as well as to many hours of library work with the English papers, much of the correspondence of Sturgeon and Henrietta with the Duke of Rockingham having survived.

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