Incriminating Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57
Author(s):  
Gregory Mole
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The Many ◽  
French Nation ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract This article explores the political fallout from the 1766 execution of the comte de Lally, who oversaw the failed defense of France's Indian colonies during the Seven Years' War. Accused of treason by administrators of the French East India Company, Lally emerged as a source of controversy in the final decades of the Old Regime. As critics and apologists clashed over the legality of Lally's execution, questions about the nature of his “crime” gave way to a broader debate over the meaning and limits of company sovereignty under France's absolutist state. This conflict remained unresolved into the French Revolution. The Lally affair provides a window into the nebulous relationship that developed between the crown, the company, and the emergent French nation, laying bare the many faces of empire that confronted France during the eighteenth century. Cet article explore les retombées politiques de l'exécution du comte de Lally, l'homme qui commandait les colonies des Indes orientales françaises durant la guerre de Sept Ans. Accusé de trahison par la Compagnie des Indes, Lally représentait une source de controverse à la fin de l'Ancien Régime. Tandis que les critiques et les apologistes contestaient la légalité de son exécution, la question de la culpabilité de Lally incita un débat plus général sur la nature de la souveraineté de la Compagnie sous l'Etat absolutiste. Ce débat restait non résolu durant la Révolution française. L'affaire Lally souligne les liens nébuleux parmi la Compagnie, la monarchie, et la nation française. Elle révèle également les multiples incarnations de l'Empire français au cours du dix-huitième siècle.

Military Trauma

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Military Trauma ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The French Revolution

The Old Regime army had been battered by serial defeats during the eighteenth century, and was open to proposals for reform. When 1789 came it was not army reforms that spread despair and trauma but the political situation created in the early years of the French Revolution: the assault on privilege, the ambivalent attitude of the king, the crisis of loyalty which this created for the officers, and the gaping void in the army’s ranks caused by desertion, emigration and the ideology of the Rights of Man. The defeats that followed the declaration of war added to despair, and it was only by resort to further traumatic measures—radicalizing recruitment, promoting officers from the ranks, and amalgamating the line army with the new volunteers, and ultimately the resort to Terror—that the fortunes of the army were turned around.

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.

Exile, Imprisonment, or Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
The French Revolution

Between the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 and the French Revolution of 1789, thousands of French nobles, including members of the royal family, courtiers, bishops, generals, and judges suffered internal exile, imprisonment, or even death for having displeased their sovereign. For most that punishment was independent of the legal system and was the result of a simple royal command or a written order, known as a lettre de cachet. Yet rather than protest, the victims were willing to obey, spending months, even years in disgrace without any knowledge of when, or even if, their ordeal would end. Their punishment was for many a terrible personal blow, striking at the heart of their own identity and relationship to the king, and it threatened the future of their families, friends, and political allies. This book is the first in-depth study of political disgrace, which was intrinsic to the exercise of royal power, drawing on the mystique of monarchy and the ideologies of divine right, patriarchy, and justice that underpinned royal authority. It explores the rise and consolidation of a new model of disgrace amongst the nobility for which obedience to the king gradually replaced the rebellious attitudes fostered during the years of religious and civil strife. Yet for all the power of royal disgrace, it was always open to challenge and in the course of the eighteenth century it would come under a sustained attack that tells us much about the political and cultural origins of the French Revolution.

Diplomacy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamish Scott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
De Re ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The French Revolution

The era of the French Revolution, and specifically the later 1780s and 1790s, saw the modern meanings first of “diplomatic” and then “diplomacy” become established in the political lexicon. A century before, when the Maurist monk Jean Mabillon wrote De re diplomatica (1681), his masterpiece devoted to the science of documents and the historical method, the term still retained its traditional meaning: relating to the study of diplomas or other documents. At this period the peaceful conduct of relations between states was known as “negotiations” (négociations ), a term which long continued to be employed. During the later eighteenth century, however, the terms “diplomatic” and “diplomacy” took on their present-day meaning both in French and in English. The Irish political journalist and British MP, Edmund Burke, did most to make the word familiar to Anglophone readers. In the Annual Register for 1787 he wrote of “civil, diplomatique [sic] and military affairs,” while a decade later, in one of his celebrated Letters on a Regicide Peace, he spoke of the French regime's “double diplomacy.” By shortly after 1800, the term was becoming established.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

The Académie and Its Dictionaries under the Old Regime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Fitzsimmons
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Language ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Berlin Academy ◽  
The French Revolution

Because of criticism of its dictionary, the Académie decided to revise the work rather than begin work on a grammar. It adhered to this pattern throughout the eighteenth century and produced new editions in 1718, 1740, and 1762. The dictionary became the definitive instrument of the French language and enacted changes in it, especially in new spellings introduced in the fourth edition in 1762. Early in the eighteenth century, after he published a pamphlet that criticized Louis XIV, the Académie expelled the abbé de Saint-Pierre, who had wanted the body to assume a larger public policy role. By the latter part of the century, however, its membership included many philosophes. In 1784 Antoine de Rivarol won the prize of the Berlin Academy for his essay on the universality of the French language, heightening the importance of the dictionary, but the fifth edition had not appeared when the French Revolution began in 1789.

Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-220
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter confronts the question of the politics of Gothic architecture in the long eighteenth century. Exploring manifestations of its Whiggish appeal, the argument also points to a number of notable Tory appropriations of the revived Gothic style. If the political significance of the Gothic was thus open to dispute, notions of improvement and repair were almost uniformly inflected with intimations of political radicalism, particularly after the French Revolution of 1789. Exploring the political meanings of improvement, repair, and ruination in the work of John Carter, the discussion extends this into a reading of political discourse of the 1790s, tracing political writers’ extensive appropriations of architectural metaphor. The chapter concludes with a reading of 1790s political Gothic fiction, showing how radical writers of the decade engaged with the politics of Gothic architecture while questioning the extent to which chivalry, romance, and other aesthetic ‘remains’ of the Gothic past could serve the needs of the present.

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