The Prospectus War of the 1790s

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-77
Author(s):  
David Duff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Effect ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
London Corresponding Society ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Prospectuses, a type of printed advertisement widely used in the eighteenth-century book trade, played a vital but previously unexamined role in the French Revolution controversy, attracting subscribers to political publications and encapsulating their message. Focusing on journal and newspaper prospectuses, which proliferated in the 1790s, this article analyzes examples from across the political spectrum, including the prospectus for the Argus by the radical journalist Sampson Perry, George Canning’s hugely influential prospectus to the Anti-Jacobin, and other examples by William Playfair, the London Corresponding Society, and other individuals and organizations. This article shows how prospectus writers exploited the distinctive resources of the genre, adapting its promissory rhetoric and hyperbolic language for political effect. It also investigates how prospectuses interacted with other forms of writing and publication, mirroring the techniques of pamphlets and contributing to the polemical intertextuality that was a feature of the Revolution debate. For all its ephemerality, the genre had a powerful impact, serving all sides of the dispute and marking a convergence of literature, politics, and advertising that typifies the innovative print culture of this period.

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.

The Initial Reception of the French Revolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Jay Bergman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Practically from its inception, the French Revolution prompted educated Russians, regardless of their politics, to form an opinion of it. As the revolution progressed, instead of changing minds, it froze them, turning assumptions into beliefs and beliefs into dogma. Chapter 1 shows this to be true especially for Russians on opposite ends of the political spectrum. This was not true, however, of liberals such as Pushkin whose politics, by contrast, fluctuated greatly. The chapter concludes with analysis of ‘gentry-revolutionaries’ such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who applied to the actors in the French Revolution the same requirement of ‘moral wholeness’ that was an essential aspect of the Russian revolutionary movement as a whole.

WHO WERE THE SANS-CULOTTES?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-455
Author(s):  
RUTH SCURR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Necessary Connections ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Who were the sans-culottes? What were their concerns and purposes? And what role did they play in the unfolding of events collectively known as the French Revolution? Michael Sonenscher first engaged directly with these questions in the 1980s (in an article for Social History 9 (1984), 303) when social historians were experimenting with the possibilities opened up by discourse analysis, and when the traditions of eighteenth-century civic, or republican, language seemed particularly exciting: The social history of the French Revolution owes much to the deepening insistence with which the discourse of the Revolution itself referred to, and postulated, necessary connections between everyday circumstances and public life. From Sieyes’ equation of aristocratic privilege with unproductive parasitism in 1788 to the Thermidorian caricature of the architects of the Terror as the dregs of society, the Revolution produced its own “social interpretation.” Sonenscher argued that while the identification of the figure of the sans-culotte with that of the artisan was “the achievement of the generation of historians—Richard Cobb, George Rudé and Albert Soboul—who reintroduced the popular movement into the historiography of the French Revolution”, there was always something problematic (or circular) in the underlying assumption that it was possible to equate the representation of artisan production found in the political language of the sans-culottes during the Revolution with what actually existed in the workshops of Paris or other towns of eighteenth-century France. Back in the 1980s what Sonenscher hoped was that a more accurate understanding of the actual dynamics of workshop production would produce “a better explanation of the meaning of the language of the sans-culottes”. His own expectation, as a social historian, was that the causality, in both explanatory and historical terms, would run from the social to the political sphere.

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.

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.

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 Debate over Theory Before Malthus and Ricardo

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter establishes a new context for reading the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo. It is the extended debate over the role of theory and practice in politics and political reform, a contest that Edmund Burke launched by publishing his hostile response to the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In attempting to defend theory, both Mackintosh and Stewart engaged in sophisticated rhetoric that attempted to portray Burke’s veneration of custom and usage as philosophically naïve at the same time as they insisted on the necessity of theory for a science of politics. It is in these defensive postures that both Mackintosh and Stewart came to articulate the idea of a ‘theorist’ of politics.

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 Taxing of the Clergy in Eighteenth-Century France

1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Ravitch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Temporal Characteristic ◽  
Major Area ◽  
French Society ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

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.

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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