Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

scholarly journals The French Revolution and the New Spatial Format for Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-528
Author(s):  
Megan Maruschke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global History ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract Both global history and the new imperial history identify an emerging convergence of spatial formats, practices, and knowledge for organizing societies during the nineteenth century, though each emphasizes different competitive formats: the territorializing nation-state and the enduring empire. Rather than contrasting empire and nation-state, this article takes their combination seriously through the example of the respatialization of the French Empire during the Revolution and the reorganization of domestic territory into departments. The history of departmentalization underscores the emerging and changing interrelationships between nation and empire. The territorialization of metropolitan France, which developed out of imperial and transregional exchanges, was emblematic of the new type of empire that became a prevailing model for societal organization in the nineteenth century: the nation-state with imperial extensions. L'histoire globale et la nouvelle histoire impériale ont toutes deux signalé l’émergence d'une convergence des formats spatiaux, des pratiques et des savoirs tout au long du dix-neuvième siècle, mais chacun de ces deux champs de recherche insiste sur des formats distincts et rivaux pour organiser les sociétés : l'Etat-nation en voie de territorialisation, d'une part, et l'empire qui perdure, d'autre part. En effet, plutôt que d'opposer l'empire à l'Etat-nation, cet article prend au sérieux leur conjonction en examinant à nouveaux frais la respatialisation de l'empire français pendant la Révolution et la réorganisation du territoire national en départements. L'histoire de la départementalisation met ainsi en évidence l’émergence et le développement des relations mutuelles entre nation et empire. La territorialisation de la France métropolitaine, qui se développa à la faveur d’échanges impériaux et transrégionaux, fut caractéristique du nouveau type d'empire qui devint un modèle dominant d'organisation des sociétés au dix-neuvième siècle : celui de l'Etat-nation pourvu de prolongements impériaux.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

scholarly journals The French Revolution as an Imperial Revolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-397
Author(s):  
Manuel Covo ◽  
Megan Maruschke
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract Attempts to reframe the Age of Revolutions as imperial in nature have not fully integrated the French Revolution. Replying to this gap and criticisms of the Revolution's global turn, this essay positions the Revolution as both a moment of imperial reorganization and a sequence of political reinvention that exceed our current categories of empire and nation-state. These arguments open a forum comprising five contributions set in transimperial contexts that span from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean. The forum offers some points of reflection regarding the narratives, periodizations, and concepts that guide historians of the French Revolution as they navigate the global turn. L'effort historiographique consistant à placer l’ère des révolutions dans leur contexte impérial n'est pas encore parvenu à pleinement intégrer la Révolution française. Cet essai propose de pallier ce manque tout en répondant aux critiques émises à l'encontre du « tournant global ». Il invite à interpréter la Révolution à la fois comme un moment de réorganisation impériale et comme une séquence de réinvention politique, dont le contenu déborde les catégories contemporaines d'empire et d'Etat-nation. Cet essai introduit cinq articles qui analysent la Révolution française dans une variété de contextes transimpériaux, des rives de l'Atlantique à celles de l'océan Indien. Le forum propose quelques points de réflexion critiques sur les récits, les périodisations et les concepts qui informent les modalités d'après lesquelles la Révolution française se voit « mondialisée » par les historiens.

Silent War and Bitter Peace: The Revolution of 1918 in Austria

2003 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Testing Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

My Subject Today is the Austrian Revolution of 1918 and its aftermath, a staple subject in the general history of the empire and the republic, but one that has not seen vigorous historiographical discussion for a number of years. In a recent review of new historiography on the French Revolution, Jeremy Popkin has argued that recent neoliberal and even neo-Jacobin scholarship about that momentous event has confirmed the position of the revolution in the “genealogy of modern liberalism and democracy.” The endless fascination engendered by the French Revolution is owing to its protean nature, one that assayed the possibilities of reconciling liberty and equality and one that still inspires those who would search for a “usable liberal past.”1 After all, it was not only a watershed of liberal ideas, if not always liberal institutions and civic practices, but it was also a testing ground for the possibility of giving practical meaning to new categories of human rights.

6. Where it stands

2019 ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The historian François Furet proclaimed in 1978, at the start of a much celebrated essay, that ‘The French Revolution is finished’. He meant the Revolution ought to be the subject for detached historical enquiry. ‘Where it stands’ examines what ended the French Revolution, the legacy it left behind, and various interpretations of its legacy, both within France and worldwide. The history of the Revolution, in France at least, has been more a matter of commemoration than scholarly analysis. The bicentenary in 1989 released a torrent of vituperative publishing, most of it denouncing one aspect or another of the Revolution and its legacy.

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.

Fra Leopold Ranke ed Eduard Gans. Un autografo inedito di Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy dalle lezioni rankiane del 1827 sulla Rivoluzione Francese

2009 ◽  
pp. 709-730
Author(s):  
Corrado Bertani
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

- Certain circumstances and stylistic considerations lead us to believe that the manuscript MS. 114 in the Mendelssohn Archive at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is (in part) evidence of a course in "Contemporary History" held by Leopold Ranke at the city's university in the summer term of 1827. The course was on the chronological history of the French Revolution. Ranke had already dealt with the same subject the year before, though in a less detailed manner. And it was not until 1875 that he published a work on the period of the Revolution, but focussing solely on the war between the European powers in 1791-1792. Hence the importance of the new manuscript - in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's own hand - which, previously, had been mistakenly connected with the teaching of the Hegelian jurist Eduard Gans. Mendelssohn attended his course on the French Revolution in the summer of 1828.

Looking at the French Revolution through Ottoman eyes: Ebubekir Ratib Efendi's observations

2007 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatih Yeşil
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractReceived wisdom has always held that the Ottomans took little interest in events beyond their borders except when they were likely to affect them. Previous scholars have suggested that it was only when French revolutionary forces occupied the Eastern Mediterranean that the Ottomans took an interest in and then condemned the revolution. From the despatches and reports of Ebubekir Ratib Efendi, ambassador to Vienna, we discover that at least one Ottoman diplomat was sending detailed accounts of events in Paris and the reactions of governments throughout Europe. Ratib Efendi's diplomatic activities would suggest that reforms were already taking place in 1793, at least in the field of gathering intelligence. This signals a fundamental change in the psyche of the Ottoman political order.

Harps, the Revolution, and London

Erard ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 46-50
Author(s):  
Robert Adelson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

For the Erard firm, the late 1780s was not only a fecund period for the manufacture of square pianos and piano-organs; it was also the time when Sébastien Erard launched his career as a harp maker. Over the course of his career Sébastien would become as innovative in harp manufacture as he was for the piano: his mechanism of forked discs and his system of double action are still at the basis of today’s models. However, Sébastien embarked upon harp building at the worst possible moment: the French Revolution would prove so disruptive for his new endeavour that he would be obliged to take the drastic step of opening a new branch in London. For this reason, harps, the Revolution, and the London enterprise are inextricably linked in the history of the Erard firm.

The Revolution That Stopped Too Soon

2019 ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Jay Bergman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bourbon Restoration ◽  
Important Purpose ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Neither Marx nor Lenin wrote much about the Revolution of 1830. This was largely because the revolution stopped too soon, thereby merely ratifying changes within the bourgeoisie instead of replacing the capitalist system (that existed to benefit the bourgeoisie) with a proletarian one. In the way the Bolsheviks explained it, the bourgeoisie split in the 1820s into more prosperous elements favouring the continuation of the Bourbon Restoration and less affluent ones that in 1830 were able to install the so-called Orléanists in power. This split, which continued, ensured the latter’s quick demise. But the proletariat was still too small and too weak and insufficiently radical politically to succeed it. However, despite its limited consequences, the Revolution of 1830 served the enormously important purpose of showing that the French Revolution, while sui generis in many ways, was also the first in a series of revolutions in the history of France that together constituted a genuine tradition of revolution.

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