“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.

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?

Remembering and Forgetting the French Revolution: Memories and Memoirs

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-180
Author(s):  
Jeff Horn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

For Rousselin, one of the chief lessons of the French Revolution was that fundamental change took time. He believed that it was the speed and the depth of the crisis of 1793–94 that led to violence. What helped a Revolutionary become a liberal was an acceptance of a slower pace of change. Rousselin used his position and then his time in retirement to try to refine his legacy and avoid further controversy. His choices about what to write and what to publish aimed to propagate a particular vision of the Revolution and his role in it. He wanted to be remembered as a victim not a perpetrator of the Terror. But he could not stop challenges to that vision from appearing; it was love for family that convinced him to retire from the spotlight to contemplate the past and hope for the future.

Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry T. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Literary Fame ◽  
The French Revolution

When William Hazlitt died, in 1830, his literary fame was obscured by his political views. The man who admired Napoleon and wrote a biography of him and who championed the radical creed of the French Revolution could hardly have been expected to be popular among Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. During the past twenty-five years, however, several volumes containing selections from his essays have been issued; and most editions of Shakespeare enrich themselves by quoting his opinions. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, printed in 1817, is still very much alive. Heine, in his volume Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen (1838), declared: “With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no Shakespearean commentator of any consequence.” And this verdict, though decidedly exaggerated, gains new interest when we append the Teutonic explosion: “It takes the very heart out of me when I remember that Shakespeare is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in his wrath ever created.”

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

The introductory chapter opens up the question of how to approach the aftermath of the Terror. Most of revolutionary historiography is focused on the origins of the event, not on its aftermath. This chapter argues that there is much to learn about the French Revolution and its relevance to our own times by studying the aftermath of the Terror. In articulating the book’s approach to the subject, the chapter draws on the recent literature on transitional justice and trauma, as well as on the much earlier ideas of Edgar Quinet. Approaching the aftermath of the Terror invites us to consider how those who had experienced revolutionary violence faced the past in the context of a movement oriented toward the future.

Revolutionary Lyric

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-156
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter examines a set of four poems, written between 1921 and 1924, that combine a certain abstraction of language with visceral violence. Mandelstam develops a set of techniques for his lyric poetry that will permanently enrich his poetics in exploring new themes such as guilt and violence; in another poem he creates an emblem to represent generational warfare, combining the highly pictorial and the abstract, and reflecting on questions of whether the ends justify the means; in a third, Mandelstam uses allegory and emblems to represent, in his own way, the analogy between the French Revolution and the Terror widespread in early Bolshevik culture, interrogating the historiography to see whether the past is of any use in predicting the future. In a eulogy to Lenin, the question of Russia’s direction remains acutely open-ended.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Philp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chronological Change ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Political Interpretation ◽  
The French Revolution

This expansive afterword reflects upon the whole volume’s arguments and contents. The focus is upon the concept of the miscellaneous: an eighteenth-century mode of organization and appreciation of culture, increasingly contested in the early nineteenth century. The author discusses issues of patriotism and audience reception, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of political loyalism and dissent in Britain in the period following the French Revolution. Questions of identity and identification are seen as crucial, and as being formed at least in part within theatrical spaces. The author considers the difficult political interpretation of affective tropes such as humour and sentimentality, deftly relating them to the key issues of the day, while also paying attention to chronological change, and the need to recover ways of seeing and feeling that have been lost over the past two centuries.

Romanticism and Realism among Czechs and Slovaks

1952 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Past ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The French Revolution

In the 1820's and 1830's the romantic movement was at the height of its influence throughout Europe* In its origins, among the Lake poets in England and in the circle around the brothers Schlegel in Germany, romanticism opposed the libertarian and rationalist tendencies of the French Revolution. In its later stage romanticism presented a more complex attitude, its imagination turned simultaneously to the fascination of the past and the Middle Ages and to the appeal of the future happiness of free men. Under the quiet surface of the Biedermeier the unrest of the Napoleonic wars continued to arouse in the educated young generation a longing for change, for activity, for a new sense of self-fulfillment.

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.

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