Rubén Darío's “Dinamita”: The Advent of Left-wing Terrorism in the Americas

1985 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-91
Author(s):  
Richard B. O'keeffe
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

We Americans cannot complain: Our civilization is European. We have been copying from Europe from the French Revolution on, even to importing the Cafe chantant. So far, we have lacked the application of chemistry to our social order, the end-of-the century use of explosives. Now, even this is on the way here; at least the seed of the tree is among us. It would seem that the corner bootblack, and the sweeper down the street have not yet realized that all the capital of Pereira's is really their capital. The hungry of Europe bring us the contagion of rage stored up for centuries, to our blessed lands, where only the man who doesn't want to, fails to put in his pot the chicken which the goodhearted Henri IV2 wished for the soup pots of his subjects.

scholarly journals Culture, Strategy, and State-Centered Explanations of Revolution, 1789 and 1989

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Sharman
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Culture Strategy ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

Social scientists studying revolutions have increasingly argued that explanations of revolutions that do not include subjective factors, such as culture, are inadequate. The failure to explain the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 is forceful testimony to this inadequacy. But the way in which cultural aspects are being added to existing approaches tends to undermine past advances in studying revolutions. Recent historiography of the French Revolution provides an example of a more thorough-going approach to political culture. A productive synthesis that both preserves past advances and better explains the revolutions of 1989 is achieved by analyzing the effects of cultural change on state elites.

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

scholarly journals Théâtre et sociétés dans la France de la révolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Philippe Bourdin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Economic Issue ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
The French Revolution

The theatre, a very often-frequented place from the 1770s, is at the junction of several socie-ties: that of the shareholders who own the auditorium and privileges; that of the artists; that of the spectators; that of amateurs who are formed in bourgeois circles and then in patriotic dramatic so-cieties. Commercial freedom, activist investment, the wars born of the French Revolution, emigra-tion, indeed, upset theatrical structures. Halls and troops then multiply, and dramatic practices gain previously unfamiliar spaces for entertainment. Theatre becomes not only an economic issue, but also a political one, posing and addressing long term issues of profitability, social order, and public order. Theatre enables social reconversions, but professional troops are also sometimes divided by the artists’ political choices. They are challenged by amateurs whose commitments are more in line with the wishes of the successive regimes.

Echoes of the Marseillaise in German Social Democracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-219
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Bonnell
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Sophisticated Analysis ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

Jean-Numa Ducange’s recent work, La Révolution française et la social-démocratie. Transmissions et usages politiques de l’histoire en Allemagne et Autriche 1889–1934, provides an ambitious and theoretically-sophisticated analysis of the ways in which German and Austrian socialists interpreted the French Revolution from 1889 to the 1930s. Ducange shows how the different strands of Second International socialism interpreted the revolution in their own ways, and shows the impact of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 on this. His work does not only focus on leading theoreticians such as Karl Kautsky, but also documents very effectively the way in which the readings of the French Revolution were disseminated widely through Social Democracy’s rank-and-file membership. It is a valuable contribution to the literature on the culture of Marxism in Central Europe in this period, as well as a rich addition to the literature on the resonance and uses of the French Revolution: the ‘echoes of the Marseillaise’.

Introduction

Napoleon ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
David A. Bell
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Changes ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

The story of Napoleon’s life runs from his birth on Corsica in 1769 to his death in exile on Saint Helena in 1821, stretching beyond his death to include posthumous battles over his reputation. It is the story of a man with genuinely extraordinary personal qualities and involves some of the most dramatic events in history. The Introduction explains the story cannot be understood without placing Napoleon in the broader context of his age—both the historical changes that made him possible and the historical forces that he so powerfully grasped hold of. Napoleon’s entire story took place against the background of the French Revolution, which paved the way for his astonishing career.

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.

3. The reign of terror

2018 ◽  
pp. 38-53
Author(s):  
Charles Townshend
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

What are the origins of terrorism? ‘The reign of terror’ explains that the notion of terrorism, or terror, came from the French Revolution. The terror transformed the Revolution from a liberating to a destructive force. Those who instigated the terror had to find justification for their violent killing. Their motivation provides a key to the distinctive nature of modern terrorism. The revolutionaries may have seemed to act as crusaders, but the Reign of Terror was informed by the Enlightenment assumption that human agency can change the social order. The French Revolution’s use of violence created a model for the application of terrorizing force by state actors that lasted two centuries.

scholarly journals Sieyès versus Bicameralism

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-279
Author(s):  
Lucia Rubinelli
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Legislative Power ◽  
Constitutional State ◽  
Liberal Constitutionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractBicameralism is traditionally considered necessary to the principle of the limitation of power and, as such, a key feature of the liberal constitutional state. Yet the history of the French Revolution reveals that this has not always been the case and that bicameralism's relationship to liberal constitutionalism is more complex than is traditionally assumed. This article will discuss how the Abbé Sieyès, one of the founding fathers of modern constitutionalism, rejected bicameralism not only because it was contrary to the revolutionary principle of equality, but also because it did not actually succeed at limiting power. Even worse, bicameralism would threaten the constitutional system by forcing the legislative power into procedural impasses that would eventually open the way to despotism. Putting Sieyès's claims in historical perspective, the paper aims to offer some historical nuance and insights into bicameralism's relationship to liberal constitutionalism.

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