scholarly journals The Flight of Louis XVI. to Varennes. a Criticism of Carlyle

1886 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-341
Author(s):  
Oscar Browning

The arrest of Louis XVI. during his flight from Paris to Montmédy was one of the most important events in the history of the French Revolution, and probably one of the most important in the history of France. It also forms one of the best known and most admired portions of Carlyle's history of the Revolution. It occupies a whole book of the second volume, fifty-four pages of the Library edition. It may therefore be taken as a fair specimen of Carlyle's style, both in its strength and in its weakness. A careful examination of his narrative from a purely prosaic standpoint will throw light on his manner of composition. It may be said that it is un-gracious to criticise in the petty details of fact a narrative which has stirred so many hearts by its tragic pathos, and which in its broad outlines is consistent with the truth. But here lies the whole distinction between the historical poem and the historical novel on the one side, and history proper on the other. Carlyle would have said, if he had been asked, that his one object in writing history was to tell the truth. It is for this reason that he multiplies fact upon fact and detail upon detail, until he has brought the scene vividly before the eyes of the reader. His accuracy can be trusted where he has visited the scenes which he describes, and where he is not carried away by preconceived prejudices or ideas.In history truth is always more tragic and more moving than fiction.

Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

This chapter first discusses the impact of the French Revolution on the United States. The development was twofold. On the one hand, there was an acceleration of indigenous movements. On the other, there was an influence that was unquestionably foreign. The latter presented itself especially with the war that began in Europe in 1792, and with the clash of armed ideologies that the war brought with it. The warring powers in Europe, which for Americans meant the governments of France and Great Britain, attempted to make use of the United States for their own advantage. Different groups of Americans, for their own domestic purposes, were likewise eager to exploit the power and prestige of either England or France. The chapter then turns to the impact of the Revolution on the “other” Americas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (7(57)) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Daria Andreevna Romanenko

The diary of G. Morris is valuable on the history of the French Revolution of the XVIII century, in particular on the problems of salon life in France, biographies of some outstanding personalities (Talleyrand, Lafayette, Necker). The article mainly focuses on the interpretation of events by the author of the diary — G. Morris, a revolutionary, politician, orator and a recognized authority in the circle of the upper class. G. Morris not only gives a chronology of the history of the revolution, but also rethinks this experience, which has become the subject for the study of this article. To reveal the topic, a question was raised, to which G. Morris indirectly gives an answer. The inertia of the revolution or just the beginning? Will there be a continuation of the revolutionary events or will it come to naught? And Morris was largely right when he said that the revolution did not achieve what was originally planned – freedom, which means that its work is not finished, but on the other hand, although the tension did not completely disappear, it was smoothed out by the activities of the government.


Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr

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.


Author(s):  
James Livesey

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn

This chapter evaluates the causes of the French Revolution. The problem was not that Louis XVI was particularly wasteful, although he had a lavish lifestyle at Versailles. The issue was instead one of crushing military necessity. Before the revolution, France was dealing with invasion threats from Spain and England and was spending over twice as much as had been spent on the Seven Years' War. However, France was fiscally crippled by the fact that a substantial proportion of its financial base was exempt from paying taxes. The disputes within the elite about who was going to come up with the money to pay for extra military expenses led to revolution. The revolutionaries found divided conservative forces, as well as members of the elite willing to oppose the king if this would help them win their battles about future tax obligations. The result was the overthrow of the king and the entire noble class. But taxes were not the whole story: there was also a rising capitalist middle class resentful of the superior status of the aristocracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Amanda De Queirós Cruz

Este artigo tem como objetivo compreender a participação política feminina, principalmente das mulheres das camadas populares, durante a Revolução Francesa, e também a origem, os usos do termo femmes tricoteuses e quem eram as mulheres caracterizadas como tricoteuses. Para isso, faz uma análise de fontes documentais imagéticas do período disponíveis no acervo da Bibliothèque Nationale de France, comparando com a produção historiográfica sobre as mulheres na Europa Moderna – principalmente no recorte França do século XVIII -, Iluminismo e Revolução Francesa. Ademais, utiliza como arcabouço teórico-metodológico o capítulo intitulado “A Revolução Francesa: um relato através de imagens” de Michel Vovelle.Palavras-chave: História das mulheres; Iluminismo; Revolução Francesa. AbstractThis article aims to comprehend feminine political participation, mainly the one of lower classes women, during the French Revolution. Also it aims to comprehend the origin, uses of term femmes tricoteuses and who were the women characterized as tricoteuses. For this purpose, The article present an analysis of image sources of the period available in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, compare images with historiography  productions about women in Modern Europe – mainly in France in the 18th century -, Enlightenment and French Revolution. Besides, it uses as theoretical-methodological support Michel Vovelle’s chapter  “A Revolução Francesa: um relato através de imagens”.Keywords: History of women; Enlightenment; French Revolution.


1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
R.B. McDowell

The French revolution split the English whigs over profound issues of principle. One section, of which Fox was the most prominent member, viewed the revolution, at least in its earlier stages, with considerable sympathy and argued that the war with France could have been avoided. The other section accepted Burke’s interpretation of the revolution and at the beginning of 1793 supported the government’s intervention in the European war. And from the middle of 1792 the possibility of a coalition between this latter section and Pitt was in the air. One factor which delayed the formation of a coalition government was the attitude of the duke of Portland, ‘the natural leader’ of the whig party. Portland, who combined pride of birth with a sense of duty, some political shrewdness and strong opinions which he expressed, when writing, with considerable fluency, seems to have inspired genuine respect and even affection amongst those who worked with him. But he was hesitant, and in the early nineties, while accepting Burke’s views on the revolution, he did not wait to split his party. The existence of the whig party, ‘a union of persons of independent minds and fortunes formed and connected together by their belief in the principles by which the revolution of 1688 was founded’, was essential, he believed, to the welfare of the country. The whig party ‘which alone is entitled to be distinguished by the name of party’, he asserted, ‘must be as eternal as I conceive the constitution of this country to be’.


2003 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Boyer

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.


1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perez Zagorin

There are at least two reasons which might be cited for undertaking the historical and comparative investigation of revolution. The first is the desire to make a revolution, the second is the desire to prevent it. Perhaps nearly everybody is susceptible to the one reason or the other, but there is yet a third reason that gives the study of revolution an outstanding interest and significance, even though its appeal is doubtless much more limited than the first two. This is that the understanding of revolution is an indispensable condition for the fuller knowledge and understanding of society. Depending on how we define it, revolution may be common or uncommon, frequent or rare. But in the case of societies, nations, and communities that have experienced revolution, we cannot claim to understand them adequately without understanding their revolutions. In a deep and therefore a non-tautological sense, it is true that every people gets the revolution it deserves and equally true that it gets only the revolutions of which it is capable.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 157-169
Author(s):  
Sławomir Bralewski

In this article, I try to answer the following question: was Constantine himself aware of the revolution that he was carrying out? Did he realise that his actions were going to change the course of the history of the Empire? An analysis of sources seems to indicate that emperor Constantine the Great saw in his reign a fundamental change not only in the history of the Imperium Romanum, but also of the entire world. He believed that this change had an eschatological dimension. Constantine’s reign, at least in its propagandist framing, was to be the turning point in the fight against evil. It appears that the ruler was fully aware that by putting an end to the persecutions of Christians he was restoring universal peace. Thus, the shift with which he is associated amounted, on the one hand, to restoring the pax Christiana and the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth, and on the other to eliminating evil from the world. Therefore, Constantine, in believing that he had become God’s tool for fighting evil, must have also been convinced that he played an incredibly important role in God’s plan of salvation; especially since the Kingdom of God, apparently realised on earth through Constantine’s military victories, was to only finally prevail when evil and death had been defeated forever.


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