The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

Britain: Republicanism and the Establishment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Established Order ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
At Home

This chapter focuses on England during the revolutionary decade. It argues that in Britain and Ireland, as in Eastern Europe, it was counter-revolution that prevailed. The net effect of the revolutionary decade was to demonstrate, or to consolidate, the strength of the established order. The very lengths to which the established order went, however, in dealing with disaffection (or what was called “sedition”) offer a measure of the magnitude of the discontents. The men who ruled England were not the sort to be frightened by witches. The British governing class was neither timid, foolish, intolerant, nor especially ruthless when unprovoked. That Englishmen of this class became fearful of unrest at home, intolerant of ideas or organizations suggesting those of the French Revolution, repressive in Britain, and deliberately terroristic in Ireland can be taken as evidence of the reality of something of which, from their own point of view, they had reason to be afraid. In England as elsewhere there was a contest between democrats and aristocrats.

‘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.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

Contemporary visions of France: the Revolution, Women and History: A Summary of the 1989 Fall Colloquia, New York University’s Institute of French Studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Studies ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The seven colloquia held at New York University’s Institute of French Studies during the Fall 1989 semester offered some new perspectives on the French Revolution, and took stock of various elements of French Society and history two hundred years after the taking of the Bastille.

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.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

scholarly journals Danton. Wektory interpretacji filmu Andrzeja Wajdy

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Włodzimierz Szturc
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Current Model ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Andrzej Wajda ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In this paper, the author presents the final period of the French Revolution as interpretated by Andrzej Wajda. The screenplay was prepared by Jean-Claude Carrière based on Stanisława Przybyszewska’s drama (also used by Wajda as a screenplay in many dramas). It helped the director to describe the reality of the intense time of Robespierre’s terror and Jacobin efforts to guillotine Danton and his allies. Wajda reveals the same mechanisms of crime, manipulation and lies which became the backdrop for political events in Poland between 1981-1983 (especially with the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981). The model of Danton’s fall and the strengthening of totalitarian rule are considered the current model of history, which is based on cruelty and the struggle for power. The film forms the basis for a broader view of history as the tragic entanglement of events, which is the result of hubris and the desire for material goods, and is the origin of totalitarian rule. References to the emblems of the revolution, allegories, and the symbolism of art (paintings of David) are the fundamental ekphrasis of meanings set by the film. Wajda’s analysis of Danton shows some typical ways of understanding and interpreting the signs of culture and history.

scholarly journals Revolutionen i Sæby

Kulturstudier ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Mührmann-Lund
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Town Hall ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Abuse Of Power ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Town ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The revolution in Saeby   In 1790, the citizens of the tiny town of Saeby in northern Jutland demanded a meeting at the Town Hall to confront the town bailiff about his abuse of power as chief of police, but the bailiff refused to obey any “self-made national assemblies”. In Denmark at the time, such examples of popular local unrest were often compared with the French Revolution. However, in later Danish historiography, these disturbances have been seen as “reactive” defences of traditional rights that do not carry the same historical significance as the bourgeois revolution in France, for example. Inspired by an interactional approach to popular unrest, this article argues that the Saeby citizens’ collective protest did indeed have some revolutionary traits: a micro-historical analysis of the conflict as a process shows that the unrest began as a reaction to enclosure and police reforms, and when the town bailiff was suspected of embezzlement, demands for democracy and more transparency grew. Descriptions of the bailiff’s rule as “despotic” show that the citizens of Saeby were inspired by contemporary ideals of democratic absolutism. Thus, the article concludes that popular local disturbances such as these should be seen as part of the revolutionary movement that was taking place elsewhere at that time.

Essays by Viktor Ya. Iretsky in the Context of the Journalism of 1917 and 1918

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Maria G. Semyonova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Brothers Karamazov ◽  
Cherry Orchard ◽  
Brothers Karamazov ◽  
Maxim Gorky ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Political Pamphlets ◽  
The Revolution

This article aims to initiate a study of an extremely interesting body of texts by Viktor Ya. Iretsky that were published in the major metropolitan newspaper Rech' [Speech] and caused a resonance in 1917-1918. The study of the originality of the half-forgotten prose writer's revolutionary journalism in the context of the ideological searches of the author's famous contemporaries - M. Gorky, V.G. Korolenko, L.N. Andreev, A.A. Blok, I.A. Bunin - seems relevant. Based on newspaper, magazine, and book collections of the National Library of Russia, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the House of Russia Abroad, the article analyzes the essays published in Rech' from March 1917 to August 1918 using historical-literary and intertextual research methods. In the course of the research, the author selected the most revealing essays that are comparable to well-known journalistic works about the revolution, analyzed their artistic originality, evolution, and similarity to the journalism of 1917-1918. Iretsky's texts are thematically and ideologically similar to Andreev's articles and diary entries, Korolenko's writings, and - particularly - Gorky's cycle published in Novaya Zhizn' [New Life]; however, theses texts describe the facts, moods, and the revolutionary atmosphere from the point of view of an observer who opposes the revolution and, since May 1917, sees it only as destructive force. The author concludes that Iretsky's essays, reflecting the metamorphoses of the intelligentsia's perception of the revolution, problems close to Gorky's and Korolenko's notes, are more similar to emigrants' diaries, especially Bunin's Cursed Days, in their confessional nature, antiBolshevik pathos and artistry. The specificity of Iretsky's texts is explained by the attention to specific everyday material immersed in the cultural and historical context. The value of the essays is determined by its orientation to everyday life, inclusion of the living tissue of life in the texts; by its confessional nature, which back in 1917 and 1918 revealed a critical emigrant attitude - then expressed in diaries only - to the course of the revolutionary transformation of Russia; and by the inclusion of expressive historical and cultural figurative elements. Abstracting, analyzing the situation from the point of view of European history and culture (including the ideals of the French revolution), using images of works of Russian literature (Dead Souls by Gogol, The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, etc.) and reminiscences on them, Iretsky does not approach authors of political pamphlets, but rather such important figures of Russian journalism as Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Korolenko, and the diary prose of the brightest Russian writers.

The French Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Military Necessity ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
To Come ◽  
Financial Base ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

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.

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