scholarly journals Genesis and Historical Sense of the Motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”

wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73
Author(s):  
Aleksandra DORSKAIA ◽  
Andrei DORSKII

The study is devoted to the formation of the motto of the French Revolution – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The hypotheses as to its emergence are considered, notably the invention of the triad by J.Locke, F.Fénelon, French enlighteners and Masons. Based on the analysis of the texts pertaining to the alleged authors of the motto, it is concluded that its spread was taking place only during the Revolution. The meaning of liberty, equality and fraternity is seen as an expression of the fundamental values of the Modern Age; the interdependence of these concepts is demonstrated.

Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

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.


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):  
Timothy Tackett

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.


1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo

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.


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.


2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan

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.


2017 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Włodzimierz Szturc

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.


Kulturstudier ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Mührmann-Lund

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.


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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 7-65
Author(s):  
John Skorupski

Two great revolutions set the stage for late modern ethics: the French Revolution and the philosophical revolution of Kant. This chapter studies the events and conflicts of ideas in the French Revolution and its aftermath in France. It gives a narrative account of the Revolution from 1789 to 1804. Three broad ethical stances are distinguished: the feudal-Catholic ethic of the monarch and his allies, the impartial individualism of the Enlightenment, and the Rousseauian radical-democracy of the Jacobins. Under the violent political conflicts between these views lies a resilient philosophical conflict: between impartial individualism and a generic stance which this study identifies as ‘eudaimonistic holism’. The feudal-Catholic ethic and radical-democracy are two very different forms of it. Hegelian ethics will turn out to be a third.


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