Rights After the Revolutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Model State ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Political System ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

Thomas Paine, born in Norfolk, England, spent his early years as an undistinguished artisan and later excise officer. In 1774 he emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia where he became a journalist and essayist. His Common Sense (1776) and sixteen essays on The Crisis (1776–83) were stunning examples of political propaganda and theorizing. In the late 1780s, in Europe, Paine wrote The Rights of Man (1791–2) and attacked the English political system. During the French Revolution he was a Girondin in the French Convention and wrote The Age of Reason (1794, 1796), savagely criticizing Christianity. He died in New York in 1809, an important figure in the sweep of the revolutionary politics in America, England, and France at the end of the eighteenth century.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

The French Revolution and the Modernization of Germany

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. W. Blanning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
German History ◽  
River Flows ◽  
General Account ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
German People ◽  
The French Revolution

Historians of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have always been spoilt for choice when needing to recommend a good general account of their period. Until recently, their colleagues working on the eighteenth century and the revolutionary-Napoleonic period have been less fortunate. The second volume of Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany contains much that is original, penetrating, and powerful but is also decidedly uneven in quality, patchy in coverage, and not an easy read. A.J.P. Taylor's The Course of German History is a wild mixture of insight and perversity, immensely stimulating but marred by an extreme Germanophobia and distorted by a teleological perspective which sees all German history since the dawn of time heading inexorably for 1933: “it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea.” “Modern Germany” has usually been deemed to begin in 1815, so the period which immediately preceded the Vienna settlement has been studied with a view only to what it started.

scholarly journals From Paine to PlayStation

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 44-57
Author(s):  
Andrey Mintchev
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The French Revolution

In Assassin’s Creed Unity, the historical narratives of Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, François Furet, and Peter McPhee are presented in a way that capitalizes on the virtual and tangible characteristics of gaming. By isolating the historical accounts of the French Revolution, Ubisoft Entertainment has created a stimulating and cinematic experience that challenges the unwavering pedagogy of French historiography. Due to the nature of videogames, Assassin’s Creed Unity serves as a gateway to understanding the French Revolution through the immersive qualities of simulation. The game safely navigates around the historicity of the event by recreating the vibrant landscapes of Paris and filling its streets with believable characters, models, player-driven decisions, and a historically-rich narrative. To this effect, Assassin’s Creed Unity inevitably collides with the opinions of several historians in a way that passively educates its audience on the overall history of 1790's France—making the game an invaluable tool for learning about the French Revolution. 

Hellenism in the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This article moves past the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and, in particular, to the French Revolution, which crystallized an important, if not fully understood, moment in the history of Hellenism. It shows how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration for so many of the French revolutionaries, were simultaneously proto-democratic and pro-Spartan. In this respect, Rousseau marks a complex breakthrough in the political traditions of Hellenism, which were, for much of European history until the eighteenth century, anti-democratic and pro-Spartan.

The Strange History of the Right to Bear Arms in the French Revolution

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-479
Author(s):  
Noah Shusterman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Social Domination ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract French Revolutionaries shared many of the same beliefs as their American counterparts about the relationship between citizenship and bearing arms. Both nations’ leaders viewed standing armies as a threat to freedom, and both nations required militia participation from a portion of the citizenry. Yet the right to bear arms is a legacy only of the American Revolution. The right to bear arms came up several times in debates in France’s National Assembly. The deputies never approved that right, but they never denied it either. During the first years of the Revolution, the leading politicians were wary of arming poor citizens, a concern that was in tension with the egalitarian language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Moreover, militias thrived during the early years of the French Revolution and became instruments—albeit unstable ones—for maintaining a social domination that played out along class lines. In response to the contradictions in their positions, French revolutionary leaders remained silent on the issue. In France as in the United States, the question of whether or not there was a right to bear arms was less important than the question of who had the right to bear arms.

WHO WERE THE SANS-CULOTTES?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-455
Author(s):  
RUTH SCURR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Necessary Connections ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Who were the sans-culottes? What were their concerns and purposes? And what role did they play in the unfolding of events collectively known as the French Revolution? Michael Sonenscher first engaged directly with these questions in the 1980s (in an article for Social History 9 (1984), 303) when social historians were experimenting with the possibilities opened up by discourse analysis, and when the traditions of eighteenth-century civic, or republican, language seemed particularly exciting: The social history of the French Revolution owes much to the deepening insistence with which the discourse of the Revolution itself referred to, and postulated, necessary connections between everyday circumstances and public life. From Sieyes’ equation of aristocratic privilege with unproductive parasitism in 1788 to the Thermidorian caricature of the architects of the Terror as the dregs of society, the Revolution produced its own “social interpretation.” Sonenscher argued that while the identification of the figure of the sans-culotte with that of the artisan was “the achievement of the generation of historians—Richard Cobb, George Rudé and Albert Soboul—who reintroduced the popular movement into the historiography of the French Revolution”, there was always something problematic (or circular) in the underlying assumption that it was possible to equate the representation of artisan production found in the political language of the sans-culottes during the Revolution with what actually existed in the workshops of Paris or other towns of eighteenth-century France. Back in the 1980s what Sonenscher hoped was that a more accurate understanding of the actual dynamics of workshop production would produce “a better explanation of the meaning of the language of the sans-culottes”. His own expectation, as a social historian, was that the causality, in both explanatory and historical terms, would run from the social to the political sphere.

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