Myth- and Monarch-Making: Claire de Duras’s Pensées de Louis XIV (1827)

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-247
Author(s):  
STACIE ALLAN

Louis XIV is one of the most captivating figures in French history despite his myth sitting uneasily alongside a modern Republican France. Louis XIV’s rarely read memoirs provide unique insight into the monarch’s role, demonstrating the tension between God-given right and the day-to-day duties of being a king. Novelist Claire de Duras used the memoirs to compile Pensées de Louis XIV (1827), a collection of seventy selected quotations. This article shows how Duras attempts to reconcile past and present, maintaining the mythical aura of the monarch while also portraying Louis XIV as a figure that might appeal to a post-Revolutionary, post-Imperial society.

Fénelon ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 108-119

Chapter 4 presents three of Fénelon’s letters. The Letter to Louis XIV is a striking excoriation of both the character and rule of Louis XIV. An enduring model of what it looks like to speak truth to power, the Letter offers an uncompromising critique of the obsession with grandeur and glory that led Louis to privilege his image and the image of his court over the well-being of his people. Alongside it appear two further selections from Fénelon’s extensive correspondence—a letter to the chief advisor to the King of Spain and a letter to the Duke of Burgundy grown to adulthood—that likewise offer insight into his views on the responsibilities of advisors to and holders of executive authority.


Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon’s works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This volume aims to help remedy this by bringing to English-language audiences the first collection of his moral and political writings in translation. By so doing it hopes to make more widely available the riches of one of the leading voices of resistance to the absolutism of Louis XIV. Fénelon’s political thought will thus be of particular interest to students and scholars of French history, as well as to those today engaged in questions of political resistance and reform. But Fénelon’s reach also extends to fields well beyond politics and ethics. In the Enlightenment, Fénelon came to be celebrated not only as a humanitarian political reformer but also as a pioneering theorist of education, a prescient student of economics and international relations, and a key voice in contemporary philosophical debates—not to mention his fame as one of the seventeenth-century’s most preeminent theologians and spiritualists and masters of French prose. As such, his work will be of interest to students and scholars in fields ranging from philosophy and political science to economics, education, literature, French history, and religion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Andreas Nijenhuis-Bescher

The ‘Dutch journey’ and the French vision of the United Provinces in the first half of the seventeenth century During the reign of the French king Louis XIV, and especially since the Dutch War 1672–1678, the relationship between the Netherlands and France often seemed only a long-lasting conflict, eclipsing the more positive mutual influences. However, during the Dutch Revolt 1568–1648, which led to the creation of the new Republic of the United Provinces, the two countries were close allies, united by a struggle against a common enemy – Spain.As a result of diplomatic cooperation, French travellers came to discover the young Dutch Republic. Early-modern travellers often kept a journal. From the beginning of the 17th century, such journals were frequently published, giving birth to a distinct literary genre.The analysis of the French travel writing offers an interesting insight into this new country as well as into the society and civilisation that developed in the Low Lands between 1600 and 1650. Religious coexistence or intellectual activities struck the French observers of the small but powerful Republic they discovered, leaving a vivid trace of the Dutch Golden Age, even beyond the reign of Louis XIV.


1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 322-330
Author(s):  
A. Beer

The investigations which I should like to summarize in this paper concern recent photo-electric luminosity determinations of O and B stars. Their final aim has been the derivation of new stellar distances, and some insight into certain patterns of galactic structure.


1984 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 461-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Hart

ABSTRACTThis paper models maximum entropy configurations of idealized gravitational ring systems. Such configurations are of interest because systems generally evolve toward an ultimate state of maximum randomness. For simplicity, attention is confined to ultimate states for which interparticle interactions are no longer of first order importance. The planets, in their orbits about the sun, are one example of such a ring system. The extent to which the present approximation yields insight into ring systems such as Saturn's is explored briefly.


Author(s):  
D. F. Blake ◽  
L. F. Allard ◽  
D. R. Peacor

Echinodermata is a phylum of marine invertebrates which has been extant since Cambrian time (c.a. 500 m.y. before the present). Modern examples of echinoderms include sea urchins, sea stars, and sea lilies (crinoids). The endoskeletons of echinoderms are composed of plates or ossicles (Fig. 1) which are with few exceptions, porous, single crystals of high-magnesian calcite. Despite their single crystal nature, fracture surfaces do not exhibit the near-perfect {10.4} cleavage characteristic of inorganic calcite. This paradoxical mix of biogenic and inorganic features has prompted much recent work on echinoderm skeletal crystallography. Furthermore, fossil echinoderm hard parts comprise a volumetrically significant portion of some marine limestones sequences. The ultrastructural and microchemical characterization of modern skeletal material should lend insight into: 1). The nature of the biogenic processes involved, for example, the relationship of Mg heterogeneity to morphological and structural features in modern echinoderm material, and 2). The nature of the diagenetic changes undergone by their ancient, fossilized counterparts. In this study, high resolution TEM (HRTEM), high voltage TEM (HVTEM), and STEM microanalysis are used to characterize tha ultrastructural and microchemical composition of skeletal elements of the modern crinoid Neocrinus blakei.


Author(s):  
Peter Sterling

The synaptic connections in cat retina that link photoreceptors to ganglion cells have been analyzed quantitatively. Our approach has been to prepare serial, ultrathin sections and photograph en montage at low magnification (˜2000X) in the electron microscope. Six series, 100-300 sections long, have been prepared over the last decade. They derive from different cats but always from the same region of retina, about one degree from the center of the visual axis. The material has been analyzed by reconstructing adjacent neurons in each array and then identifying systematically the synaptic connections between arrays. Most reconstructions were done manually by tracing the outlines of processes in successive sections onto acetate sheets aligned on a cartoonist's jig. The tracings were then digitized, stacked by computer, and printed with the hidden lines removed. The results have provided rather than the usual one-dimensional account of pathways, a three-dimensional account of circuits. From this has emerged insight into the functional architecture.


Author(s):  
J. J. Laidler ◽  
B. Mastel

One of the major materials problems encountered in the development of fast breeder reactors for commercial power generation is the phenomenon of swelling in core structural components and fuel cladding. This volume expansion, which is due to the retention of lattice vacancies by agglomeration into large polyhedral clusters (voids), may amount to ten percent or greater at goal fluences in some austenitic stainless steels. From a design standpoint, this is an undesirable situation, and it is necessary to obtain experimental confirmation that such excessive volume expansion will not occur in materials selected for core applications in the Fast Flux Test Facility, the prototypic LMFBR now under construction at the Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory (HEDL). The HEDL JEM-1000 1 MeV electron microscope is being used to provide an insight into trends of radiation damage accumulation in stainless steels, since it is possible to produce atom displacements at an accelerated rate with 1 MeV electrons, while the specimen is under continuous observation.


Author(s):  
John R. Devaney

Occasionally in history, an event may occur which has a profound influence on a technology. Such an event occurred when the scanning electron microscope became commercially available to industry in the mid 60's. Semiconductors were being increasingly used in high-reliability space and military applications both because of their small volume but, also, because of their inherent reliability. However, they did fail, both early in life and sometimes in middle or old age. Why they failed and how to prevent failure or prolong “useful life” was a worry which resulted in a blossoming of sophisticated failure analysis laboratories across the country. By 1966, the ability to build small structure integrated circuits was forging well ahead of techniques available to dissect and analyze these same failures. The arrival of the scanning electron microscope gave these analysts a new insight into failure mechanisms.


Author(s):  
D. R. Liu ◽  
S. S. Shinozaki ◽  
J. S. Park ◽  
B. N. Juterbock

The electric and thermal properties of the resistor material in an automotive spark plug should be stable during its service lifetime. Containing many elements and many phases, this material has a very complex microstructure. Elemental mapping with an electron microprobe can reveal the distribution of all relevant elements throughout the sample. In this work, it is demonstrated that the charge-up effect, which would distort an electron image and, therefore, is normally to be avoided in an electron imaging work, could be used to advantage to reveal conductive and resistive zones in a sample. Its combination with elemental mapping can provide valuable insight into the underlying conductivity mechanism of the resistor.This work was performed in a CAMECA SX-50 microprobe. The spark plug used in the present report was a commercial product taken from the shelf. It was sectioned to expose the cross section of the resistor. The resistor was known not to contain the precious metal Au as checked on the carbon coated sample. The sample was then stripped of carbon coating and re-coated with Au.


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