The press and politics in Britain: From the glorious revolution to the French Revolution

2008 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

scholarly journals “The Bloody Assizes:” Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Zook
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
New Order ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Popular Memory ◽  
Street Literature ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.

Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Philip Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
True Nature ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

In attempting to explain the stability of eighteenth-century Britain, and in particular the maintenance of political, social and economic supremacy by the landed aristocracy, scholars have begun to pay attention to the role of ideology and opinion. They see this not merely as providing an explanation of the way things were, but justifying and reinforcing them. The dominant ideological interpretation of society had emerged from the political and constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, and in particular from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an interpretation which might be denominated ‘Whig’, and which faced its most serious challenge at the very end of the eighteenth century from the French revolution. Despite the more tangible threat of French arms, the ruling classes in Britain did not underestimate the danger to social order from the arguments advanced by adherents of the rights-of-man doctrine propagated by the revolutionaries. If, in reply to these views, the status quo could be shown not only to be necessary and inevitable, but also right and good, that is to say correspondent with the true nature of man, then the morality of the existing practices and institutions of civil society would be proven. The problem at its most fundamental level was ethical, and it was a problem which conservatives attempted to solve in a variety of ways.

scholarly journals Religious Books, the French Revolution and the Printer Jean-Baptiste Collignon in Metz

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane McLeod ◽  
Renée Girard
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Freedom Of The Press ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
Border Town ◽  
The Press ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Ideological Commitment ◽  
The French Revolution

When the Revolutionary government in France declared Freedom of the Press in 1789 it did not anticipate the flow of counter-revolutionary pamphlets attacking its decision to nationalize the French Church and require all clergy to swear an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This article examines the conditions surrounding the printing of these religious pamphlets by investigating the career of one provincial printer in the border town of Metz—Jean-Baptiste Collignon—who worked with émigré bishops to produce them and who was guillotined in 1794 for counterrevolutionary activities. The authors explore the production and distribution of religious pamphlets, the ideological commitment of revolutionary printers, and the regional nature of censorship in the early French Revolution.

scholarly journals Napoleon Reversing the French Revolution.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heena Kapoor
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
Free Flow ◽  
Harsh Punishment ◽  
Napoleon Bonaparte ◽  
The Press ◽  
French People ◽  
The French Revolution

Napoleon Bonaparte turned France into a police state during his reign.[1] However, he did not continue the French Revolution as the French people hoped. The French Revolution brought forth liberty and to do as ones will if it does not harm another.[2] A new document brought by the French Revolution embodying these principles was the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789.[3] This Declaration stated under article 11 that there was to be a free flow of ideas and opinions in writing and the press.[4] Article 7 outlawed any cruel harsh punishment and arbitrary sentencing.[5] However, Napoleon reversed these fundamental principles of the French Revolution. Writers, the press, along with the French people were subjected to the General police and prefects and were banned from saying anything controversial, against his regime, anything about France’s revolutionary past, and against France’s allies.[6] Arbitrary, cruel punishments, and harsh rules were enacted by Napoleon through the Penal Code in 1810.[7] Napoleon did not continue the French Revolution and reversed it by turning France into a police state and monitored and censored the French people, the press, and writers.

Constitutional Order, Revolutionary Violence, and Modern Power

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon S. Wolin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Hundredth Anniversary ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Centennial Celebrations

In 1988 and 1989, centenary celebrations were held in the United States, Great Britain, and France that linked together constitutions and revolutions. Americans observed the two hundredth anniversary of the ratification of their constitution; Britons the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and of the constitutional settlement that followed; and for the French the bicentennial of their revolution of 1789. This chapter asks, is it an accident of centennial celebrations, themselves an accident of calendars, that found 1988–1989 a moment for celebrating the anniversaries of two conceptual opposites, the ratification of the American Constitution and the outbreak of the French Revolution? It suggests that unless revolutions produce “genuine” constitutions there is no reason to celebrate them and perhaps good reasons not to.

Scotland's Newspapers, the French Revolution and Domestic Radicalism (c.1789–1794)

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Harris
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
The Press ◽  
A Site ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper examines responses in the Scottish newspaper press to the French Revolution and the associated rise of domestic radicalism. The development of the press in Scotland still awaits its modern historian, and this paper furnishes a picture of it in a crucial phase in its growth. However, the main emphasis is on how Scotland's newspapers ‘represented’ the French Revolution as its character changed between 1789 and the advent of the Terror. In 1793–4, the Scottish press provided powerful support to the anti-reformcause, but this could not have been easily anticipated as late as the middle of 1792. A further aim of the paper is to establish the distinctive importance of the newspaper as a site of idealogical and political struggle in Scotland in the 1970s.

Women and the Glorious Revolution

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The role of women in revolutions has recently excited a good deal of scholarly interest. Innovative studies have appeared on women in the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution that have not only rescued women from oblivion but also modified and enlarged understanding of the revolutions themselves. But for the English Revolution of 1688-89 there has been, aside from biographical studies of the two future queens, Mary and Anne, very little published work on the role of women. My purpose is to remedy that situation, and to broaden the inquiry by addressing four major questions: (1) what role did women from all social groups, lower, middle, aristocratic and royal, play in the Revolution: (2) why, in view of customary restraints, did they enter the public arena; (3) what influence did they have on the Glorious Revolution; and (4) what influence did the Revolution have on women? Underlying these queries is the basic question of what are the contextual conditions that encourage or even make possible women's participation in revolutions?Such a topic requires changes in the questions customarily used in studying political history. If politics is defined in traditional terms simply as the competition for and exercise of power by individuals through their office, voting, and decision making, then there is nothing to say about women in the Glorious Revolution. Women, whatever their social status, had no direct access to the levers of conventionally-defined politics. They did not vote, sit in either house of Parliament, or hold office on any level of government, unless they were queens. In a predominantly patriarchal society, females, except for widows, were customarily subordinate to their fathers or husbands and confined to the sphere of the family and household.

Press and Parliament in the Revolution of 1689

1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Elected Representatives ◽  
The Revolution

The Convention Parliament, the revolutionary tribunal of the English Revolution of 1689, prohibited the printing of news of its affairs and barred the public from its debates. Authors, printers and publishers, however, defied these orders and published unlicensed accounts of speeches, votes, committee reports, and the membership of the Convention. Although the laws and administrative procedures which the later Stuarts had used to restrict the press were still in effect, they were not enforced. During the weeks of political crisis, quantities of news-sheets, newspapers and tracts reporting parliamentary news and political opinion appeared. At a time of growing scholarly and popular interest in the Glorious Revolution, it may be useful to examine the relationship between parliament and press. Although studies of the early press and of parliamentary reporting have been made, no detailed examination of these matters during the months of political upheaval in the winter of 1688–9 has been undertaken. Two central questions suggest themselves. How did the politically conscious public learn about what was happening in Westminster where their elected representatives and the peers of the realm were meeting to resolve the crisis facing the nation? What was the attitude of those representatives and peers to having information about their affairs spread beyond their chambers? The answers to such questions may deepen understanding of the Convention and of one aspect of the part played by the press in the Revolution.

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