Emotion and Political Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines how political history is reshaped by attention to the emotions. It explores how sentiment undergirded political identities and allegiances and how emotion shaped civic memory and consciousness in revolutionary and early-nineteenth-century America. From the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution, from the rise of eighteenth-century republicanism to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, emotion proved pivotal to political change. Whether animating the spirit of freedom or sparking action on behalf of the nation, emotion was, by definition, central to patriotism in all its dynamic forms. In addition to this, the chapter also considers why emotions have been excluded from traditional political narratives.

The Problem of Christian Unity in Early Nineteenth-Century America

1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lefferts A. Loetscher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Social Challenge ◽  
Atlantic Community ◽  
Christian Unity ◽  
Aggressive Attack

American Protestants in the early nineteenth century faced intellectual and social challenge which made conspicuous the weakness of their own divided condition. The American Revolution—which was part of a larger upheaval in the Atlantic Community—had spread Enlightenment ideas, with their aggressive attack on orthodoxy. Quite typical was the lament of a convention of Massachusetts Congregational ministers in 1799 over “the present decay of Christian morals and piety, and the awful prevalence of speculative and practical infidelity.” Well before the middle eighteen-thirties the tide of deism had ebbed, but some, like the editors of the new Christian Review, were still building sea walls against it.

German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Doron Avraham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
Alternative Meaning ◽  
Christian Conservatives ◽  
Prevailing View

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
French Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National System ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Abolitionist sentiments had long circulated in the British Atlantic world, but it was not until the 1760s in Virginia that they gained political traction in a colony dependent on slave labor. The politics of reproduction explain the success of abolitionism in this time and place: Virginia was unique among Britain’s colonies because, by the mid-eighteenth century, its slave population was growing, and wealthy planters had no need for fresh recruits. The American Revolution depleted the slave populations in the Caribbean, however, because it disrupted both the slave trade and the flow of imported foodstuffs. Consequently, British politicians began to fantasize, by the 1780s, that Caribbean slave societies could mimic the demographic success in North America in order to enjoy the economic benefits of a plentiful labor supply and allow for the abolition of the slave trade. This vision for reform was postponed, however, by geopolitical developments, including the Haitian Revolution.

Early-Nineteenth-Century Reactions to Benthamism

1984 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Dinwiddy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Controversial Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

IN 1965 a very distinguished Bentham scholar read a paper to this society on Bentham and the French Revolution. During the period dealt with by that paper Bentham became an honorary citizen of France (largely through his friendship with Brissot), but he remained little known either in Britain or on the Continent. Thirty years later, he was world-famous. In 1825 members of the Colombian Congress in Bogot were quoting Bentham at each other much as eighteenth-century Englishmen had quoted Cicero in the House of Commons; and among the leaders of the Decembrist mutiny of the same year in St Petersburg were men who confessed to having been influenced by Bentham's works. In 1829 a weekly newspaper was appearing at Boston, Massachusetts, which carried his phrase the greatest happiness of the greatest number as its motto, while a journal called L'Utilitaire was being published at Geneva to propagate his ideas. This paper will not tackle the large and controversial subject of the extent and significance of Bentham's influence. It will address itself to questions that are more limited, though they have some bearing on the larger topic. These questions are: how did those outside the circle of his followers react to his ideas, and what attempts were made to challenge or refute them?

The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire

2020 ◽  
pp. 197-222
Author(s):  
Adam Lecznar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Form ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines the forms of classicism that proliferate in the writings of the Martinican poet-politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), focusing in particular on his 1963 drama The Tragedy of King Christopher. The classical form of tragedy, mediated through Nietzsche, provides Césaire with a way of reconsidering the reverberations of the Haitian revolution throughout the black Atlantic as a foundational event of black identity. Césaire uses tragedy to dramatize the story of Henri Christophe, the creator of a monarchy in the northern part of Haiti in the early nineteenth century, as a way of instructing his audience on the urgent issue of black political organization in the mid-twentieth century.

VI. Discontent and Rebellion

1987 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 47-51
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Hostile Attitude

For most of the nineteenth century and up until recently, the slave rebellion has been one of the most important components of the educated public’s image of life in the Greek and Roman world. Since the 1960’s, academic scholars have come to see that there is little historical evidence to justify the traditional picture of slave societies as ‘police states’ constantly at the brink of violent rebellion, and that the frequency and scale of uprisings had been greatly overemphasized.One reason for this overemphasis was the romantic nationalism that spread first with, and then in opposition to, the French Revolution; and its characteristic symbol has been the figure of Spartacus. The ancient accounts of the Spartacus war assisted the process, since alongside the expected hostile attitude towards him (to be found in Cicero and the Livian tradition), another group of sources treats him much more respectfully as Horace’s ‘Spartacus acer’. Spartacus was thus sufficiently noble to qualify as a subject for eighteenth-century French tragedy. The plot of Bernard-Joseph Saurin’s drama Spartacus of 1760 revolves around Crassus’ daughter falling in love with him. Then – partly in reaction against Saurin’s frivolous treatment – Spartacus was chosen by the dramatists Lessing (1727–81) and Grillparzer (1791-1872) to symbolize resistance against tyranny. Freemasons saw him as an Enlightenment hero in the struggle against ‘Roman’ Catholicism; and early nineteenth-century nationalism made Spartacus the liberator, not so much of slaves as a social class, as of the national groups enslaved by Rome.

Friends of Freedom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micah Alpaugh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
A Chain ◽  
American Party

From the Sons of Liberty to British reformers, Irish patriots, French Jacobins, Haitian revolutionaries and American Democrats, the greatest social movements of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions grew as part of a common, interrelated pattern. In this new transnational history, Micah Alpaugh demonstrates the connections between the most prominent causes of the era, as they drew upon each other's models to seek unprecedented changes in government. As Friends of Freedom, activists shared ideas and strategies internationally, creating a chain of broad-based campaigns that mobilized the American Revolution, British Parliamentary Reform, Irish nationalism, movements for religious freedom, abolitionism, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and American party politics. Rather than a series of distinct national histories, Alpaugh shows how these movements jointly responded to the Atlantic trends of their era to create a new way to alter or overthrow governments: mobilizing massive social movements.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Philp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chronological Change ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Political Interpretation ◽  
The French Revolution

This expansive afterword reflects upon the whole volume’s arguments and contents. The focus is upon the concept of the miscellaneous: an eighteenth-century mode of organization and appreciation of culture, increasingly contested in the early nineteenth century. The author discusses issues of patriotism and audience reception, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics of political loyalism and dissent in Britain in the period following the French Revolution. Questions of identity and identification are seen as crucial, and as being formed at least in part within theatrical spaces. The author considers the difficult political interpretation of affective tropes such as humour and sentimentality, deftly relating them to the key issues of the day, while also paying attention to chronological change, and the need to recover ways of seeing and feeling that have been lost over the past two centuries.

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