The Time of the Trap Door

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Trap Door ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

The Invention of National Legal History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Rückert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Critical Method

The chapter undertakes the first European overview up to the present and a comparison of the main European variations with its significant differences and communalities. European legal history is a product of special historiographies. The decisive contexts were the legal humanism and the monarchical state-nationalism of the seventeenth century. Legal history now was understood as task of legitimation, integration, and differentiation. The scientific basis was a new critical method. In the late eighteenth century the task became a modern national drive and was concentrated on state and folk. At the same time the genre was widened in nearly all branches of law. The three pioneers and model cases, namely Hermann Conring (1643) with K.F. Eichhorn (1808), Claude Fleury (about 1670), and Matthew Hale (about 1670), are analysed intensively.

Common Law Confrontations

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 763-786
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Common

This symposium essay contends that the image of the common law drawn by the Supreme Court in the Confrontation Clause context is both distorted and incomplete. In particular, the Court and scholars defending originalist positions rely almost entirely on English sources in their reconstruction of the common law basis for the Confrontation Clause, thereby neglecting the diversity of American common laws from the time of the Founding, a diversity that has already been unearthed by a number of legal historians. By drawing on hitherto untapped sources to furnish a bottom-up reconstruction of how testimony was treated in local criminal courts within mid- to late-eighteenth-century New Jersey, this essay demonstrates that, in at least some jurisdictions, the originalist vision of common law did not apply. The common law cannot, therefore, furnish a univocal answer to questions about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.

Learning Conservatism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
English Literature ◽  
General Level ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Students

The construction of Burke as the ‘founder of conservatism’ was also a product of developments in education. The increasing study of Burke arose out of several converging movements: in publishing and technology; in philosophical thought; in the increasing disposable income and leisure time of greater portions of the population; and in education movements for men and women at all levels. The popularity of topics such as the French Revolution, Romanticism, and late eighteenth-century history meant that Burke became a feature of lectures and examinations. At university, Burke was of particular interest to philosophical Idealists, English literature professors and students, and a generation of historians who taught increasingly modern courses. By analysing how Burke was studied at this much more popular, general level it is possible to pinpoint how Burke’s ‘conservative’ political thought was taught to swathes of new students—it took more than gentlemanly erudition to establish a scholarly orthodoxy.

Carl Schmitt's Vattel and the 'Law of Nations' between Enlightenment and Revolution

Grotiana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Nakhimovsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Total War ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Of International Law

AbstractThis article questions the status of Vattel's Law of Nations as an exemplary illustration of eighteenth-century developments in the history of international law. Recent discussions of the relation between eighteenth-century thinking about the law of nations and the French Revolution have revived Carl Schmitt's contention about the nexus between just war theory and the emergence of total war. This evaluative framework has been used to identify Vattel as a moral critic of absolutism who helped undermine the barriers against total war, as well as an architect and defender of those very barriers. Neither of these opposing readings is corroborated by late-eighteenth-century commentators on Vattel's treatise. To its late-eighteenth-century critics and defenders alike, Vattel's Law of Nations was distinguished by the weakness of its derivation of the law of nations from principles of natural law. Insofar as these readers did link Vattel to justifications of relatively unrestrained forms of warfare, they did so in connection with the perceived weakness of Vattel's moral position rather than with its strength. This late-eighteenth-century consensus on the defining features of Vattel's approach to the law of nations sits uncomfortably with Schmitt's evaluative framework, and indeed with other assessments of Vattel that limit themselves to orienting his treatise along fault lines in the historiography of international law.

scholarly journals Otherness and Self in Latvian Theatre: Changes at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Pauls Daija
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Hill

In the article, political and historical interpretations of the first play in Latvian, an adapted translation of Ludvig Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill (1723, Latvian version 1790) are explored. Although the play has been often interpreted as a work of anti-alcohol propaganda, the article argues that the political motives of the play are no less important. Translated into Latvian during the time of the French revolution, the play mirrors the tense atmosphere of the revolutionary years and reflects changes in Latvian peasant identity. While translating, Baltic German pastor Alexander Johann Stender changed the play’s setting to the late eighteenth century Courland and added new details, emphasizing the social conflict of the play as an ethnic one. It has been argued in the article that since ‘class’ in the Baltics was divided along national lines, the difference between peasants and masters was also the difference between Latvians and Germans, so class and ethnicity merged. When the peasant and the nobleman switch places in the play, this symbolizes a change in the Latvian-German colonial relationship. The colonial interpretation allows for a characterisation of the protagonist as a desperate imitator – a colonial subject who loses his identity as a serf and is not able to form a new identity in any way other than by copying the colonialist op- pressor. But this mimicry turns into ridicule, hence the play acquires a political meaning as it implicitly shows the disastrous consequences of revolutionary pro- test. Therefore, the play can be read as a part of the discussions about the Baltic Enlightenment emancipation project and as a hidden debate on serfdom and the colonial framework of the Courland society

scholarly journals COMMON LAW JURISPRUDENCE AND ANCIENT CONSTITUTIONALISM IN THE RADICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN CARTWRIGHT, GRANVILLE SHARP, AND CAPEL LOFFT

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE BERNARD OWERS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ancient Constitution

AbstractA number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Stow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter explores the transformation in Jewish life that failed to occur in late eighteenth-century Rome. The French Revolution and the U.S. Constitution had established that Jews were citizens with full and equal legal rights. But in Rome, the capital of the then Papal State, no such proclamation occurred. Although Rome's Jews possessed rights in civil law, the discrimination determined by canon law was great. Roman Jews were forced to live in the ghetto decreed by Pope Paul IV in 1555, as part of a vigorous conversionary drive. People were taken to an institution known as the House of Converts, where they were held for periods of time, and most eventually converted. However, some did not, most notably Anna del Monte, who not only remained a Jew but also left a diary recounting her thirteen days in the Catecumeni, as Rome's Jews called the place.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegfried Weichlein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Phase

With the French Revolution, the ‘nation’ entered a new phase as a model for political order that replaced corporate societies and triggered a large-scale process of emancipation and modernisation in European societies. Until the eighteenth century the political order in central Europe was organised along other lines, such as the state, the Reich, the monarchy, or the republic. That changed dramatically between the Seven Years War and around 1800. Despite its thorough universalism, Enlightenment in Germany combined universalism with patriotism, a rather unlikely combination in the twentieth century. For most educated authors in the age of Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism and patriotism were not opposites, but complementary. How, then, did contemporaries in the late eighteenth century conceptualise cosmopolitanism, patriotism, and nationalism, and relate them? How did they explain the complicity of cosmopolitanism and patriotism? This chapter outlines different answers to these questions relating to the period between the Seven Years War and around 1800.

scholarly journals Being Immortal in Paris: Violence and Prophecy during the French Revolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (02) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ramón Solans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Emotional Needs ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

This article uses the case of Catherine Théot and her prophetic activity in late eighteenth-century Paris to reflect on the relationship between event and prophecy in the era of the French Revolution. Despite appearing fixed and immobile, Théot's prophecies were constantly changing and evolving, giving rise to hybrid discourses influenced by various currents including both Jansenism and revolutionary discourses. The Théot affair thus provides an occasion to reflect on contemporary supernatural interpretations of the French Revolution. In this context, her prophecies can be read as a response to the emotional needs triggered by political instability, the fear of war and political violence, and religious changes. In conclusion, the article points to a religious discourse that existed on the margins of the dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution, but was nevertheless closely linked to it though the effects of the Revolutionary Wars and the Terror.

Vitalism’s Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics

2018 ◽  
pp. 114-134
Author(s):  
Richard A. Barney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Human World ◽  
Economic Theology ◽  
John Thelwall

This essay examines how John Thelwall, the notorious political radical inspired by the French Revolution, deployed scientific vitalism in order to promote economic and political change in late eighteenth-century Britain. In adapting Agamben’s notion of “economic theology” to revolutionary contexts, this piece argues that “economy” in several senses serves to mediate between Thelwall’s vitalist conception of the human body and its availability for creating more equitable socioeconomic relations. In the case of The Peripatetic (1793), Thelwall’s sprawling, multi-generic novel, his commitment to systemic openness—both physiological and economic—produces a story oriented around the principle of what he calls “susceptibility,” which generates three crucial reformist features: an acute sensitivity to suffering of all kinds (both animal and human), a relentless unmaking and remaking of systemic constructs, and ultimately a recasting of traditional notions of political sovereignty by radically distributing it throughout the natural and human world.

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