The Devil by the Tail

The Mentelles ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph Paul Runyon
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
European Politics ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
The Future ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Vivid Description ◽  
The French Revolution

In January 1820 Charlotte writes Rosalie Saugrain of St. Louis, a friend since their years in Gallipolis, complaining of her unhappiness with a lifelong struggle "not just with fortune, but with poverty." A visitor to Lexington in 1823 records a vivid description of the Mentelles. Charlotte "has a masculine, weather-beaten face," and dresses in the plainest fashion. He is impressed by her intelligence and knowledge, particularly of American and European politics. "She is a very fine Belles Lettres scholar and plays in a mastery manner on the violin." He finds her "gay and cheerful, sometimes playful," but far removed from normal womanly pursuits. She dresses like a man. Waldemar, "a lively little Frenchman," appears "as excessively effeminate as Madame is masculine." From 1832 to 1836, Mary Todd (born in 1818), resides at the Mentelle school except for weekends, later calling it "my early home." Her mother had died and she did not get along with her father's second wife. Charlotte Mentelle becomes a substitute mother for her, exerting a profound influence on the future Mrs. Lincoln, regaling her and other students with tales, not always true, of her escape from the French Revolution.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
George Sand ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Historical Agency ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

Class Struggle and Culture Wars in the Springtime of the French Revolution, Year II (1794)

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-235
Author(s):  
Sophie Wahnich ◽  
Alexander Dunlop ◽  
Sylvia Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Political Community ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract In the spring of Year II (1794), the future of French society was uncertain. This article looks at the response to the uncertainty of three members of the Committee on Public Safety, who discussed the need to choose between a revolutionary political community and civil war, even as they disagreed about what form the future republic should take.

François-René de Chateaubriand

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marie Roulin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Future ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
New Literature ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Chateaubriand’s seminal debate with de Staël at the dawn of the nineteenth century around perceptions of literary history and the orientations of modern literature was largely focused on what aspects of this Enlightenment legacy should be retained or rejected. A contemporary of Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand was marked, like them, by the experience of the French Revolution. This sets him apart from the Romantics of the ‘battle ofHernani’ (1830), for whom the Revolution was a pre-existing narrative. For Chateaubriand’s generation the Revolution was crucial, posing ontological, political, and metaphysical questions—how could that ‘river of blood’ be crossed, to borrow one of his recurrent metaphors? What should the new literature be like, and for what type of society in revolutionized France? Chateaubriand’s Romanticism was first of all an answer to these questions, an elegiac adieu to a past forever lost and an uneasy questioning of the future.

FAVIER'S HEIRS: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE SECRET DU ROI

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARY SAVAGE
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The One ◽  
Unofficial Diplomacy ◽  
The French Revolution

In contrast to the prevailing historiographical consensus, this essay will seek to demonstrate that there was a widespread and persistent concern with foreign policy in the early years of the French Revolution, the product of the interplay between inherited diplomatic assumptions on the one hand and revolutionary politics and values on the other. In particular, it will show how and why public opinion in France after 1789 abandoned its pre-revolutionary concern with Britain, Russia, and the global balance of commercial power in favour of Austria, the émigrés, and the security of the frontiers. In this light, considerable attention will be given to the development of Austrophobia in the period. Rooted in traditional French distrust of the Habsburg dynasty and reinforced by widespread opposition to the Austrian alliance of 1756, this would find its most virulent expression in the popular myth of a sinister counter-revolutionary ‘Austrian committee’ headed by Marie-Antoinette. The argument of the essay will turn upon the links between the emergence of that myth and the popularization of the ideas of Louis XV's unofficial diplomacy – the secret du roi – and its outspoken apologist Jean-Louis Favier. Adopted by various disciples after his death in 1784, Favier's ideas gained in popularity as the menace of counter-revolutionary invasion – aroused in particular by the emperor's reoccupation of the Austrian Netherlands in July 1790 – began to dominate the popular forums of revolutionary politics. They would ultimately help to generate a political climate in which the Brissotins could engineer an almost universally popular declaration of war against Austria less than two years after the revolutionaries had declared peace and friendship to the entire world. From this perspective, the growth of Austrophobia between 1789 and 1792 and its profound influence on the development of revolutionary foreign policy might usefully be described as the triumph of ‘Favier's heirs’.

Remembering and Forgetting the French Revolution: Memories and Memoirs

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-180
Author(s):  
Jeff Horn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

For Rousselin, one of the chief lessons of the French Revolution was that fundamental change took time. He believed that it was the speed and the depth of the crisis of 1793–94 that led to violence. What helped a Revolutionary become a liberal was an acceptance of a slower pace of change. Rousselin used his position and then his time in retirement to try to refine his legacy and avoid further controversy. His choices about what to write and what to publish aimed to propagate a particular vision of the Revolution and his role in it. He wanted to be remembered as a victim not a perpetrator of the Terror. But he could not stop challenges to that vision from appearing; it was love for family that convinced him to retire from the spotlight to contemplate the past and hope for the future.

The Directory and the Future of France's Colonial Possessions in Africa, 1795–1802

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-497
Author(s):  
Pernille Røge
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Saint Louis ◽  
The Future ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract This article examines how French revolutionaries envisioned a republican imperial future in Africa between the decreed abolition of slavery and its restoration under Napoléon. Drawing on proposals within the Ministry of the Marine and the Colonies and analyzing French activities in the Senegambian holdings of Saint-Louis and Gorée, the author argues that, although the French Revolution included numerous creative imperial processes vis-à-vis Africa, they did not amount to an imperial revolution in their own right. Cet article étudie la manière dont les révolutionnaires français envisageaient un avenir impérial et républicain en Afrique entre le décret d'abolition de l'esclavage du 4 février 1794 et sa restauration sous Napoléon. S'appuyant sur des archives manuscrites du ministère de la Marine et des Colonies et analysant les activités françaises à Saint-Louis et Gorée, il démontre que, bien que la Révolution française ait été synonyme de processus impériaux novateurs vis-à-vis de l'Afrique, ces derniers ne constituaient pas pour autant une véritable révolution impériale.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

The introductory chapter opens up the question of how to approach the aftermath of the Terror. Most of revolutionary historiography is focused on the origins of the event, not on its aftermath. This chapter argues that there is much to learn about the French Revolution and its relevance to our own times by studying the aftermath of the Terror. In articulating the book’s approach to the subject, the chapter draws on the recent literature on transitional justice and trauma, as well as on the much earlier ideas of Edgar Quinet. Approaching the aftermath of the Terror invites us to consider how those who had experienced revolutionary violence faced the past in the context of a movement oriented toward the future.

Revolutionary Lyric

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-156
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter examines a set of four poems, written between 1921 and 1924, that combine a certain abstraction of language with visceral violence. Mandelstam develops a set of techniques for his lyric poetry that will permanently enrich his poetics in exploring new themes such as guilt and violence; in another poem he creates an emblem to represent generational warfare, combining the highly pictorial and the abstract, and reflecting on questions of whether the ends justify the means; in a third, Mandelstam uses allegory and emblems to represent, in his own way, the analogy between the French Revolution and the Terror widespread in early Bolshevik culture, interrogating the historiography to see whether the past is of any use in predicting the future. In a eulogy to Lenin, the question of Russia’s direction remains acutely open-ended.

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