In Pursuit of Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Participatory Politics ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Public Instruction ◽  
The French Revolution

In pursuit of politics offers a new interpretation of debates over education and politics in the early years of the French Revolution. Following these debates from the 1760s to the early years of the Republic (1792-94), and putting well-known works in dialogue with previously-neglected sources, it situates education at the center of revolutionary contests over citizenship, participatory politics, and representative government.Education was central to how people thought about what was possible, desirable, and achievable in eighteenth-century France. With that in mind, In pursuit of politics uses the debates over education as a window onto one of history’s most dramatic periods of political uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and ambition. It weaves together debates taking place among Enlightenment writers, philosophes, royal and institutional administrators and, later, among revolutionary legislators, private citizens, political clubs, and provincial schoolmasters. This book explores the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, highlights the emergence of “public instruction” as a revolutionary pedagogy, and allows us to think in new ways about how the citizens and statesmen of eighteenth-century France tried to navigate modern politics at their tumultuous start.

The Archaeology of the French Revolution

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both nationalism and archaeology as a professional discipline. The aim of this chapter is to show how this apparent coincidence was not accidental. This discussion will take us into uncharted territory. Despite the growing literature on archaeology and nationalism (Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996a; Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998), the relationship between the two during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has yet to be explored. The analysis of how the past was appropriated during this era of the revolutions, which marked the dawn of nationalism, is not helped by the specialized literature available on nationalism, as little attention has been paid to these early years. Most authors dealing with nationalism focus their research on the mid to late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideas that emerged during the era of the revolutions bore fruit and the balance between civic and ethnic nationalism (i.e. between a nationalism based on individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation and another built on the common history and culture of the members of the nation) definitively shifted towards the latter. The reluctance to scrutinize the first years of nationalism by experts in the field may be a result of unease in dealing with a phenomenon which some simply label as patriotism. The term nationalism was not often used at the time. The political scientist Tom Nairn (1975: 6) traced it back to the late 1790s in France (it was employed by Abbé Baruel in 1798). However, its use seems to have been far from common, to the extent that other scholars believed it appeared in 1812. In other European countries, such as England, ‘nationalism’ was first employed in 1836 (Huizinga 1972: 14). Despite this disregard for the term itself until several decades later, specialists in the Weld of nationalism consider the most common date of origin as the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution as the key event in its definition.

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Ries
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
State Terror ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

Hellenism in the Enlightenment

2009 ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This article moves past the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and, in particular, to the French Revolution, which crystallized an important, if not fully understood, moment in the history of Hellenism. It shows how the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the inspiration for so many of the French revolutionaries, were simultaneously proto-democratic and pro-Spartan. In this respect, Rousseau marks a complex breakthrough in the political traditions of Hellenism, which were, for much of European history until the eighteenth century, anti-democratic and pro-Spartan.

Rights After the Revolutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Model State ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

Sans-Culottes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The French Revolution

This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, this book examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, the book opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.

Frenchmen and Francophiles in New Spain from 1760 to 1810

1957 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Houdaille
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
History Books ◽  
The French Revolution

IT is often said that the French Revolution and the ideas of the philosophers of the eighteenth century were of great influence in Latin America and that they constituted the intellectual motivation of its movements toward independence.This idea is presented in the majority of elementary history books. It is worthy of note that in the national hymn of the Republic of Honduras, one of the stanzas lauds the work of the Convention and mentions Danton.However, some years ago a French historian, Marius André, published a rather short essay, La fin de l’Empire Espagnol des Indes, in which he attempted to demonstrate that the independence of Spanish America was achieved by a group of conservatives who were frightened by the rebellion of Riego in Spain and who had no desire at any time to take the French Revolution as a model.

Charismatic Authority in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
Napoleon Bonaparte ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The French Revolution

The essay examines the emergence, during the eighteenth century, of what the author calls the figure of the charismatic revolutionary leader. It shows how an image of virtuous, powerful, redeemers and founder-figures became enormously popular in the Atlantic World during the 1760s. It goes on to consider the characteristics associated with these figures, tracing their roots in such sources as the Enlightenment cult of genius, the eighteenth-century worship of “les grands hommes,” new forms of celebrity, and the sentimental novel. It discusses the applicability of the Weberian definition of “charisma” to the figure, and distinguishes it carefully from monarchy. The essay then explores the consequences of this transformation for our understanding of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Military Trauma

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Military Trauma ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The French Revolution

The Old Regime army had been battered by serial defeats during the eighteenth century, and was open to proposals for reform. When 1789 came it was not army reforms that spread despair and trauma but the political situation created in the early years of the French Revolution: the assault on privilege, the ambivalent attitude of the king, the crisis of loyalty which this created for the officers, and the gaping void in the army’s ranks caused by desertion, emigration and the ideology of the Rights of Man. The defeats that followed the declaration of war added to despair, and it was only by resort to further traumatic measures—radicalizing recruitment, promoting officers from the ranks, and amalgamating the line army with the new volunteers, and ultimately the resort to Terror—that the fortunes of the army were turned around.

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