The French Revolution--that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy--continues to provoke a reevaluation of essential questions. This volume presents the research of a wide range of international scholars into those questions. 58 color illustrations, 10 halftones.
Winner of the 2022 London Hellenic Prize On the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution, an essential guide to the momentous war for independence of the Greeks from the Ottoman Empire. The Greek war for independence (1821–1830) often goes missing from discussion of the Age of Revolutions. Yet the rebellion against Ottoman rule was enormously influential in its time, and its resonances are felt across modern history. The Greeks inspired others to throw off the oppression that developed in the backlash to the French Revolution. And Europeans in general were hardly blind to the sight of Christian subjects toppling Muslim rulers. In this collection of essays, Paschalis Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas bring together scholars writing on the many facets of the Greek Revolution and placing it squarely within the revolutionary age. An impressive roster of contributors traces the revolution as it unfolded and analyzes its regional and transnational repercussions, including the Romanian and Serbian revolts that spread the spirit of the Greek uprising through the Balkans. The essays also elucidate religious and cultural dimensions of Greek nationalism, including the power of the Orthodox church. One essay looks at the triumph of the idea of a Greek “homeland,” which bound the Greek diaspora—and its financial contributions—to the revolutionary cause. Another essay examines the Ottoman response, involving a series of reforms to the imperial military and allegiance system. Noted scholars cover major figures of the revolution; events as they were interpreted in the press, art, literature, and music; and the impact of intellectual movements such as philhellenism and the Enlightenment. Authoritative and accessible, The Greek Revolution confirms the profound political significance and long-lasting cultural legacies of a pivotal event in world history.
Revolutionary France d is a vivid narrative history. It is also a radical reinterpretation of the period, and testimony to the power both of ideas and of personality in movements of the past.
This book argues that the introduction of popular sovereignty as the basis for government in France facilitated a dramatic transformation in international law in the eighteenth century.
The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution.
A riveting portrait of the radical and militant partisans who changed the course of the French Revolution A phenomenon of the preindustrial age, the sans-culottes—master craftsmen, shopkeepers, small merchants, domestic servants—were as hostile to the ideas of capitalist bourgeoisie as they were to those of the ancien régime that was overthrown in the first years of the French Revolution. For half a decade, their movement exerted a powerful control over the central wards of Paris and other large commercial centers, changing the course of the revolution. Here is a detailed portrait of who these people were and a sympathetic account of their moment in history.
Throughout his life Karl Marx commented on the French Revolution, but never was able to realize his project of a systematic work on this immense event. This book assembles for the first time all that Marx wrote on this subject. François Furet provides an extended discussion of Marx's thinking on the revolution, and Lucien Calvié situates each of the selections, drawn from existing translations as well as previously untranslated material, in its larger historical context. With his early critique of Hegel, Marx started moving toward his fundamental thesis: that the state is a product of civil society and that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois society. Furet's interpretation follows the evolution of this idea and examines the dilemmas it created for Marx as he considered all the faces the new state assumed over the course of the Revolution: the Jacobin Terror following the constitutional monarchy, Bonaparte's dictatorship following the parliamentary republic. The problem of reconciling his theory with the reality of the Revolution's various manifestations is one of the major difficulties Marx contended with throughout his work. The hesitation, the remorse, and the contradictions of the resulting analyses offer a glimpse of a great thinker struggling with the constraints of his own system. Marx never did elaborate a theory of an autonomous state, but he never stopped wrestling with the challenge to his doctrine posed by late eighteenth-century France, whose changing conditions and successive regimes prompted some of his most intriguing and, until now, unexplored thought.
"This concise introduction to the French Revolution explains the origins, development, and eventual decline of a movement that defines France to this day. Through an accessible chronological narrative, Sylvia Neely explains the complex events, conflicting groups, and rapid changes that characterized this critical period in French History. She traces the fundamental transformations in government and society that forced the French to come up with new ways of thinking about their place in the world and led to liberalism, conservatism, terrorism, and modern nationalism. All readers interested in France and revolutionary history will find this a rewarding read."--BOOK JACKET.