This third volume in a much praised series on The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture examines the way in which the Revolution has been portrayed in European thought and its impact upon the development of political philosophy in the nineteenth century. Opening with the influence of Burke and other contemporaries of the Revolution and the ensuing debate over the question "Why the Terror?", this volume explores such diverse themes as the legacy of the Revolution on the political and social evolution of Germany, England, Italy and Russia; the crisis it brought about in the Catholic Church; and the difficulties encountered in determining the end of the Revolution. By showing that the upheaval in European politics and philosophy caused by the French Revolution continued to shape nations, peoples and thought, the texts brought together in this volume permit a better understanding of the event's extraordinary complexity.
France and Women, 1789-1914 is the first book to offer an authoritative account of women's history throughout the nineteenth century. James McMillan, author of the seminal work Housewife or Harlot, offers a major reinterpretation of the French past in relation to gender throughout these tumultuous decades of revolution and war. This book provides a challenging discussion of the factors which made French political culture so profoundly sexist and in particular, it shows that many of the myths about progress and emancipation associated with modernisation and the coming of mass politics do not stand up to close scrutiny. It also reveals the conservative nature of the republican left and of the ingrained belief throughout french society that women should remain within the domestic sphere. James McMillan considers the role played by French men and women in the politics, culture and society of their country throughout the 1800s.
The second of four volumes of papers from a set of major international international symposia commemorating the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. A discussion of the political culture of the Revolution itself, from the declaration of the principle of national sovereignty by the National Assembly until the creation of the Consulate.
This study examines how debates about history during the French Revolution informed and changed the nature of the British novel between 1790 and 1814. During these years, intersections between history, political ideology, and fiction, as well as the various meanings of the term "history" itself, were multiple and far reaching. Morgan Rooney elucidates these subtleties clearly and convincingly. While political writers of the 1790s--Burke, Price, Mackintosh, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others--debate the historical meaning of the Glorious Revolution as a prelude to broader ideological arguments about the significance of the past for the present and future, novelists engage with this discourse by representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West draw on Burkean historical discourse to characterize the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. For their part, reform-minded novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth travesty Burke's tropes and arguments so as to undermine and then redefine the category of history. As the Revolution crisis recedes, new novel forms such as Edgeworth's regional novel, Lady Morgan's national tale, and Jane Porter's early historical fiction emerge, but historical representation--largely the legacy of the 1790s' novel--remains an increasingly pronounced feature of the genre. Whereas the representation of history in the novel, Rooney argues, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, it is appropriated in the early nineteenth century by authors such as Edgeworth, Morgan, and Porter for other, often related ideological purposes before ultimately developing into a stable, nonpartisan, aestheticized feature of the form as practiced by Walter Scott. The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790-1814 demonstrates that the transformation of the novel at this fascinating juncture of British political and literary history contributes to the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realized in Scott's Waverley (1814).
The reordering of France into a new hierarchy of administrative and judicial regions in 1791 unleashed an intense rivalry among small towns for seats of authority, while raising vital issues for the vast majority of the French population. Here Ted Margadant tells a lively story of the process of politicization: magistrates, lawyers, merchants, and other townspeople who petitioned the National Assembly not only boasted of their own communities and denigrated rival towns, but also adopted revolutionary slogans and disseminated new political ideas and practices throughout the countryside. The history of this movement offers a unique vantage point for analyzing the regional context of town life and the political dynamics of bourgeois leadership during the French Revolution. Margadant explores the institutional crisis of the old regime that brought about the reordering, considers the rhetoric and politics of space in the first year of the Revolution, and examines the fate of small towns whose districts and law courts were suppressed. Combining descriptive narrative with statistical analysis and computer mapping, he reveals the important consequences of the new hierarchy for the urban development of France in the post-Revolutionary era.
What Is the Third Estate? was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the Abbé Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assembly's declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état. This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewell's insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyes's thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readers--educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphlet's highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyes's thought--and to the core of the revolutionary project itself. Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture.
The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack of January 7, 2015 shook French journalism to the core and reverberated around the world, triggering a cascade of responses from journalists, media outlets, cartoonists and caricaturists from diverse geographies of freedom of expression and journalistic cultures. This book is a multifaceted case study that describes and explains sameness and difference in diverse journalistic conceptualizations of the Charlie Hebdo affair from a comparative, international perspective. It explores how different journalistic traditions, cultures, worldviews and styles conceptualized and reacted to the clash between freedom of expression and respect for religious sentiments in the context of terrorism, where those sentiments are imposed on the media and secular societies through intimidation, coercion and violence. The book analyzes the political and cultural clashes between the core human right of freedom of expression, and rite of respect for religious sentiments, which is situated on the outer periphery of the human right of freedom of religion. It also examines how media outlets, editors, and cartoonists from different politico-cultural contexts and journalistic cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, addressed the delicate issue of Mohammed cartoons in general, and the problem of (re)publication of the controversial Charlie Hebdo Je Suis Charlie Mohammed cartoon, in particular.
Sacred Bonds of Solidarity is a history of the emergence of Jewish international aid and the language of "solidarity" that accompanied it in nineteenth-century France.
