HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine (1762-1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power.

Dress is the most fleeting of the arts, subject to the arbitrary dictates of fashion. It is also, however, the art that relates most closely to our lives, both as a reflection of our self-image and, in the words of Louis XIV, as 'the mirror of history'. This handsome book examines English and French fashion from 1750 to 1820 by studying the art of the period, and it shows how changes in dress reflected social, political and cultural developments in the two countries. Closely analysing a wide range of visual sources - including portraits and history painting, sculpture, drawings, caricatures and fashion plates, by such artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, David and Ingres - Aileen Ribeiro describes the development of fashion during this period.

This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime.

Historians, including Arlette Farge and Robert Darnton, retrace the history of a mythical monument that symbolizes both the fall of the monarchy and the foundation of the republic. Includes many illustrations from museum holdings.

Outram takes the body as the central focus of her book and the way that people perceived and constructed the world of experience in which they lived at a time of profound upheaval. Her choice of the body may at first seem unusual and not at all the way that histories are written. This is her central point. For although the body proves to be an enduring social referent, powerfully, provocatively persistent in contemporary society, it has, she argues, become trivialised. In this sense it has been lost to the crowds of modern politics and is deprived of the public authority it once possessed.

This is a history of the French Revolution told through the study of images of the body as they appeared in the popular literature of the time, showing how these images were at the very center of the metaphoric language used to describe the revolution in progress. The author draws upon some 2,000 texts, pamphlets, announcements, opinions, accounts, treatises, and journals to exhume the textual reality of the Revolution, the body of its history. The deployment of bodily images - the degeneracy of the nobility, the impotence of the king, the herculean strength of the citizenry, the goddess of politics appearing naked like Truth, the bleeding wounds of the Republican martyrs - allowed political society to represent itself at a pivotal moment in its history.

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life.

"From the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the coming of Napoleon ten years later, the commemoration of the dead was a recurring theme during the French Revolution. Based on extensive research across a wide range of sources, this book is the first comprehensive study of the cultural politics of commemoration in Revolutionary France. It examines what remembrance meant to the people who staged and attended ceremonies, raised monuments, listened to speeches and purchased souvenirs of the Revolution's dead. It explores the political purposes these commemorations served and the conflicts they gave rise to, while also examining the cultural traditions they drew upon. Above all, it asks what private ends did the Revolution's rites of memory serve? What consolation did commemoration bring to those the dead left behind, and what conflicts did this relationship between the public and private dimensions of remembrance give rise to?"--BOOK JACKET.

This exhibition catalog explores images of Marat and Corday and their fatal encounter from French revolutionary prints to 20th century lithographs.

Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, while acknowledging the seminal contribution of Daniel Mornet’s Les origens intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1935), he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier goes beyond Mornet’s work, not be revising that classic text but by raising questions that would not have occurred to its author.
Chartier’s second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789.

There was no time in history when the politics of fashion was more fraught than during the French Revolution. In the 1790s almost any article of clothing could be scrutinized for evidence of one's political affiliation. Elizabeth Amann shows that in France, England, and Spain, daring dress became a way of taking a stance toward the social and political upheaval of the period. France is the centerpiece of the story, not just because of the significance of the Revolution but also because of the speed with which its politics and fashions shifted. Dandyism in France represented an attempt to recover a political center after the extremism of the Terror, while in England and Spain it offered a way to reflect upon the turmoil across the Channel and Pyrenees.

Robert traces the rise of a "judicial theater" in which plays denounced criminals by name, even forcing them, in some cases, to perform their transgressions before a jeering public. Likewise, legal reformers intentionally modeled trial proceedings on dramatic representations and went so far as to recommend that judges mimic the sentimental judgment of spectators and that lawyers seek private lessons from actors.

From the outset of Napoleon's career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country's history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the "economy of glory" Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution. The author reveals that the economy of glory was both egalitarian, creating the possibility of an aristocracy based on merit rather than wealth, and traditional, being deeply embedded in the history of aristocratic chivalry and the monarchy--making it the heart of Napoleon's politics of fusion.

Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Mona Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. Festivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revolution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew.

Legacey explores how a new burial culture emerged in Paris as a result of both revolutionary fervor and public health concerns, resulting in the construction of park-like cemeteries on the outskirts of the city and a vast underground ossuary. Making Space for the Dead describes how revolutionaries placed the dead at the center of their republican project of radical reinvention of French society and envisioned a future where graveyards would do more than safely contain human remains; they would serve to educate and inspire the living.

"Marie-Antoinette has been idolized as embodying the height of eighteenth-century French style, vilified as the spark that ignited the French revolution, and romanticized as France's martyred queen. This book departs from such traditional interpretations of the notorious queen's reign and her historical impact and chooses to reflect on the humanistic aspects of her private realm, her gardens at Trianon, and her passionate curiosity for the natural world." "Marie-Antoinette's entire private domain and its story are told in beautiful photographic detail by Francois Halard and accompanied by well-researched texts by Christian Duvernois for the first time since its recent renovation."--BOOK JACKET.

Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. Drawing on new sources, he describes how she refused to prioritize the aggressive foreign policy of her mother, Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance.

Napoleon I employed a myriad of media through which to promote his propaganda and his universal hegemony. Classical Rome - home to the great Caesars - was central to his ambitious visions for the transformation of Paris into an imperial metropolis of unprecedented magnitude. Exploring the interrelationship between antiquity, the display of power and the reinvention of Paris, this volume evaluates how the Roman world and post-antique exploitations of Rome influenced Napoleonic Paris, and how Napoleon promoted his authority by appropriating Rome's triumphal architecture and its associated symbolism to relocate 'Rome' in his own times. The volume shows how consideration of Louis XIV's legacy is crucial to understanding the evolution of Napoleon's fascination with imperial Rome. It also charts Napoleon's manipulation of the populist rhetoric of Republican France (and Rome) as he moved from being a general fighting for the Revolutionary cause to become the 'absolute' ruler of a new empire.

"In the turbulent political and social landscape of Revolutionary France, dress played a major role in defining and displaying new identities. What people wore was, in fact, a vital symbol of their allegiances and beliefs. Drawing on a wide range of documentary and visual sources, this book offers a vivid picture of the highly charged politics of Revolutionary appearances. The author explores the dynamic complexity of the new socio-political world, where the identification of who stood for what was such an urgent, if vexed, issue: where identical items of dress could stand for opposing political ideologies, where a variety of institutions - from local societies to the national assembly - tried to define the meanings associated with clothing, and where the clothes a person wore could seal their fate. Tracing the stories surrounding the liberty cap, the different manifestations of official dress, the tricolore cockade and the sans-culotte provides a new and exciting insight into the complexities and uncertainties that made up life in Revolutionary France and the political culture that it created."--BOOK JACKET.

This book challenges widely held assumptions about both the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images. After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways. The triumph of revolutionary portraiture also marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals.

Parmi les questions auxquelles l'histoire de la Révolution française n'a pas donné de réponses définitives, la définition " du " politique demeure toujours irrésolue. Cette indécision est d'autant plus grande que l'historiographie actuelle ne s'intéresse plus seulement aux " grands " hommes mais qu'elle prend en compte les multiples interventions dans le " domaine politique ".

The search for a republican morality provides an exciting new study of an important event in the French Revolution and a defining moment in the career of its principal actor, Maximilien Robespierre, the Festival of the Supreme Being. This day of national celebration was held to inaugurate the new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, and while traditionally it has been dismissed as a compulsory political event, this book redefines its importance as a hugely popular national event.

This is the first study of French theater and war at a time of global revolutions, colonial violence, and radical social transformation. Demonstrating how war and soldiering catalyzed new drama types and fostered theater's expansion into France's geographical and social peripheries, the study also shows how theater emerged as a dynamic space in which military practices could be re-imagined. Print copy available.