HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era.

Examines the lives and thought of three extraordinary black men who, as public intellectuals, traveled extensively throughout the 18th century Atlantic world. They embraced republican ideals of civic virtue and communal life, and so helped radicalize the calls for freedom that were emerging from the Enlightenment.

This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.

"The promises of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" did not extend to women, but with the publication of Blood Sisters, the voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution are finally restored to history."

Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did.

"Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enligtenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents - including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases - the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates."--BOOK JACKET.

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed as an event of world-historical importance. The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le systeme colonial devoilé (1814), provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Cesaire, Fanon, and Sartre.

This book examines the sudden and irreversible decline of France's Atlantic empire in the Age of Revolution, and shows how three major forces undermined the country's competitive position as an Atlantic commercial power. Those forces are: war, the anti-slavery movement and the French Revolution.

Presents 19 eyewitness accounts of the Haitian revolution, representing a variety of viewpoints.

The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of "competing inter-Americanisms" as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality and profit.

A critical reexamination of Carpeaux's bust Why Born Enslaved! and other nineteenth-century antislavery images--this book interrogates the treatment of the Black figure as a malleable political symbol and locus of exoticized beauty. It unpacks the sculpture's complex and sometimes contradictory engagement with an antislavery discourse.

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.

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) is perhaps best known today as a novelist, literary critic, and outspoken and independent thinker. Yet she was also a prominent figure in politics during the French Revolution. Biancamaria Fontana sheds new light on this often overlooked aspect of Staël's life and work, bringing vividly to life her unique experience as a political actor in a world where women had no place. During the Revolution, when the lives of so many around her were destroyed, she succeeded in carving out a unique path for herself and making her views heard, first by the powerful men around her, later by the European public at large.

Zalkind Hourwitz lived during one of the most pivotal periods in history. A Polish Jew born in 1752, Hourwitz moved to France in 1774 and entered the intellectual and political life of ancien regime Paris. Frances Malino provides a vivid description of this compelling and exotic figure who fits none of the traditional portraits of eighteenth-century Jews.

This major work follows the reshaping of Franco-Jewish identity from legal emancipation after the French revolution through the creation in 1860 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the first international Jewish organization devoted to the struggle for Jewish rights throughout the world.

In this moving microhistory of nineteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica, Matthew J. Smith details the intimate connections that illuminate the conjoined histories of both places after slavery. The frequent movement of people between Haiti and Jamaica in the decades following emancipation in the British Caribbean brought the countries into closer contact and influenced discourse about the postemancipation future of the region. In the stories and genealogies of exiles and politicians, abolitionists and diplomats, laborers and merchants--and mothers, fathers, and children--Smith recognizes the significance of nineteenth-century Haiti to regional development.

This book examines the memoir of Toussaint Louverture a former slave, general in the French army, and leader of the Haitian Revolution and the memoir of his son, Isaac. The two texts are read as examples of how black men thought of themselves as men (citizens) and, therefore, how they expressed their masculinity, at that historical moment, as experiences of mourning and loss.

From the beginning, French revolutionaries imagined their transformation as a universal one that must include Muslims, Europe's most immediate neighbors. They believed in a world in which Muslims could and would be French citizens, but they disagreed violently about how to implement their visions of universalism and accommodate religious and social difference.

When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. This paradox--the need both to accept and to refuse sexual difference in politics--was the constitutive condition of the long struggle by women to gain the right of citizenship. In this new book, remarkable in both its findings and its methodology, award-winning historian Joan Wallach Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox of sexual difference. Focusing on four French feminist activists--Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen during the French Revolution; Jeanne Deroin, a utopian socialist and candidate for legislative office in 1848; Hubertine Auclert, the suffragist of the Third Republic; and Madeleine Pelletier, a psychiatrist in the early twentieth century who argued that women must "virilize" themselves in order to gain equality--Scott charts the repetitions and variations in feminist history. Again and again, feminists tried to prove they were individuals, according to the standards of individuality of their day. Again and again, they confronted the assumption that individuals were men. But when sexual difference was taken to be a fundamental difference, when only men were regarded as individuals and thus as citizens, how could women also be citizens? The imaginative and courageous answers feminists offered to these questions are the subject of this engaging book.

Includes an extensive bibliography of French women authors, 1789-1800.

"Based on a true story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that makes her suddenly conscious of her race - and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe." "A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine, the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist, and, as John Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind." An inspiration for Fowles's acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ourika will astonish and haunt modern readers."--BOOK JACKET

This book provides a history of the French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe from 1789 to 1802. Examining political conflict between white factions, as well as economic, social, and racial tensions, it argues that metropolitan news, ideas, language, and political culture played a key role in shaping the colonial revolution.

This book examines the ways in which a minority of primarily white, male, French philanthropists used their social standing and talents to improve the lives of peoples of African descent in Saint-Domingue during the crucial period of the Haitian Revolution.

One of the most dramatic images of the French Revolution is of Parisian market women dragging cannons as they marched on Versailles and returned with bread and the king. These market women sold essential foodstuffs to the residents of the capital but, equally important, through their political and economic engagement, held great revolutionary influence.

This is the first historical survey ever conducted on prostitution at the time of the French Revolution. This is a key period to understand the place of prostitutes in contemporary politics.
It also marks an unprecedented turning point by decriminalizing this activity while maintaining police control over the women involved with the result of making prostitutes, "infamous women" of the Ancien Régime and diminished citizens of the Republic. At the crossroads between the history of women and gender, the history of the French Revolution and the contributions of sociology and political science, this work revisits the fantasies and prejudices that all too often summarize the history of Revolutionary prostitution.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the important andparadoxical relation between women and the French Revolution. Although the maleleaders of the Revolution depended on the women's active militant participation,they denied to women the rights they helped to establish. At the same time thatwomen were banned from the political sphere, "woman" was transformed into anallegorical figure which became the very symbol of (masculine) Liberty andEquality. This volume analyzes how the revolutionary process constructed a newgender system at the foundation of modern liberal culture.

"There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancient Regime examines the paradox of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. Black slaves who came to France as domestic servants of colonial masters challenged their servitude in courts. On the basis of the Freedom Principle, a judicial maxim granting freedom to any slave who set foot in the kingdom, hundreds of slaves won their freedom. Sue Peabody shows how the political culture of late Bourbon France created ample opportunities for contestation over the meaning of freedom. Men of letters used the metaphor of slavery to critique the supposed despotism of Louis XV and Louis XVI. In the second half of the century, courts and the crown colluded to erect a series of laws prohibiting the entry of blacks into the metropolis. "There Are No Slaves in France" shows how both antislavery and anti-black discourses emerged from the tension between France's reification of liberty and its dependence on colonial slavery.

On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus bringing to an end the only successful slave revolution in history and transforming the colony of Saint-Domingue into the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere. The historical significance of the Haitian Revolution has been addressed by numerous scholars, but the importance of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon has only begun to be explored.

"In this extraordinarily rich book, Madelyn Gutwirth examines over one hundred prints and paintings, dozens of texts, and the work of a great many cultural critics in order to consider how gender politics were played out during a highly volatile era. Finding evidence of a crisis in gender relations during the eighteenth century, she traces its evolution in the politics of rococo art, demographic trends, plans for the control of prostitution, maternal nursing and wet-nursing practices, folklore, the salon, and in the theater of Diderot and the polemics of Rousseau." --BOOK JACKET.

Unlike the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going well beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, Nick Nesbitt argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom.

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society.

During the French Revolution, hundreds of domestic and working-class women of Paris were interrogated, examined, accused, denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for their rebellious and often hostile behavior. Here, for the first time in English translation, Dominique Godineau offers an illuminating account of these female revolutionaries.

The abolitions of slavery in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793 and in revolutionary France in 1794 were the first dramatic blows against an institution that had shaped the Atlantic world for three centuries and affected the lives of millions of people. Based on extensive archival research, You Are All Free provides the first complete account of the dramatic events that led to these epochal decrees, and also to the destruction of Cap Fran ais, the richest city in the French Caribbean, and to the first refugee crisis in the United States.