HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

"The French Revolution sparked an ideological debate which also brought Britain to the brink of revolution in the 1790s. Just as radicals wrote 'Jacobin' fiction, so the fear of rebellion prompted conservatives to respond with novels of their own; indeed, these soon outnumbered the Jacobin novels. This is the first survey of the full range of conservative novels produced in Britain during the 1790s and early 1800s. M. O. Grenby examines the strategies used by conservatives in their fiction, thus shedding new light on how the anti-Jacobin campaign was understood and organised in Britain. Chapters cover the representation of revolution and rebellion, the attack on the 'new philosophy' of radicals such as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and the way in which hierarchy is defended in these novels. Grenby's book offers an insight into the society which produced and consumed anti-Jacobin novels, and presents a case for re-examining these neglected texts."--BOOK JACKET.

With the 1790 publication of Reflections on the revolution in France, Edmund Burke became the first prominent intellectual to question critically the French Revolution and its course. Published to (almost) coincide with the bicentennial of both the Revolution and Burke's antirevolutionary opus, this book features essays by six scholars who approach both subjects from a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

This is an intellectual biography of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-85), who emerges as a central figure in the history of republican thought in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This book has two related aims. The first is to fill an important gap in historical scholarship. Although Mably, whose career as a historian and political theorist stretched from 1740 to the eve of the French Revolution, clearly played a major role in the intellectual history of his era, there has been no study of his life and thought in English for nearly seventy years. At the same time, the book seeks to advance a novel interpretation of Mably's thought. This study sets forth a different reading of Mably's thought, one that shows him to be a classical republican, in the sense this term has acquired in recent years for students of early modern political thought. Mably was the author of the most comprehensive and influential body of republican thought produced in eighteenth-century France - a claim with implications that go beyond the merely biographical. These are explored in a final chapter, which draws some conclusions about the character of classical republicanism in France and about the French contribution to the republican tradition in Europe.

"Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it an unworthy topic of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment." "Darnton here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, The Devil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places."--BOOK JACKET.

The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France offers the first full account of the role played by seventeenth and eighteenth-century English republican ideas in eighteenth-century France. Challenging some of the dominant accounts of the republican tradition, it revises conventional understandings of what republicanism meant in both Britain and France during the eighteenth-century, offering a distinctive trajectory as regards ancient and modern constructions and highlighting variety rather than homogeneity within the tradition.

"Between 1792 and 1814 London was home to a flourishing French emigre newspaper and periodical press that served both an exile audience and a pan-European francophone elite. Staffed by experienced journalists who had fled the revolution, the emigre press was commercially successful, politically influential, and a major bone of contention between Britain and France during the brief peace of 1802-3. Thereafter, it was hired to fight Britain's propaganda war against Napoleonic France on continental Europe, but nevertheless remained surprisingly independent of its Foreign Office patrons." "This study discusses the staffing, production and dissemination of emigre journals, arguing that emigre journalists were professional activists engaged in an international ideological and propaganda struggle, who combined journalism with a variety of other counter-revolutionary activities. It also describes how French campaigns to control the emigre papers influenced and even drove foreign policy, and explores the relations of the exile press with its British government patrons." "Later chapters trace the ideological development of the emigre press and its impact on France and Europe. They show how counter-revolutionary ideology evolved continuously throughout the 1790s, but positions became fixed and polarised after the accession of Bonaparte in 1799. By 1803 most emigres had returned to France, leaving an ideologically united, reactionary, anti-Bonaparte press which played a key, but ultimately counter-productive, role in the evolution of a Black Legend of Napoleon and the shaping of an ideological framework for Bourbonism." "This study will be of interest to all students of the press, European politics and the French revolution and counter-revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

"During the French Revolution most performances on the London stage were strictly censored, but political attitudes found indirect expression. New and popular genres like pantomime, Gothic drama, history plays, musical and spectacular entertainment, and, above all, melodrama provided metaphors for the hopes and fears inspired by the conflict in France and subsequent European wars." "George Taylor looks at how British drama and popular entertainment were affected by the ideas and events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. He argues that melodrama had its origins in this period, with certain Gothic villains displaying qualities attributed to Robespierre and Napoleon, and that recurrent images of incarceration and dispossession reflected fears of arbitrary persecution, from the tyranny of the Bastille to the Jacobin's Reign of Terror. By a cultural analysis of the popular entertainment and theatre performances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Taylor reveals issues of ideological conflict and psychological stress."--BOOK JACKET.

Pierre-Joseph Amoreux of Montpellier was a Linnaean naturalist, agronomist and bibliographer whose adult life spanned the last decades of the ancien régime, the French Revolution, the age of Napoleon and the Restoration. His autobiography, published here for the first time, provides the fullest first-person account of the life of a provincial man of science during this tumultuous period of history.

Telling the story of three overlooked revolutionary thinkers, Liberty in Their Names explores the lives and works of Olympe de Gouges, Sophie de Grouchy and Manon Roland. Sandrine Bergès examines the lives and writings of these trailblazing women philosophers, and their impact on philosophical thought during the French Revolution.

French playwright, novelist, activist, and journalist Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) passionately captured scenes of social injustice in pre-Revolutionary Paris in his prolific oeuvre but today remains an understudied writer. Mercier's rich writings speak powerfully to the sociopolitical problems that continue to afflict us as political leaders manipulate public debate and encourage absolutist thinking, deepening social divides. Available in print.

"Long before the Internet and advent of “social media,” even before the invention of photography…prints played a key role in the creation of modern political culture: prints helped people grasp the essence and significance of newsworthy events both near and far.” With 40 catalogue entries and 43 illustrations documenting prints and rare books made in France from 1770 to 1820, this scholarly publication offers new insights on art and ideas in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

"A Modern Maistre provides the first general account of the social and political thought of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), a founding author of Continental conservative philosophy. Commonly repudiated or ignored as an inconsistent and retrograde extremist, Maistre emerges on closer consideration as a subtle social theorist and a shaping force in modern intellectual history. Through his decisive effect upon Comte and Baudelaire, Maistre's influence far exceeds the narrow conservatism with which he is usually associated. Indeed, his critique of the Enlightenment bears an uncanny resemblance to central claims of postmodernist thought." "The guiding thread of Owen Bradley's analysis is Maistre's theory of sacrifice, a comparativist study of the ritualization of human barbarity in religious practices, punishments, wars, and revolutions."--BOOK JACKET.

The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent.

Why is postmodernist discourse so biased against the Enlightenment? Rather than avoiding this conflict, the contributors to this vibrant collection return to the philosophical roots of the Enlightenment, and do not hesitate to look at them through a postmodernist lens, engaging issues like anti-Semitism, Utopianism, colonial legal codes, and ideas of authorship.

Analyzes public opinion along with the radical press in Paris.

Drawing on twenty-five years of research, Darnton reveals the illegal book trade in rich detail. He explores the cultural and political significance of these "bad" books and introduces readers to three of the most influential illegal best-sellers: Therese Philosophe, an anti-clerical blend of sex and metaphysics; L'An 2440, an attack on the Old Regime in the form of a utopian fantasy set in a future Paris; and Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry, a deliciously scathing work of political slander with the king as its target. Substantial excerpts from these works, gathered at the end of the book, make excellent reading today and shed light on elements of our own political culture.

In 1789 French revolutionaries initiated a cultural experiment that radically transformed the most basic elements of French literary civilization--authorship, printing, and publishing. In a panoramic analysis, Carla Hesse tells how the Revolution shook the Parisian printing and publishing world from top to bottom, liberating the trade from absolutist institutions and inaugurating a free-market exchange of ideas.

Fourteen essays examine how the French Revolution has been represented in art, literature, and historical narratives from England, France, Germany, and the Caribbean.

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.

James Melton's lucid and accessible study examines the rise of 'the public' in eighteenth-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this is the first book-length, critical reassessment of what Habermas termed the 'bourgeois public sphere'.

Two centuries of sexism have hidden Staël's place in international history. Extensive archival research, and a complete contextual overview of Staël's writings, here restore Staël's canonical status as political philosopher, historian, European Romantic theorist, and Revolutionary.

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.

Many American readers like to regard Alexis de Tocqueville as an honorary American and democrat--as the young French aristocrat who came to early America and, enthralled by what he saw, proceeded to write an American book explaining democratic America to itself. Yet, as Lucien Jaume argues in this acclaimed intellectual biography, Democracy in America is best understood as a French book. For Tocqueville, America was a mirror for France, a way for Tocqueville to write indirectly about his own society, to engage French thinkers and debates, and to come to terms with France's aristocratic legacy. By taking Tocqueville's French context seriously, Jaume provides a powerful and surprising new interpretation of Democracy in America, as well as a fresh intellectual and psychological portrait of its author. Situating Tocqueville amid the crisis of authority in postrevolutionary France, Jaume shows that Tocqueville was an ambivalent promoter of democracy, a man who tried to reconcile himself to the coming wave, but who also believed that it would be necessary to preserve aristocratic values in order to protect liberty under democracy. Also available as an ebook.

Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. Also available in print.