History

"In this major study, John Hardman examines the political system in France in the closing years of the Ancient Regime. Although he considers the political origins of the Revolution, his main emphasis is not on the coming storm but on the way the country was governed under the system so soon to be swept away. The questions he addresses - all of them basic, yet many are being answered here for the first time - include what the political institutions and underlying power structures were; who operated and controlled them; how and why ministers were appointed and dismissed; where and how decisions were taken; how far the royal administration stemmed from the king himself; and what his roles in theory and practice actually were."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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. Lüsebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols' functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups. To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.

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.

In Goodness beyond Virtue, one of the leading scholars of the French Revolution reconceptualizes Jacobin politics and philosophy and rescues them from recent postmodernist condescension. Higonnet shows Jacobinism's variety and flexibility, as it emerged in the lived practices of exceptional and ordinary people in varied historical situations.

Ending the Terror makes accessible for the first time to an English-speaking readership a major revisionist assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution. The months that followed the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 mark not just a turning point in the history of the Revolution: "Thermidor" is also a symbolic moment that came to haunt the subsequent revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By this date the Terror as a system of power was discredited, and the engineers of the Terror were confronting the problem of how to dismantle it without repudiating the aims of the Revolution itself and its work. Professor Baczko analyzes the Terror in detail through the political history of the French National Assembly, and looks at the broader issues of the political culture of Revolutionary France.

This Reader introduces students to a wide range of modern scholarship on the French Revolution. The readings are grouped into five categories: Interpretations and Debates, Socio-Cultural Approaches, Gender in the Public Sphere, Revolutionary Politics, and The Crowd, Terror, and Counter-Terror.

The French Revolutionaries waged total war. Mobilising the largest army yet seen in Europe, they conquer most of the continent with amazing speed. Their war was one of movement, aggression and action, punctuated by some of the most dramatic battles in history - Valmy, Jemappes, Fleurus,Arcola, Marengo and Hohenlinden, to name only a few. They also sought ideological conquest, forcing the people they liberated to be free in the French manner whether they liked it or not. The military and political progress of the Revolutionary armies is narrated and analysed in this important newstudy, with special attention paid to the legacy of the old regime, the remarkable resilience displayed by the old regime powers, the reasons for the revolutionaries' success on land - and the reasons for their failure at sea. The Revolutionary wars brought France hegemony in Europe but at aterrible cost. Inside the country, the war brought the end of pluralism, the destruction of the Monarchy, civil war and the Terror, paving the way for military dictatorship and burdening the country with an enduring legacy of instability. This interaction between events at the front and at home isdiscussed in full. Special attention is also paid to the devastation inflicted by the Revolutionary armies as they rampaged across the continent, together with the nationalist resistance movements they provoked. From County Mayo to Constantinople, no part of Europe was unaffected. It was not theFrench Revolution that created the modern world but the French Revolutionary wars.

This book presents ten selections from the most importantscholarship on the French Revolution over the past quarter century,introduced and contextualized for student readers. Historians typically categorize the historiography of the FrenchRevolution according to each author's approval or disapproval ofthe Revolution, political agenda (for example Marxist, liberal,conservative, or feminist), or methodology (for example social,political, or cultural history). This book demonstrates theinadequacy of these categories of analysis for a nuancedunderstanding of the Revolution and emphasizes the surprisingconnections between historians typically seen simply as opponentsin a debate. In its thorough introduction, The FrenchRevolution: The Essential Readings demonstrates the success ofan eclectic, interdisciplinary approach to this central period inmodern European history and the larger relevance of thehistoriography to the humanities more generally.

This classic work on the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era has been thoroughly updated to reflect the most recent scholarship on a magnificently complex epoch. The text is appropriate for the upper level history course titled French Revolution and Napoleonic Era. Its primary purpose is to give undergraduate students the generally accepted "story" of the Era and furnish them with the basic knowledge to put in context the more sophisticated works listed in the bibliography.

Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire. The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms--at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing--were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues.

From 1789 onwards there sprang up a fervent revolutionary cult of Rousseau, and at each stage in the subsequent unfolding of the drama of the Revolution historians have seen Rousseau's influence at work. Mrs McDonald seeks in this study to trace the development of the cult and to define the nature of the influence by means of a detailed survey of the appeals made to the authority of Rousseau in books, pamphlets and accounts of speeches put forth by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary writers between 1762 and 1791, and she reaches conclusions more complex than those which have been commonly accepted. She is able to show that most of the writers on the revolutionary side who invoked Rousseau's name did so in order to put forward their own views and used arguments that were often in direct contradiction with those which he had formulated; the Social Contract was not widely read in these years, and those revolutionaries who did actually study it were often critical of what they found there. By contrast, the most careful analysis of Rousseau's political theory is to be found in the pamphlets written by aristocratic critics of the Revolution in protest against the misuse to which his name had been put.

The effects of the French Revolution reached far beyond the confines of France itself. The Ottoman Empire, ancient ally and major trading partner of France, was not immune from the repercussions of the 'Age of Revolutions', especially since it was home to permanent French communities with a certain legal autonomy. French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire examines, for the first time, the political and cultural impact of the French Revolution on Franco-Ottoman relations, as well as on the French communities of the Ottoman Empire. The modern interpretation of revolutionary ideological expansionism is strongly influenced by the famous propaganda decree of 19 November 1792 which promised 'fraternity and help to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty', as well as the well-studied efforts to export the Revolution into the territories conquered by the revolutionary armies and to the various Sister Republics. Against all expectations, however, French revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire exhibited neither a 'crusading mentality' nor a heightened readiness to use force in order to achieve ideological goals. Instead, as this volume shows, in matters of diplomacy as well as in the administration of French expatriate communities, revolutionary policies were applied in an extremely circumspect fashion. The focus on the effects of the French regime change outside of France offers valuable new insights into the revolutionary process itself, which will revise common assumptions about French revolutionary diplomacy. In addition, Pascal Firges takes a close look at the establishment of the new political culture of the French Revolution within the transcultural context of the French expatriate communities of the Ottoman Empire, which serves as a thought-provoking point of comparison for the emergence and development of French revolutionary political culture.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the important and paradoxical relation between women and the French Revolution. Although the male leaders 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 that women were banned from the political sphere, "woman" was transformed into an allegorical figure which became the very symbol of (masculine) Liberty and Equality. This volume analyzes how the revolutionary process constructed a new gender system at the foundation of modern liberal culture.