1. Echoes

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Western World ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
19Th Century Literature ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
The French Revolution

‘Echoes’ examines the legacy of the French Revolution in the Western world through the lens of late 18th-century and 19th-century literature and culture. It considers writing by Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, but it is Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) that offers the most influential image that posterity has of the French Revolution. It took as its main theme the contrast between violent Paris and tranquil London. The images of this book define the French Revolution for many, and were reinforced elsewhere, for example in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). Despite enjoying all the romance of the French Revolution in books and plays, did people really know what caused it?

scholarly journals Church and State during the French Revolution in the Works of J.M. Zakher

2020 ◽  
Vol 162 (6) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
A.A. Kutuzova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
French Society ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Comprehensive Picture ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The Church ◽  
The French Revolution

The relations between the church and the state during the revolutionary events in France in the late 18th century were discussed based on the works of Jakov Mikhailovich Zakher (1893–1963), an outstanding Soviet historian. J.M. Zakher’s works cast light on a number of questions: the general position of the church; the frame of people’s mind in the pre-revolutionary period; the emergence and development of the antireligious struggle; the roles played by J. Foucher and A. Schomet, two most prominent public figures of the deсhristianization movement who triggered the most dramatic changes in the spiritual framework of the French society; etc. It was concluded that, despite a whole complex of studies have been performed on the French Revolution, the works of J.M. Zakher provide an important systematic coverage of the state-church relations in France during the 18th century. His legacy clearly preserves the “École russe” traditions, such as thoroughness, scrupulousness and attention to details, as well as the desire to create a vivid and comprehensive picture of the past.

Between Law and Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Joel Colón-Ríos
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Power Part ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Although the origins of the theory of constituent power are generally placed in the French Revolution, the different legal and institutional implications associated with it in late 18th-century France are seldom explored. This chapter engages in such an exploration by focusing on two institutions that were rejected by Sieyès: the imperative mandate and (decision-making) primary assemblies. Part I focuses on Sieyès’ proposals about constitution-making and constitutional reform after 1789. Part II of the chapter examines the role of citizen instructions in late 18th-century France. Sieyès saw citizen instructions as radically inconsistent with the very idea of representation; they were abolished very early in the Revolution. In so doing, it will be shown, French revolutionaries altered in fundamental ways not only the relationship between electors and representatives, but the very nature of what counts as an exercise of constituent power. Part III focuses on the role of primary assemblies during the more radical stages of the French Revolution (namely, 1792–1793). The approach to primary assemblies found in both in the Constitution of 1793, as well as in the Girondin Draft Constitution, reflected in important ways Rousseau’s conception of those entities as a key mechanism of democratic constitutional change. This approach to constitutional change will be contrasted with that of Sieyès, who saw primary assemblies as the site for the exercise of the much more modest ‘commissioning power’, the power to elect those seen as capable of identifying the nation’s constituent will.

2. Why it happened

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Single Event ◽  
French Society ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The French Revolution

Describing why the French Revolution happened poses challenges. The French Revolution was not a single event; it was a series of developments that stretched over a number of years beginning between 1787 and 1789. ‘Why it happened’ attempts to outline the causes of the French Revolution by looking at the events leading up to the end of the 1780s. This was a period of uncertainty and confusion. What role did the monarchy have in causing the initial disquiet? Were the seeds of disorder already present in French society in the late 18th century? How important was France’s financial difficulties in causing a crisis?

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

Nothing Personal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Right ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Dickens’s Neutral Philosophy of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 1123
Author(s):  
Ali Abdullah AL-Zuhairi
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Decent Life ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Full Power ◽  
French People ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper delves into Charles Dickens’s objectivity of the events of the French Revolution and his unique stand and transparency in his representation for the two great power rivals and their prolonged conflict. The pre-revolutionary period was remarkable for the tyranny, cruelty, Socioeconomic-Inequality, and Subjugation of the Barbarous aristocratic rule against the masses. Conversely, the post-revolutionary period underwent sweeping social and political chaos and the form of administration set after the revolution was not a democracy, as French people were fond of calling it, but a mischievous and shameful anarchy lasted from 1789 until 1799. This discussion is an attempt to analyze and sort out a complex of hostile relationships involving the aristocrats and the peasants of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’ universal appeal indicates that whoever is in authority, aristocracy or masses, will get lavishly tempted to practice their full power depressingly and be obsessed with the dilemma of the establishment of the supremacy and dictatorship at any cost ignoring other’s right in decent life , freedom ,and equal opportunity. As the novel advanced, oppression is shown to breed oppression; violence to beget violence, evil to provoke evil. Instead of progress there is something more like the catastrophic continuum and piling wreckage upon wreckage.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document