The New Regime

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Crook
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Administrative Framework ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Liberal Perspective ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter aims to establish the first years of the French Revolution as a radical experiment in the practice of democracy, and to overturn the ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ perspective that many historians have adopted. Following the wholesale destruction of the ancien régime and the principles laid down in 1789 for the creation of a replacement, a new political culture emerged. The administrative framework that was rapidly instituted was by no means decentralized, but it proved incapable of controlling the great explosion of political activity and discussion, which subverted rather than supported the foundation of representative government. The analysis of elections, clubs and newspapers that flourished nationwide demonstrates these unruly dynamics of revolutionary citizenship, which the constitutional monarchy struggled to circumscribe. Despite the concerted efforts made to close this period of upheaval with the inception of the Constitution in the autumn of 1791, the Revolution was far from over.

The Novel Wars of 1790–1804

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Mee
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
English Novel ◽  
British System ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter explores the novel in the period 1790–1804. The French Revolution profoundly shaped the English novel in the 1790s. Originally, the Revolution was welcomed by sections of the reading public, many of whom regarded it as bringing France into line with the liberty under law perceived as the British system of constitutional monarchy. Opinion began to change significantly after Edmund Burke's attack on the Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Accounts of the novels written in the decade after Burke's assault on the Revolution are now routinely organized around the two poles of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘Anti-Jacobin’ fiction. Certainly, the novel in this decade did find itself shaped by the ‘war of ideas’, but—like the pamphlet war itself—it was neither conducted as a straightforward exchange of fire between two distinct ideological camps, nor was it untouched by developments in the novel as a form.

Shaping Institutions

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
Clive Emsley
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Public Spirit ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Government ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the period of the French Revolution, which saw a greater emphasis on the creation of police institutions and particularly fostered developments in political policing designed to check any one or any group that appeared to threaten the state. The revolution, the wars, and the politics of the period helped to shape the police institutions of Europe for the generations that spanned the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. They also contributed to the extension of what the French term haute police and which, in 1841, had its essence defined by a prefect as ‘everything related to the security of the king and of the state and also related to public spirit, opinions manifested, news that circulates as it arrives, and the men known to be opposed to the government’. Successive regimes in France—revolutionary, Napoleonic, Restoration—developed political police to investigate internal and external threats; opponents of the French acted similarly. Political police were developed to cope with threats to what increasingly resembled the modern state, and so too were ideas and practices regarding police who could prevent crime in the streets and countryside. At the same time, popular policing and the victim’s or community’s investigations and pursuits still continued, as did victim and community discretion about how to treat a suspect.

Playing with the Nation: Napoleon and the Culture of Nationalism

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Alter
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Unit ◽  
Napoleon Bonaparte ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
National Autonomy ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In his time, Napoleon Bonaparte of France commanded the ideological environment which made nationalism grow and helped to turn the idea of the ‘nation’ into one of the most powerful political forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Napoleon's conquests, and the strong reactions they provoked in England, Spain, Germany, Poland, and Russia, intensified and diffused the civic ideas of national autonomy, unity, and identity across Europe and throughout Latin America. It is this aspect of Napoleon's historic impact which, more or less by accident, and only in a few instances deliberately, helped to spread a new political culture or, indeed, a new political cult whose origins can be traced back to the French Revolution. The new political culture which arose out of the Revolution focused on the concept of the democratic, sovereign nation as a novel political and social unit for the organisation of society. National aspirations turned against Napoleon and his rule over Europe, and helped substantially to bring him down, instead of lending him support in consolidating his overstretched empire.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

‘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.

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