Brissot de Warville


Book Description

Originally published in 1915, this is a biography of the writer, philanthropist, and traveler, considered responsible for the foreign war that ended only with the fall of Napoleon, known as the leader of the Girondins, and when that party fell he was brought to trial and execution. Contains a fair amount of information concerning his time in America.




Jacques Pierre Brissot in America and France, 1788–1793


Book Description

This book examines a decisive five-year period in the life of Jacques Pierre Brissot, one of the influential leaders of the French Revolution. An idealistic, somewhat naive journalist who became a member of the national assembly, Brissot championed the new American republic as an example for the French revolutionary government to follow. This book is not intended to serve as a biography of the Girondin leader, but rather to present an examination of his life between 1788, when he visited the United States, and 1793, when he was executed. As such, the narrative necessarily focuses on the events of the revolution as the ever-present background to Brissot's thoughts and actions. Both as a journalist and as a legislator, Brissot was consumed by the tumultuous events of the period under review. The book is based primarily on the publications, correspondence, and memoirs of Brissot, as well as materials from the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Archives Nationales, and relevant secondary sources. It also includes comparisons between Brissot's observations of America in 1788, published in 1791 as "Nouveau Voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l'Amerique Septentrionale, 1788," and those of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville in his widely read "Democracy in America," which described his visit in 1831 and was published in 1835.




Tortured Subjects


Book Description

At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.




Witness to the Revolution


Book Description

One of the least likely survivors of the Jacobin purge of the National Convention in early 1793 was Jean-Baptiste Louvet, the author of the popular eighteenth-century romance Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas. Had it not been for the upheaval caused by the revolution in 1789, Louvet undoubtedly would have continued to build his promising literary career. Few of his readers could have imagined that this frail, young man would be elected as a deputy in the national assembly, where he dared to oppose powerful Jacobin leaders like Robespierre. His limited formal education and background as a bookstore clerk set Louvet apart among his legally trained friends in the Brissotin/Girondin faction; yet his intelligence, courage, and loyalty led them to appreciate his skills and friendship. Louvet would be the only one among the group to survive the proscription of the Girondins and life as a fugitive. He returned to Paris following the Jacobins’ downfall in July 1794, to serve again in the National Convention and then in the newly elected government of the Directory.




Revolutionary Ideas


Book Description

How the Radical Enlightenment inspired and shaped the French Revolution Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers—that the Revolution was shaped by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades, scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social forces, politics, economics, or culture—almost anything but abstract notions like liberty or equality. In Revolutionary Ideas, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment restores the Revolution’s intellectual history to its rightful central role. Drawing widely on primary sources, Jonathan Israel shows how the Revolution was set in motion by radical eighteenth-century doctrines, how these ideas divided revolutionary leaders into vehemently opposed ideological blocs, and how these clashes drove the turning points of the Revolution. In this compelling account, the French Revolution stands once again as a culmination of the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That it ended in the Terror represented a betrayal of those ideas—not their fulfillment.







Against War and Empire


Book Description

As Britain and France became more powerful during the eighteenth century, small states such as Geneva could no longer stand militarily against these commercial monarchies. Furthermore, many Genevans felt that they were being drawn into a corrupt commercial world dominated by amoral aristocrats dedicated to the unprincipled pursuit of wealth. In this book Richard Whatmore presents an intellectual history of republicans who strove to ensure Geneva's survival as an independent state. Whatmore shows how the Genevan republicans grappled with the ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire, Bentham, and others in seeking to make modern Europe safe for small states, by vanquishing the threats presented by war and by empire.




The Black Count


Book Description

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY • ONE OF ESQUIRE’S BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. But, hidden behind General Dumas's swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat. The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. TIME magazine called The Black Count "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible." But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.




The American Year Book


Book Description




Provincial Patriot of the French Revolution


Book Description

This biography of François Buzot, a Girondin leader in both the Constituent Assembly (1789-91) and the National Convention (1792-93), illustrates how his early life in Evreux and his training as a lawyer influenced his ideas and actions during the French Revolution, when he championed individual rights and the rule of law in a republic. A provincial leader who distrusted the increasingly centralized government in Paris, Buzot worked tirelessly to defend departmental interests, which led his Jacobin opponents to accuse him of federalism. Buzot became an active participant in the factional disputes dividing the national assembly in 1792-93, which led to frequent attacks against him and his cohorts by the radical press and demands for their impeachment. Consequently, Buzot and twenty-nine other Girondin deputies were expelled from the assembly in June 1793 and placed under house arrest. While Buzot and some of his friends escaped and fled to Caen, those Girondins who had remained in Paris were executed that October. After their attempt to form a large departmental force to march against the government in Paris had failed, Buzot and his friends fled to St. Emilion, where they survived as fugitives, often hiding in abandoned stone quarries, until June 1794. Buzot’s memoirs, written when he was on the run in 1793-94, provide an unusual contemporary account of the difficult and dangerous period known as the Terror. In addition, letters to and from his friends, notably Madame Roland, with whom he shared a romantic relationship, offer a more personal view of Buzot than can be found in most texts. Although Buzot was honored as a local hero by the citizens of Evreux in 1789, by the summer of 1793 the authorities had declared him a traitor and ordered his home demolished, and its furnishings sold at auction. Honored again during the centennial celebration of the French Revolution, by 1989 he had almost been forgotten. This first biographical treatment in English of François Buzot, a “bourgeois gentilhomme,” provides a new dimension to the story of an important revolutionary leader.