Memoirs of an Egotist


Book Description

This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.




Abbé Sicard's Deaf Education


Book Description

Abbé Sicard was a French revolutionary priest and an innovator of French and American sign language. He enjoyed a meteoric rise from Toulouse and Bordeaux to Paris and, despite his non-conformist tendencies, he escaped the guillotine. In fact, the revolutionaries acknowledged his position and during the Terror of 1794, they made him the director of the first school for the deaf. Later, he became a member of the first Ecole Normale, the National Institute, and the Académie Française. He is recognized today as having developed Enlightenment theories of pantomime, "signing,' and a form of "universal language" that later spread to Russia, Spain, and America. This is the first book-length biography of Sicard published in any language since 1873, despite Sicard’s international renown. This thoughtful, engaging work explores French and American sign language and deaf studies set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and Napoleon.




Thomas Paine and the French Revolution


Book Description

This book explores Thomas Paine's French decade, from the publication of the first part of Rights of Man in the spring of 1791 to his return trip to the United States in the fall of 1802. It examines Paine's multifarious activities during this period as a thinker, writer, member of the French Convention, lobbyist, adviser to French governments, officious diplomat and propagandist. Using previously neglected sources and archival material, Carine Lounissi demonstrates both how his republicanism was challenged, bolstered and altered by this French experience, and how his positions at key moments of the history of the French experiment forced major participants in the Revolution to defend or question the kind of regime or of republic they wished to set up. As a member of the Lafayette circle when writing the manuscript of Rights of Man, of the Girondin constellation in the Convention, one of the few democrats who defended universal suffrage after Thermidor, and as a member of the Constitutional Circle which promoted a kind of republic which did not match his ideas, Paine baffled his contemporaries and still puzzles the present-day scholar. This book intends to offer a new perspective on Paine, and on how this major agent of revolutions contributed to the debate on the French Revolution both in France and outside France.




The Culture of French Revolutionary Diplomacy


Book Description

This book examines the culture of the French diplomatic corps from 1789 to 1799. It analyzes how the French revolutionaries attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to transform the diplomatic culture of the old regime, notably in etiquette, language and dress and how the ideology and dynamic of the Revolution affected certain aspects of international affairs.




Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions


Book Description

Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions charts a transformation in the way people thought about democracy in the North Atlantic region in the years between the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the mid-eighteenth century, 'democracy' was a word known only to the literate. It was associated primarily with the ancient world and had negative connotations: democracies were conceived to be unstable, warlike, and prone to mutate into despotisms. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the word had passed into general use, although it was still not necessarily an approving term. In fact, there was much debate about whether democracy could achieve robust institutional form in advanced societies. In this volume, a cast of internationally-renowned contributors shows how common trends developed throughout the United States, France, Britain, and Ireland, particularly focussing on the era of the American, French, and subsequent European revolutions. Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions argues that 'modern democracy' was not invented in one place and then diffused elsewhere, but instead was the subject of parallel re-imaginings, as ancient ideas and examples were selectively invoked and reworked for modern use. The contributions significantly enhance our understanding of the diversity and complexity of our democratic inheritance.




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.




Jacobin Legacy


Book Description

Professor Woloch shows that Jacobinism survived and forcefully developed into a constitutional party under the conservative Directorial republic. The Jacobin legacy was a mode of political activism—the local political club—and a constellation of attitudes which might be called the "democratic persuasion." By focusing on the nature of this persuasion and the way that it was articulated in the Neo-Jacobin clubs, the author provides a fresh perspective on the history of Jacobinism, and on the fate of the Directorial republic. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




The People's Armies


Book Description

The 'People's Armies' of eighteenth-century France were an instrument of the Reign of Terror. Civilian rather than military armies, they were created to obtain food and military equipment from the reluctant and frequently anti-revolutionary rural populace in order to supply the towns and the soldiers fighting on the frontiers. Composed of urban, highly politicized 'sans-culottes', they interacted with rural villages in a way that reflected the age-old conflict between town and country. This classic book by the famed historian Richard Cobb describes the clash between the swaggering, insubordinate 'sans-culottes' and the crafty villagers and in so doing, provides important insighyts into aspects of the social and administrative history of the French Revolution. 'The People's Armies' was first published in France in 1961 and has now been translated into English by Marianne Elliott. This book was Cobb's first major work and is still generally regarded as his most important contribution to French history.It illustrates all those characteristics that have come to be seen as typical of Cobb's distinctive historical style: the concern with local colour and variation, the vignettes that evoke in vivid detail all the hues of daily life at the time of the French Revolution, and, most of all, the sound basis of detailed and wide-ranging research.The book has had a profound influence on the study of the French Revolution and is still unsurpassed as a history of an important institution of the period of Revolutionary government in France. Richard Cobb was professor of modern European history at Oxford University.




Ending the French Revolution


Book Description

"Filled with critical insights, Brown's revisionist study utilizes an impressive array of archival sources, some only recently cataloged, to support his thesis that the French Revolution survived until 1802 and the Consulate regime.... This volume should be a priority for all historians and serious students interested in modern French history. Summing Up: Essential."--Choice "What Brown has done is to put all historians of the French Revolution in his debt by the thoroughness with which he explores an important aspect of the complex and interrelated problems posed by any attempt to create a new social and moral order based on principles that could prove to be self-contradictory and were neither understood nor welcomed by a substantial proportion of the population."--English Historical Review "This is one of the most important pieces of scholarship on the French Revolution since the 1989 bicentennial."--David Bell, Johns Hopkins University For two centuries, the early years of the French Revolution have inspired countless democratic movements around the world. Yet little attention has been paid to the problems of violence, justice, and repression between the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. In Ending the French Revolution, Howard Brown analyzes these years to reveal the true difficulty of founding a liberal democracy in the midst of continual warfare, repeated coups d'état, and endemic civil strife. By highlighting the role played by violence and fear in generating illiberal politics, Brown speaks to the struggles facing democracy in our own age. The result is a fundamentally new understanding of the French Revolution's disappointing outcome. Howard G. Brown, Professor of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, is the author of War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791-1799 and coeditor of Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon. Winner of the American Historical Association's 2006 Leo Gershoy Award and the University of Virginia's 2004 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies