The Old Regime and the Revolution
Author : Alexis de Tocqueville
Publisher :
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 21,65 MB
Release : 1856
Category : History
ISBN :
Modern France
Author : Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher : OUP USA
Page : 153 pages
File Size : 45,47 MB
Release : 2011-10-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0195389417
Book Description
The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future.
Marx and the French Revolution
Author : François Furet
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 37,4 MB
Release : 1988-12-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0226273385
Book Description
Throughout his life Karl Marx commented on the French Revolution, but never was able to realize his project of a systematic work on this immense event. This book assembles for the first time all that Marx wrote on this subject. François Furet provides an extended discussion of Marx's thinking on the revolution, and Lucien Calvié situates each of the selections, drawn from existing translations as well as previously untranslated material, in its larger historical context. With his early critique of Hegel, Marx started moving toward his fundamental thesis: that the state is a product of civil society and that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois society. Furet's interpretation follows the evolution of this idea and examines the dilemmas it created for Marx as he considered all the faces the new state assumed over the course of the Revolution: the Jacobin Terror following the constitutional monarchy, Bonaparte's dictatorship following the parliamentary republic. The problem of reconciling his theory with the reality of the Revolution's various manifestations is one of the major difficulties Marx contended with throughout his work. The hesitation, the remorse, and the contradictions of the resulting analyses offer a glimpse of a great thinker struggling with the constraints of his own system. Marx never did elaborate a theory of an autonomous state, but he never stopped wrestling with the challenge to his doctrine posed by late eighteenth-century France, whose changing conditions and successive regimes prompted some of his most intriguing and, until now, unexplored thought.
The French Revolution in Theory
Author : Sophie Wahnich
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 35,84 MB
Release : 2022-03-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 178661619X
Book Description
It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why. More so than historians, it is philosophers that have played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault. Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution? Rancière, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history. These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what democracy and emancipation mean for us today.
Interpreting the French Revolution
Author : François Furet
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 23,24 MB
Release : 1981-09-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521280495
Book Description
The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution.
The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France
Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 38,86 MB
Release : 1996
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393314427
Book Description
Robert Darnton's work is one of the main reasons that cultural history has become an exciting study central to our understanding of the past.
A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution
Author : William H. Sewell (Jr.)
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 45,43 MB
Release : 1994
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822315384
Book Description
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.
The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction
Author : William Doyle
Publisher : Oxford Paperbacks
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 17,14 MB
Release : 2001-08-23
Category : History
ISBN : 0192853961
Book Description
Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, this work looks at how the ancien régime became ancien as well as examining cases in which achievement failed to match ambition.
The French Revolution
Author : Florin Aftalion
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 21,96 MB
Release : 1990-03-22
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780521368100
Book Description
The economic history of revolutionary France is still a neglected area in studies of the Revolution of 1789. Whilst some attention has been given to the condition of the peasants, the urban working classes and the financial crisis of the Ancient Régime, there has been a general tendency to regard economic factors as external and somewhat peripheral to the truly political nature of the Revolution. This book is designed to redress the balance, providing a clear, accessible, and thought-provoking guide to the economic background to the French Revolution. Professor Aftalion analyses the policies followed by successive revolutionary assemblies, examining in detail taxation, the confiscation of church property, the assignats, and the siege economy of the Terror. He shows how decisions taken in 1789 by the Constituent Assembly inevitably led to a deepening financial and economic crisis, and to increasingly radical and disastrous policies. The study is important also for its exposure of many of the economic fallacies propounded both at the time by many Frenchmen and later by many modern historians.
Conspiracy in the French Revolution
Author : Peter R. Campbell
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 10,2 MB
Release : 2024-06-04
Category : History
ISBN : 152618382X
Book Description
Conspiratorial views of events abound even in our modern, rational world. Often such theories serve to explain the inexplicable. Sometimes they are developed for motives of political expediency: it is simpler to see political opponents as conspirators and terrorists, putting them into one convenient basket, than to seek to understand and disentangle the complex motivations of opponents. So it is not surprising to see that just when the French Revolution was creating the modern political world, a constant obsession with conspiracies lay at the heart of the revolutionary conception of politics. The book considers the nature and development of the conspiracy obsession from the end of the old regime to the Directory. Chapters focus on conspiracy and fears of conspiracy in the old regime; in the Constituent Assembly; by the king and Marie Antoinette; amongst the people of Paris; on attitudes towards the peasantry and conspiracy; on Jacobin politics of the Year II and the ‘foreign plot’; on counter-revolutionary plots and imaginary plots; on Babeuf and the ‘conspiracy of equals’; and finally on fear of conspiracy as an intellectual impasse in the revolutionary mentality. Inspired by recent debates, this book is a comprehensive survey of the nature of conspiracy in the French Revolution, with each chapter written by a leading historian on the question. Each chapter is an original contribution to the topic, written however to include the wider issues for the area concerned. There is an emphasis throughout on clarity and accessibility, making the volume suitable for a wide readership as well as undergraduates and advanced researchers
