Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility PDF Author: Chad Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498537278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination, from the unending fascination with the Marquis de Sade to the successes of the film Ridicule. Drawing on memoirs, letters, popular songs and pamphlets, and political treatises, The Enlightened and Depraved: Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility traces the origins of this powerful stereotype from between the reign of Louis XIV and the Terror of the French Revolution. The decadent and enlightened noble of early modern France, the libertine, was born in a push to transform the nobility from a warrior caste into an intelligentsia. Education itself had become a power through which the privileged could set themselves free from old social and religious restraints. However, by the late eighteenth century, the libertine noble was already falling under attack by changing attitudes toward gender, an emphasis on economic utility over courtly service, and ironically the very revolutionary forces that the enlightened nobility of the court and Paris helped awaken. In the end, the libertine nobility would not survive the French Revolution, but the basic idea of knowledge as a liberating force would endure in modernity, divorced from a single class.

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility PDF Author: Chad Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498537278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination, from the unending fascination with the Marquis de Sade to the successes of the film Ridicule. Drawing on memoirs, letters, popular songs and pamphlets, and political treatises, The Enlightened and Depraved: Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility traces the origins of this powerful stereotype from between the reign of Louis XIV and the Terror of the French Revolution. The decadent and enlightened noble of early modern France, the libertine, was born in a push to transform the nobility from a warrior caste into an intelligentsia. Education itself had become a power through which the privileged could set themselves free from old social and religious restraints. However, by the late eighteenth century, the libertine noble was already falling under attack by changing attitudes toward gender, an emphasis on economic utility over courtly service, and ironically the very revolutionary forces that the enlightened nobility of the court and Paris helped awaken. In the end, the libertine nobility would not survive the French Revolution, but the basic idea of knowledge as a liberating force would endure in modernity, divorced from a single class.

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France PDF Author: Donna Bohanan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1403940347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This book analyses the evolving relationship between the French monarchy and the French nobility in the early modern period. New interpretations of the absolutist state in France have challenged the orthodox vision of the interaction between the crown and elite society. By focusing on the struggle of central government to control the periphery, Bohanan links the literature on collaboration, patronage and taxation with research on the social origins and structure of provincial nobilities. Three provinical examples, Provence, Dauphine and Brittany, illustrate the ways in which elites organised and mobilised by vertical ties (ties of dependency based on patronage) were co-opted or subverted by the crown. The monarchy's success in raising more money from these pays d'etats depended on its ability to juggle a set of different strategies, each conceived according to the particularity of the social, political and institutional context of the province. Bohanan shows that the strategies and expedients employed by the crown varied from province to province; conceived on an individual basis, they bear the signs of ad hoc responses rather than a gradnoise plan to centralise.

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Noel Malcolm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198886381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys. Typically, the sodomites (as they were called) were adult men seeking sex with teenage boys. This was something intriguingly different from modern homosexuality: the boys ceased to be desired when they became fully masculine. And the desire for them was seen as natural; no special sexual orientation was assumed. The rich evidence from Southern Europe in the Renaissance period was not matched in the Northern lands; historians struggled to apply this new knowledge to countries such as England or its North American colonies. And when good Northern evidence did appear, from after 1700, it presented a very different picture. So the theory was formed - and it has dominated most standard accounts until now - that the 'emergence of modern homosexuality' happened suddenly, but inexplicably, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Noel Malcolm's masterly study solves this and many other problems, by doing something which no previous scholar has attempted: giving a truly pan-European account of the whole phenomenon of male-male sexual relations in the early modern period. It includes the Ottoman Empire, as well as the European colonies in the Americas and Asia; it describes the religious and legal norms, both Christian and Muslim; it discusses the literary representations in both Western Europe and the Ottoman world; and it presents a mass of individual human stories, from New England to North Africa, from Scandinavia to Peru. Original, critical, lucidly written and deeply researched, this work will change the way we think about the history of homosexuality in early modern Europe.

The Routledge History of Monarchy

The Routledge History of Monarchy PDF Author: Elena Woodacre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351787306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1093

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Book Description
The Routledge History of Monarchy draws together current research across the field of royal studies, providing a rich understanding of the history of monarchy from a variety of geographical, cultural and temporal contexts. Divided into four parts, this book presents a wide range of case studies relating to different aspects of monarchy throughout a variety of times and places, and uses these case studies to highlight different perspectives of monarchy and enhance understanding of rulership and sovereignty in terms of both concept and practice. Including case studies chosen by specialists in a diverse array of subjects, such as history, art, literature, and gender studies, it offers an extensive global and interdisciplinary approach to the history of monarchy, providing a thorough insight into the workings of monarchies within Europe and beyond, and comparing different cultural concepts of monarchy within a variety of frameworks, including social and religious contexts. Opening up the discussion of important questions surrounding fundamental issues of monarchy and rulership, The Routledge History of Monarchy is the ideal book for students and academics of royal studies, monarchy, or political history.

Bad Subjects

Bad Subjects PDF Author: Jennifer J. Davis
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496236629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Libertinage was a polysemous term in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, generally translated as “debauchery” or “licentiousness” in English. Davis assesses the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage in the French Atlantic, based on hundreds of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out potential revolutions. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behaviors, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest, for a libertine need not have committed any crimes to be perceived as disregarding authority and thereby threatening families and social institutions. The research in Bad Subjects provides a framework for analysis of libertinage as a set of anti-authoritarian practices and discourses that circulated among the peoples of France and the Atlantic World, ultimately providing a compelling blueprint for alternative social and economic order in the Revolutionary period.

Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France

Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Jeffrey Merrick
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271084189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In this book, Jeffrey Merrick brings together a rich array of primary-source documents—many of which are published or translated here for the first time—that depict in detail the policing of same-sex populations in eighteenth-century France and the ways in which Parisians regarded what they called sodomy or pederasty and tribadism. Taken together, these documents suggest that male and female same-sex relations played a more visible public role in Enlightenment-era society than was previously believed. The translated and annotated sources included here show how robust the same-sex subculture was in eighteenth-century Paris, as well as how widespread the policing of sodomy was at the time. Part 1 includes archival police records from the 1720s to the 1780s that show how the police attempted to manage sodomitical activity through surveillance and repression; part 2 includes excerpts from treatises and encyclopedias, published nouvelles (collections of news) and libelles (libelous writings), fictive portrayals, and Enlightenment treatments of the topic that include calls for legal reform. Together these sources show how contemporaries understood same-sex relations in multiple contexts and cultures, including their own. The resulting volume is an unprecedented look at the role of same-sex relations in the culture and society of the era. The product of years of archival research curated, translated, and annotated by a premier expert in the field, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France provides a foundational primary text for the study and teaching of the history of sexuality.

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 3, Sites of Knowledge and Practice

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 3, Sites of Knowledge and Practice PDF Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1066

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Book Description
Volume III provides in-depth analyses of specific times and places in the history of world sexualities, to investigate more closely the lived experience of individuals and groups to reveal the diversity of human sexualities. Comprising twenty-five chapters, this volume covers ancient Athens, Rome, and Constantinople; eighth- and ninth-century Chang'an, ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad, and tenth- through twelfth-century Kyoto; fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iceland and Florence; sixteenth-century Tenochtitlan, Istanbul, and Geneva; eighteenth-century Edo, Paris, and Philadelphia; nineteenth-century Cairo, London, and Manila; late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lagos, Bombay, Buenos Aires, and Berlin, and twentieth-century Sydney, Toronto, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. Broad in range, this volume sheds light on continuities and changes in world sexualities across time and space.

The Kingdom of Darkness

The Kingdom of Darkness PDF Author: Dmitri Levitin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110883700X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 981

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Book Description
This transformative account of early modern intellectual life culminates with new interpretations of two of its leading minds: Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton.

The Shaping of French National Identity

The Shaping of French National Identity PDF Author: Matthew D'Auria
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107128099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
Casts new light on of the 'official' French nineteenth-century narrative by examining how historians and philosophers conceived of the country's past.

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271035870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Historians have long been fascinated by the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. What difference did nobles make in French society? What role did they play in the coming of the Revolution? In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France’s past. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century appears some thirty years after the publication of the most sweeping and influential “revisionist” assessment of the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s La noblesse au dix-huitième siècle. The contributors to this volume incorporate the important lessons of Chaussinand-Nogaret’s revisionism but also reexamine the assumptions on which that revisionism was based. At the same time, they consider what has been gained or lost through the adoption of new methods of inquiry in the intervening years. Where, in other words, should the nobility fit into the twenty-first century’s narrative about eighteenth-century France? The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century will interest not only specialists of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and modern European history but also those concerned with the differences in, and the developing tensions between, the methods of social and cultural history. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Rafe Blaufarb, Gail Bossenga, Mita Choudhury, Jonathan Dewald, Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Thomas E. Kaiser, Michael Kwass, Robert M. Schwartz, John Shovlin, and Johnson Kent Wright.