Author: Walter Dennis Gray
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874134612
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
"Interpreting American Democracy in France is a study of the French savant, liberal, politician, and Americanist Edouard Laboulaye. Laboulaye, who was a professor at the College de France, is perhaps best known in America today as president of the Union Franco-Americaine, which raised funds in France for the Statute of Liberty. He was also well known to Americans in the nineteenth century, particularly for his staunch support of the Union in the American Civil War. He and his circle influenced French public opinion and were instrumental in preventing the government of Napoleon III from recognizing the Confederacy." "After the Revolutions of 1848, the aftermath of which disillusioned him, a dominant theme in Laboulaye's writings was that America provided France with a model constitution that guaranteed individual liberties and a stable political system; it was his great hope that his country would follow this example. As France's leading Americanist, Laboulaye's energies were devoted to lectures on American history and politics and work on behalf of the North during the Civil War. He was also a translator of the works of those Americans for whom he had a special devotion: Franklin, Channing, and Mann. As a founding father of the Third Republic, Laboulaye drew great satisfaction from the fact that some principles drawn from the American political tradition were embodied in its constitutional laws. Additionally, Laboulaye was the first Frenchman to give a course on American history at a French university, and he later published a three-volume history of the United States, which stands as his masterpiece. He was a member of the liberal opposition to Napoleon III and after 1870 became active in the Third Republic, serving as deputy and later senator for life." "In France Laboulaye is primarily known as a professor at the respected College de France, a position he maintained throughout his entire career, and as a member of the Institut de France. He was also president of the French Anti-Slavery Society. Laboulaye was, in fact, a savant of almost universal interests who held a place at the center of French intellectual life during the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. His bibliography, comprised of books, pamphlets, essays, children's stories, and articles, totals over two hundred entries. His final years as a senator for life were devoted in large part to a successful fundraising campaign for the Statute of Liberty, which he did not live to see erected in New York Harbor, and to carrying on the fight for political liberty as he envisioned it." "This book is based on extensive research into the unpublished papers of Laboulaye, which are still in his family's possession, and manuscripts in other depositories in France and the United States."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Conor Cruise O'Brien
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226616568
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
As controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, this examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution, offers a provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture and challenges the traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy. 15 illustrations.
Author: George Washington
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
Author: James T. Kloppenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019505461X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 909
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Book Description
James T. Kloppenberg presents the history of democracy from the perspective of those who established its principles, offering a fresh look at how ideas about representative government, suffrage, and the principles of self-rule and ideals have shifted over time and place.
Author: Lucien Jaume
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400846722
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
A major intellectual biography of Toqueville that restores democracy in America to its essential context Many American readers like to regard Alexis de Tocqueville as an honorary American and democrat—as the young French aristocrat who came to early America and, enthralled by what he saw, proceeded to write an American book explaining democratic America to itself. Yet, as Lucien Jaume argues in this acclaimed intellectual biography, Democracy in America is best understood as a French book, written primarily for the French, and overwhelmingly concerned with France. "America," Jaume says, "was merely a pretext for studying modern society and the woes of France." For Tocqueville, in short, America was a mirror for France, a way for Tocqueville to write indirectly about his own society, to engage French thinkers and debates, and to come to terms with France's aristocratic legacy. By taking seriously the idea that Tocqueville's French context is essential for understanding Democracy in America, Jaume provides a powerful and surprising new interpretation of Tocqueville's book as well as a fresh intellectual and psychological portrait of the author. Situating Tocqueville in the context of the crisis of authority in postrevolutionary France, Jaume shows that Tocqueville was an ambivalent promoter of democracy, a man who tried to reconcile himself to the coming wave, but who was also nostalgic for the aristocratic world in which he was rooted—and who believed that it would be necessary to preserve aristocratic values in order to protect liberty under democracy. Indeed, Jaume argues that one of Tocqueville's most important and original ideas was to recognize that democracy posed the threat of a new and hidden form of despotism.
Author: Alexis de Tocqueville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
Author: Edouard Laboulaye
Publisher: Applewood Books
ISBN: 1429015527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Author: Gianna Englert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197635318
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Liberal democracies are under constant threat in the twenty-first century, and there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their "new democracy" to combat universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.
Author: Jeffrey Zvengrowski
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807172308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
In this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics, Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites. Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style warfare with large conscripted armies. States’ rights, they believed, should not preclude the national government from exercising power. Anglophile anti-Davis Confederates, in contrast, advocated inequality among whites, favored radical states’ rights, and supported slavery-in-the-abstract theories that were dismissive of white supremacy. Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they preferred decentralized guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and hoped for support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states. Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to Jeffersonian Democrats and their faction of War Hawks, who lost power on the national level in the 1820s but regained it during Davis' term as secretary of war. Davis used this position to cultivate friendly relations with France and later warned northerners that the South would secede if Republicans captured the White House. When Lincoln won the 1860 election, Davis endorsed secession. The ideological heirs of the pro-British faction soon came to loathe Davis for antagonizing Britain and for offering to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for direct assistance from French soldiers in Mexico. Zvengrowski’s important new interpretation of Confederate ideology situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition. It also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar South and obscure the true nature of Confederate ideology. Furthermore, it updates the biographies of familiar characters: John C. Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as his namesake, Thomas Jefferson; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point’s superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.
Author: Aurelian Cr_iu_u
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271033908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
"A collection of essays that discuss representative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and English views of American democracy and society, and offer a critical assessment of various narrative constructions of American life, society, and culture"--Provided by publisher.
