Prince of Europe

Prince of Europe PDF Author: Philip Mansel
Publisher: Orion Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780753818558
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The Habsburg courtier Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne seduced and symbolized eighteenth-century Europe. Speaking French, the international language of the day, he travelled between Paris and St Petersburg, charming everyone he met. He stayed with Madame du Barry, dined with Frederick the Great and travelled to the Crimea with Catherine the Great. But Ligne was more than a frivolous charmer. He participated in and recorded some of the most important events and movements of his day: the Enlightenment; the struggle for mastery in Germany; the decline of the Ottoman Empire; the birth of German nationalism; and the wars to liberate Europe from Napoleon. He had surprisingly radical views, believing for example in property rights for women, legal rights for Jews and the redistribution of wealth. He was also a highly respected writer and his books on gardens, his letters from the Crimea and his epigrams are considered minor classics of French literature.

Prince of Europe

Prince of Europe PDF Author: Philip Mansel
Publisher: Orion Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780753818558
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The Habsburg courtier Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne seduced and symbolized eighteenth-century Europe. Speaking French, the international language of the day, he travelled between Paris and St Petersburg, charming everyone he met. He stayed with Madame du Barry, dined with Frederick the Great and travelled to the Crimea with Catherine the Great. But Ligne was more than a frivolous charmer. He participated in and recorded some of the most important events and movements of his day: the Enlightenment; the struggle for mastery in Germany; the decline of the Ottoman Empire; the birth of German nationalism; and the wars to liberate Europe from Napoleon. He had surprisingly radical views, believing for example in property rights for women, legal rights for Jews and the redistribution of wealth. He was also a highly respected writer and his books on gardens, his letters from the Crimea and his epigrams are considered minor classics of French literature.

Conscripts and Deserters

Conscripts and Deserters PDF Author: Alan I. Forrest
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195059379
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Between the outbreak of war with Austria in 1792 and Napoleon's final debacle in 1814, France remained almost continously at war, recruiting in the process some two to three million frenchmen--a level of recruitment unknown to previous generations and widely resented as an attack on the liberties of rural communities. Forrest challenges the notion of a nation heroically rushing to arms by examining the massive rates of desertion and avoidance of service as well as their consequences on French society--on military campaigns and the morale of armies, on political opinion at home, on the social fabric of local villages, and on the Napoleonic dream of bringing about a coherent and centralized state.

Ending the Terror

Ending the Terror PDF Author: Bronislaw Baczko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521441056
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
A major assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution - the fall of Robespierre in July 1794.

Interpreting the French Revolution

Interpreting the French Revolution PDF Author: François Furet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521280495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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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 French Revolution

The French Revolution PDF Author: Florin Aftalion
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521368100
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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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.

Farewell, Revolution

Farewell, Revolution PDF Author: Steven L. Kaplan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801427183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
How the Revolution should be remembered has been the focus of debates concerned as much with France's future as with its past. Kaplan both reviews these debates and reconstructs - in sometimes hilarious detail - events leading up to the official commemoration. Bringing to bear the skills of the archival historian and the ethnographer, he masterfully explains how a particular political culture attempts to come to terms with its past.

The New Regime

The New Regime PDF Author: Isser Woloch
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393313970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Confident that they had broken with a discredited past, French revolutionaries after 1789 referred to pre-revolutionary times as the ancien regime (old regime). The National Assembly proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, grasping the reins of power and asserting the supremacy of law over all other interests. Even as the liberalism of 1789 collapsed into the Terror and then into the Napoleonic dictatorship, a new regime emerged at the juncture of state and civil society. The cycles of recrimination, hatred, and endemic local conflict unleashed by the Terror did not obliterate this new civic order. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study of three turbulent decades in French history, the eminent historian Isser Woloch examines some large questions: How did the French civic order change after 1789? What civic values animated the new regime; what policies did it adopt? What institutions did it establish, and how did they fare when carried into practice? Drawing on a variety of archival sources, Professor Woloch explains shifts in lawmaking and local authority, state intervention in village life, the creation of public primary schools, experiments in public assistance, a cycle of changes in the mechanisms of civil justice, the introduction of felony trials, and above all the imposition of military conscription. Unlike most accounts of the period, The New Regime moves outside Paris in search of the new civic order. Professor Woloch writes: "Imagine approaching a typical French town in 1798 or 1808 - the capital of one of the eighty-odd departments that the National Assembly created by redividing the nation's territory. The spires of a cathedral or the largest parish churches would stillcommand the horizon. But as one moved about the town, one could readily identify its civic institutions: the departmental administration (later the prefecture); the town hall or mairie; the local schools; several new courts or tribunals; the institutions of poor relief such as a

Tom Paine

Tom Paine PDF Author: John Keane
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802199534
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 855

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Book Description
“It is hard to imagine this magnificent biography ever being superseded . . . It is a stylish, splendidly erudite work.” —Terry Eagleton, The Guardian “More than any other public figure of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant world.” So begins John Keane’s magnificent and award-winning (the Fraunces Tavern Book Award) biography of one of democracy’s greatest champions. Among friends and enemies alike, Paine earned a reputation as a notorious pamphleteer, one of the greatest political figures of his day, and the author of three bestselling books, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. Setting his compelling narrative against a vivid social backdrop of prerevolutionary America and the French Revolution, John Keane melds together the public and the shadowy private sides of Paine’s life in a remarkable piece of scholarship. This is the definitive biography of a man whose life and work profoundly shaped the modern age. “[A] richly detailed . . . disciplined labor of scholarship and love, an exemplar of the rewards of a gargantuan effort at historical research. . . . In short, buy it; it’s definitive.” —Library Journal

Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux

Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux PDF Author: Alan I. Forrest
Publisher: London ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description


The People's Armies

The People's Armies PDF Author: Richard Cobb
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300027281
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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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.