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Author: Mary Ashburn Miller
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau’s writings to Old Regime protest tactics. A Natural History of Revolution suggests that it is perhaps on a different shelf of the Enlightenment library that we might find the best clues for understanding the French Revolution: namely, in studies of the natural world. In their attempts to portray and explain the events of the Revolution, political figures, playwrights, and journalists often turned to the book of nature: phenomena such as hailstorms and thunderbolts found their way into festivals, plays, and political speeches as descriptors of revolutionary activity. The particular way that revolutionaries deployed these metaphors drew on notions derived from the natural science of the day about regeneration, purgation, and balance. In examining a series of tropes (earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes) that played an important role in the public language of the Revolution, A Natural History of Revolution reveals that understanding the use of this natural imagery is fundamental to our understanding of the Terror. Eighteenth-century natural histories had demonstrated that in the natural world, apparent disorder could lead to a restored equilibrium, or even regeneration. This logic drawn from the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. If thunder could restore balance in the atmosphere, and if volcanic eruptions could create more fertile soil, then so too could episodes of violence and disruption in the political realm be portrayed as necessary for forging a new order in revolutionary France.
Author: Mary Ashburn Miller
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau’s writings to Old Regime protest tactics. A Natural History of Revolution suggests that it is perhaps on a different shelf of the Enlightenment library that we might find the best clues for understanding the French Revolution: namely, in studies of the natural world. In their attempts to portray and explain the events of the Revolution, political figures, playwrights, and journalists often turned to the book of nature: phenomena such as hailstorms and thunderbolts found their way into festivals, plays, and political speeches as descriptors of revolutionary activity. The particular way that revolutionaries deployed these metaphors drew on notions derived from the natural science of the day about regeneration, purgation, and balance. In examining a series of tropes (earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes) that played an important role in the public language of the Revolution, A Natural History of Revolution reveals that understanding the use of this natural imagery is fundamental to our understanding of the Terror. Eighteenth-century natural histories had demonstrated that in the natural world, apparent disorder could lead to a restored equilibrium, or even regeneration. This logic drawn from the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. If thunder could restore balance in the atmosphere, and if volcanic eruptions could create more fertile soil, then so too could episodes of violence and disruption in the political realm be portrayed as necessary for forging a new order in revolutionary France.
Author: Lyford Paterson Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Revolutions
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Author: Lyford P. Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Author: E. C. Spary
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226768708
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue. Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.
Author: Mary Ashburn Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780801449420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
The use of nature metaphors in explaining and justifying the excesses of the French Revolutions.
Author: Tim Blanning
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0679605002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times “[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National Review From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a psychological force, and the use of dreamlike imagery. Whether unearthing the origins of “sex appeal” or the celebration of accessible storytelling, The Romantic Revolution is a bold and brilliant introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast its age. “Anyone with an interest in cultural history will revel in the book’s range and insights. Specialists will savor the anecdotes, casual readers will enjoy the introduction to rich and exciting material. Brilliant artistic output during a time of transformative upheaval never gets old, and this book shows us why.”—The Washington Times “It’s a pleasure to read a relatively concise piece of scholarship of so high a caliber, especially expressed as well as in this fine book.”—Library Journal
Author: Patrick Manning
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981483
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
The century from 1750 to 1850 was a period of dramatic transformations in world history, fostering several types of revolutionary change beyond the political landscape. Independence movements in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world were catalysts for radical economic, social, and cultural reform. And it was during this age of revolutions—an era of rapidly expanding scientific investigation—that profound changes in scientific knowledge and practice also took place. In this volume, an esteemed group of international historians examines key elements of science in societies across Spanish America, Europe, West Africa, India, and Asia as they overlapped each other increasingly. Chapters focus on the range of participants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, their concentrated effort in description and taxonomy, and advances in techniques for sharing knowledge. Together, contributors highlight the role of scientific change and development in tightening global and imperial connections, encouraging a deeper conversation among historians of science and world historians and shedding new light on a pivotal moment in history for both fields.
Author: Christopher P. Iannini
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Iannini connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world--the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. Iannini argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas. The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
Author: John Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729829
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
John Rogers here addresses the literary and ideological consequences of the remarkable, if improbable, alliance between science and politics in seventeenth-century England. He looks at the cultural intersection between the English and Scientific Revolutions, concentrating on a body of work created in a brief but potent burst of intellectual activity during the period of the Civil Wars, the Interregnum, and the earliest years of the Stuart Restoration. Rogers traces the broad implications of a seemingly outlandish cultural phenomenon: the intellectual imperative to forge an ontological connection between physical motion and political action.
Author: Dan Edelstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226184404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
