The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution PDF Author: Timothy Tackett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674425189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution’s lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror? “By attending to the role of emotions in propelling the Terror, Tackett steers a more nuanced course than many previous historians have managed...Imagined terrors, as...Tackett very usefully reminds us, can have even more political potency than real ones.” —David A. Bell, The Atlantic “[Tackett] analyzes the mentalité of those who became ‘terrorists’ in 18th-century France...In emphasizing weakness and uncertainty instead of fanatical strength as the driving force behind the Terror...Tackett...contributes to an important realignment in the study of French history.” —Ruth Scurr, The Spectator “[A] boldly conceived and important book...This is a thought-provoking book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of terror and political intolerance, and also to the history of emotions more generally. It helps expose the complexity of a revolution that cannot be adequately understood in terms of principles alone.” —Alan Forrest, Times Literary Supplement

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution PDF Author: Timothy Tackett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674425189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution’s lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror? “By attending to the role of emotions in propelling the Terror, Tackett steers a more nuanced course than many previous historians have managed...Imagined terrors, as...Tackett very usefully reminds us, can have even more political potency than real ones.” —David A. Bell, The Atlantic “[Tackett] analyzes the mentalité of those who became ‘terrorists’ in 18th-century France...In emphasizing weakness and uncertainty instead of fanatical strength as the driving force behind the Terror...Tackett...contributes to an important realignment in the study of French history.” —Ruth Scurr, The Spectator “[A] boldly conceived and important book...This is a thought-provoking book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of terror and political intolerance, and also to the history of emotions more generally. It helps expose the complexity of a revolution that cannot be adequately understood in terms of principles alone.” —Alan Forrest, Times Literary Supplement

Festivals and the French Revolution

Festivals and the French Revolution PDF Author: Mona Ozouf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674298842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.

Making Democracy in the French Revolution

Making Democracy in the French Revolution PDF Author: James Livesey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674006249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This book reasserts the importance of the French Revolution to an understanding of the nature of modern European politics and social life. Livesey argues that the European model of democracy was created in the Revolution, a model with very specific commitments that differentiate it from Anglo-American liberal democracy.

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution PDF Author: Rebecca L. Spang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674047036
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats—a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”—to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions. “This is a quite brilliant, assertive book.” —Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement “Brilliant...What [Spang] proposes is nothing less than a new conceptualization of the revolution...She has provided historians—and not just those of France or the French Revolution—with a new set of lenses with which to view the past.” —Arthur Goldhammer, Bookforum “[Spang] views the French Revolution from rewardingly new angles by analyzing the cultural significance of money in the turbulent years of European war, domestic terror and inflation.” —Tony Barber, Financial Times

A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution

A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution PDF Author: François Furet
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674177284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1140

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Book Description
The French Revolution--that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy--continues to provoke a reevaluation of essential questions. This volume presents the research of a wide range of international scholars into those questions. 58 color illustrations, 10 halftones.

Revolutionary Commerce

Revolutionary Commerce PDF Author: Paul Cheney
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674047266
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. The discovery of the New World and the rise of Europe's Atlantic economy brought unprecedented wealth. It also reordered the political balance among European states and threatened age-old social hierarchies within them. In this charged context, the French developed a "science of commerce" that aimed to benefit from this new wealth while containing its revolutionary effects. Montesquieu became a towering authority among reformist economic and political thinkers by developing a politics of fusion intended to reconcile France's aristocratic society and monarchical state with the needs and risks of international commerce. The Seven Years' War proved the weakness of this model, and after this watershed reforms that could guarantee shared prosperity at home and in the colonies remained elusive. Once the Revolution broke out in 1789, the contradictions that attended the growth of France's Atlantic economy helped to bring down the constitutional monarchy. Drawing upon the writings of philosophes, diplomats, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.

Edmund Burke's Reflections On the Revolution in France

Edmund Burke's Reflections On the Revolution in France PDF Author: John Whale
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719057878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In this volume, leading Burke scholars offer new and challenging essays which allow us to reconsider the historical context in which Reflections on the Revolution in France was written, its reception, its engagement in the discourses of nationalism and toleration, its legacy to English and Irish writers of the Romantic period, and its impact within our contemporary cultural and critical theory. The volume demonstrates a range of interdisciplinary critical methods and cultural perspectives from which to read Burke's most famous work.

When the King Took Flight

When the King Took Flight PDF Author: Timothy Tackett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044207
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
On a June night in 1791, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fled Paris in disguise, hoping to escape the mounting turmoil of the French Revolution. They were arrested by a small group of citizens a few miles from the Belgian border and forced to return to Paris. Two years later they would both die at the guillotine. It is this extraordinary story, and the events leading up to and away from it, that Tackett recounts in gripping novelistic style. The king's flight opens a window to the whole of French society during the Revolution. Each dramatic chapter spotlights a different segment of the population, from the king and queen as they plotted and executed their flight, to the people of Varennes who apprehended the royal family, to the radicals of Paris who urged an end to monarchy, to the leaders of the National Assembly struggling to control a spiraling crisis, to the ordinary citizens stunned by their king's desertion. Tackett shows how Louis's flight reshaped popular attitudes toward kingship, intensified fears of invasion and conspiracy, and helped pave the way for the Reign of Terror. Tackett brings to life an array of unique characters as they struggle to confront the monumental transformations set in motion in 1789. In so doing, he offers an important new interpretation of the Revolution. By emphasizing the unpredictable and contingent character of this story, he underscores the power of a single event to change irrevocably the course of the French Revolution, and consequently the history of the world.

Conspiracy in the French Revolution

Conspiracy in the French Revolution PDF Author: Peter R. Campbell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152618382X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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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

Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782

Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782 PDF Author: Virginia Bernhard
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826260071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Slaves & Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782, offers a fresh perspective on the complex relationship between racism & slavery in the often overlooked second-oldest English colony in the New World. As the first blacks were brought onto the islands not specifically for slave labor, but for their expertise as pearl divers & cultivators of West Indies plants, Bermuda's racial history began to unfold much differently from that of the Caribbean islands or of the North American mainland. Bermuda's history records the arrival of the first blacks, the first English law passed to control the behavior of the "Negroes," & the creation of ninety-nine-year indentures for black & Indian servants. Slavery may have dictated & strained the relationships between whites & blacks, but in this smallest of English colonies it differed from slavery elsewhere because of the uniquely close master-slave relations created by Bermuda's size & maritime economy. At only twenty-one square miles in size, Bermuda saw slaves & slave-holders working & living closer together than in other societies. Additionally, the emphasis on maritime pursuits offered slaves a degree of autonomy & a sense of identity unequaled in other English colonies. This groundbreaking history of Bermuda's slavery reveals fewer runaways, less-violent rebellions, & relatively milder punishments for offending slaves. One anecdote recounts that in 1782, seventy black seamen offered freedom in Boston voluntarily returned to their Bermuda homes. Bernhard delves into the origins of Bermuda's slavery, its peculiar nature, & its effects on blacks & whites. She bases her study on archival research drawn from wills & inventories, laws & court cases, governors' reports & council minutes. Intended as an introduction to both the history of the islands & the rich sources for further study, this book will prove invaluable to scholars of slavery, as well as those interested in historical archaeology, anthropology, maritime history, & colonial history.