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

Get Book Here

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.

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271058672
Category : Nobility
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France's past. 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.

Noblesse Au XVIIIe Siècle. Anglais

Noblesse Au XVIIIe Siècle. Anglais PDF Author: Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521275903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Contrary to their traditional image as a caste of intransigent reactionaries and parasites, this analysis maintains that pre-revolutionary nobility actually were in the forefront of French economic and intellectual life, and until 1789, at the head of the movement for reform of the old regime.

The State Nobility

The State Nobility PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804733465
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
Examining in detail the work of consecration carried out by elite education systems, Bourdieu analyzes the distinctive forms of power—political, intellectual, bureaucratic, and economic—by means of which contemporary societies are governed.

Birth of a National Icon

Birth of a National Icon PDF Author: Venita Datta
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791442074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Birth of a National Icon examines the emergence of the intellectual in fin-de-siècle France, setting this important phenomenon against the backdrop of an emerging mass democracy and concentrating on the key role played by the avant-garde.

French Intellectuals Against the Left

French Intellectuals Against the Left PDF Author: Michael Scott Christofferson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571814289
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism & revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. He offers an alternative interpretation for the denunciation of communism & Marxism by the French intellectual left in the late 1970s.

The Existentialist Moment

The Existentialist Moment PDF Author: Patrick Baert
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745685439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Jean-Paul Sartre is often seen as the quintessential public intellectual, but this was not always the case. Until the mid-1940s he was not so well-known, even in France. Then suddenly, in a very short period of time, Sartre became an intellectual celebrity. How can we explain this remarkable transformation? The Existentialist Moment retraces Sartre's career and provides a compelling new explanation of his meteoric rise to fame. Baert takes the reader back to the confusing and traumatic period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath and shows how the unique political and intellectual landscape in France at this time helped to propel Sartre and existentialist philosophy to the fore. The book also explores why, from the early 1960s onwards, in France and elsewhere, the interest in Sartre and existentialism eventually waned. The Existentialist Moment ends with a bold new theory for the study of intellectuals and a provocative challenge to the widespread belief that the public intellectual is a species now on the brink of extinction.

A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution

A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution PDF Author: William H. Sewell (Jr.)
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
What Is the Third Estate? was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the Abbé Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assembly's declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état. This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewell's insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyes's thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readers--educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphlet's highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyes's thought--and to the core of the revolutionary project itself. Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture.

Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France

Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France PDF Author: Jonathan Dewald
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271067462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France, Jonathan Dewald explores European aristocratic society by looking closely at one of its most prominent families. The Rohan were rich, powerful, and respected, but Dewald shows that there were also weaknesses in their apparently secure position near the top of French society. Family finances were unstable, and competing interests among family members generated conflicts and scandals; political ambitions led to other troubles, partly because aristocrats like the Rohan intensely valued individual achievement, even if it came at the expense of the family’s needs. Dewald argues that aristocratic power in the Old Regime reflected ongoing processes of negotiation and refashioning, in which both men and women played important roles. So did figures from outside the family—government officials, middle-class intellectuals and businesspeople, and many others. Dewald describes how the Old Regime’s ruling class maintained its power and the obstacles it encountered in doing so.

When The World Spoke French

When The World Spoke French PDF Author: Marc Fumaroli
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590173759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
A New York Review Books Original During the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters or other writings. These men and women, despite their differences, were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures. Their stories are testaments to the appeal of that famous “sweetness of life” nourished by France and its language.