Nobility Reimagined

Nobility Reimagined PDF Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The mature nationalism that fueled the French Revolution grew from patriotic sensibilities fostered over the course of a century or more. Jay M. Smith proposes that the French thought their way to nationhood through a process of psychic adjustment premised on the reimagining of nobility, a social category and moral concept that had long dominated the cultural horizons of the old regime. Nobility Reimagined follows the elaboration of French patriotism across the eighteenth century and highlights the accentuation of key, and conflicting, features of patriotic thought at defining moments in the history of the monarchy. By enabling the articulation of different futures for nobility and nation, the patriotic awakening that marked the old regime helped to create both the quest for patriotic unity and the fierce constitutional battles that flowered at the time of the Revolution. Smith argues that the attempt to redefine and restore French nobility brought forth competing visions of patriotism with correlating models of the social and political order. Although the terms of public debate have changed, the same basic challenge continues to animate contemporary politics: how to reconcile inspiring and unifying nationalist ideals—honor, virtue, patriotism—with persistent social frictions rooted in class, ideology, ethnicity, or gender.

Nobility Reimagined

Nobility Reimagined PDF Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The mature nationalism that fueled the French Revolution grew from patriotic sensibilities fostered over the course of a century or more. Jay M. Smith proposes that the French thought their way to nationhood through a process of psychic adjustment premised on the reimagining of nobility, a social category and moral concept that had long dominated the cultural horizons of the old regime. Nobility Reimagined follows the elaboration of French patriotism across the eighteenth century and highlights the accentuation of key, and conflicting, features of patriotic thought at defining moments in the history of the monarchy. By enabling the articulation of different futures for nobility and nation, the patriotic awakening that marked the old regime helped to create both the quest for patriotic unity and the fierce constitutional battles that flowered at the time of the Revolution. Smith argues that the attempt to redefine and restore French nobility brought forth competing visions of patriotism with correlating models of the social and political order. Although the terms of public debate have changed, the same basic challenge continues to animate contemporary politics: how to reconcile inspiring and unifying nationalist ideals—honor, virtue, patriotism—with persistent social frictions rooted in class, ideology, ethnicity, or gender.

Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution

Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution PDF Author: William Doyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199559856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Doyle describes how the French revolutionaries tried to abolish the nobility, analysing the intellectual roots of hostility to nobles, the steps by which revolutionaries turned against aristocracy, the impact of persecution, and the long-term consequences of these developments for the nobility.

Forging Napoleon's Grande ArmŽe

Forging Napoleon's Grande ArmŽe PDF Author: Michael J. Hughes
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081473748X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The men who fought in Napoleon’s Grande Armée built a new empire that changed the world. Remarkably, the same men raised arms during the French Revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In just over a decade, these freedom fighters, who had once struggled to overthrow tyrants, rallied to the side of a man who wanted to dominate Europe. What was behind this drastic change of heart? In this ground-breaking study, Michael J. Hughes shows how Napoleonic military culture shaped the motivation of Napoleon’s soldiers. Relying on extensive archival research and blending cultural and military history, Hughes demonstrates that the Napoleonic regime incorporated elements from both the Old Regime and French Revolutionary military culture to craft a new military culture, characterized by loyalty to both Napoleon and the preservation of French hegemony in Europe. Underscoring this new, hybrid military culture were five sources of motivation: honor, patriotism, a martial and virile masculinity, devotion to Napoleon, and coercion. Forging Napoleon's Grande Armée vividly illustrates how this many-pronged culture gave Napoleon’s soldiers reasons to fight.

Life Reimagined

Life Reimagined PDF Author: Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101622970
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
A dynamic and inspiring exploration of the new science that is redrawing the future for people in their forties, fifties, and sixties for the better—and for good. There’s no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It’s a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. In Life Reimagined, Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It’s the time to renegotiate your purpose, refocus your relationships, and transform the way you think about the world and yourself. Drawing from emerging information in neurology, psychology, biology, genetics, and sociology—as well as her own story of midlife transformation—Hagerty redraws the map for people in midlife and plots a new course forward in understanding our health, our relationships, even our futures.

Nobility Lost

Nobility Lost PDF Author: Christian Ayne Crouch
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801470390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Nobility Lost is a cultural history of the Seven Years' War in French-claimed North America, focused on the meanings of wartime violence and the profound impact of the encounter between Canadian, Indian, and French cultures of war and diplomacy. This narrative highlights the relationship between events in France and events in America and frames them dialogically, as the actors themselves experienced them at the time. Christian Ayne Crouch examines how codes of martial valor were enacted and challenged by metropolitan and colonial leaders to consider how those acts affected French-Indian relations, the culture of French military elites, ideas of male valor, and the trajectory of French colonial enterprises afterwards, in the second half of the eighteenth century. At Versailles, the conflict pertaining to the means used to prosecute war in New France would result in political and cultural crises over what constituted legitimate violence in defense of the empire. These arguments helped frame the basis for the formal French cession of its North American claims to the British in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. While the French regular army, the troupes de terre (a late-arriving contingent to the conflict), framed warfare within highly ritualized contexts and performances of royal and personal honor that had evolved in Europe, the troupes de la marine (colonial forces with economic stakes in New France) fought to maintain colonial land and trade. A demographic disadvantage forced marines and Canadian colonial officials to accommodate Indian practices of gift giving and feasting in preparation for battle, adopt irregular methods of violence, and often work in cooperation with allied indigenous peoples, such as Abenakis, Hurons, and Nipissings. Drawing on Native and European perspectives, Crouch shows the period of the Seven Years’ War to be one of decisive transformation for all American communities. Ultimately the augmented strife between metropolitan and colonial elites over the aims and means of warfare, Crouch argues, raised questions about the meaning and cost of empire not just in North America but in the French Atlantic and, later, resonated in France’s approach to empire-building around the globe. The French government examined the cause of the colonial debacle in New France at a corruption trial in Paris (known as l’affaire du Canada), and assigned blame. Only colonial officers were tried, and even those who were acquitted found themselves shut out of participation in new imperial projects in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. By tracing the subsequent global circumnavigation of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a decorated veteran of the French regulars, 1766–1769, Crouch shows how the lessons of New France were assimilated and new colonial enterprises were constructed based on a heightened jealousy of French honor and a corresponding fear of its loss in engagement with Native enemies and allies.

Sentimental Savants

Sentimental Savants PDF Author: Meghan K. Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638411X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Men of Letters, Men of Feeling -- 2. Working Together -- 3. Love, Proof, and Smallpox Inoculation -- 4. Enlightening Children -- 5. Organic Enlightenment -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Brotherly Love

Brotherly Love PDF Author: Kenneth Loiselle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801454875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Friendship, an acquired relationship primarily based on choice rather than birth, lay at the heart of Enlightenment preoccupations with sociability and the formation of the private sphere. In Brotherly Love, Kenneth Loiselle argues that Freemasonry is an ideal arena in which to explore the changing nature of male friendship in Enlightenment France. Freemasonry was the largest and most diverse voluntary organization in the decades before the French Revolution. At least fifty thousand Frenchmen joined lodges, the memberships of which ranged across the social spectrum from skilled artisans to the highest ranks of the nobility. Loiselle argues that men were attracted to Freemasonry because it enabled them to cultivate enduring friendships that were egalitarian and grounded in emotion. Drawing on scores of archives, including private letters, rituals, the minutes of lodge meetings, and the speeches of many Freemasons, Loiselle reveals the thought processes of the visionaries who founded this movement, the ways in which its members maintained friendships both within and beyond the lodge, and the seemingly paradoxical place women occupied within this friendship community. Masonic friendship endured into the tumultuous revolutionary era, although the revolutionary leadership suppressed most of the lodges by 1794. Loiselle not only examines the place of friendship in eighteenth-century society and culture but also contributes to the history of emotions and masculinity, and the essential debate over the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment

The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment PDF Author: Liana Vardi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021197
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Offers a framework for understanding physiocratic theory and the development of modern economics.

Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France

Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Nicole Bauer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031122364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book traces changing attitudes towards secrecy in eighteenth-century France, and explores the cultural origins of ideas surrounding government transparency. The idea of keeping secrets, both on the part of individuals and on the part of governments, came to be viewed with more suspicion as the century progressed. By the eve of the French Revolution, writers voicing concerns about corruption saw secrecy as part and parcel of despotism, and this shift went hand in hand with the rise of the idea of transparency. The author argues that the emphasis placed on government transparency, especially the mania for transparency that dominated the French Revolution, resulted from the surprising connections and confluence of changing attitudes towards honour, religious movements, rising nationalism, literature, and police practices. Exploring religious ideas that associated secrecy with darkness and wickedness, and proto-nationalist discourse that equated foreignness with secrecy, this book demonstrates how cultural shifts in eighteenth-century France influenced its politics. Covering the period of intense fear during the French Revolution and the paranoia of the Reign of Terror, the book highlights the complex interplay of culture and politics and provides insights into our attitudes towards secrecy today.

Sex in an Old Regime City

Sex in an Old Regime City PDF Author: Julie Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190945206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard. In Sex in an Old Regime City, Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide. This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state.