The Fall of the French Monarchy

The Fall of the French Monarchy PDF Author: Munro Price
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447265900
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Munro Price has meticulously researched the mood, atmosphere and personalities behind the palace walls. At the heart of this research is a cache of letters that sheds new light on the lives of the royals, as the monarchy was gradually stripped of its power and revolutionary fervour called for their execution. The central character in this new evidence is the Baron de Breteuil, Louis's ambassador in exile, who orchestrated doomed escape plans and co-ordinated the international response to the revolution.This new book reassesses a perennially interesting period of history and will shed fresh insight into one of the real tuning points in European history

The Fall of the French Monarchy

The Fall of the French Monarchy PDF Author: Munro Price
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447265900
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
Munro Price has meticulously researched the mood, atmosphere and personalities behind the palace walls. At the heart of this research is a cache of letters that sheds new light on the lives of the royals, as the monarchy was gradually stripped of its power and revolutionary fervour called for their execution. The central character in this new evidence is the Baron de Breteuil, Louis's ambassador in exile, who orchestrated doomed escape plans and co-ordinated the international response to the revolution.This new book reassesses a perennially interesting period of history and will shed fresh insight into one of the real tuning points in European history

The Life of Louis XVI

The Life of Louis XVI PDF Author: John Hardman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220421
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
A thought-provoking, authoritative biography of one of history's most maligned rulers Louis XVI of France, who was guillotined in 1793 during the Revolution and Reign of Terror, is commonly portrayed in fiction and film either as a weak and stupid despot in thrall to his beautiful, shallow wife, Marie Antoinette, or as a cruel and treasonous tyrant. Historian John Hardman disputes both these versions in a fascinating new biography of the ill-fated monarch. Based in part on new scholarship that has emerged over the past two decades, Hardman's illuminating study describes a highly educated ruler who, though indecisive, possessed sharp political insight and a talent for foreign policy; who often saw the dangers ahead but could not or would not prevent them; and whose great misfortune was to be caught in the violent center of a major turning point in history. Hardman's dramatic reassessment of the reign of Louis XVI sheds a bold new light on the man, his actions, his world, and his policies, including the king's support for America's War of Independence, the intricate workings of his court, the disastrous Diamond Necklace Affair, and Louis's famous dash to Varennes.

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.

Louis XVI and the French Revolution, 1789–1792

Louis XVI and the French Revolution, 1789–1792 PDF Author: Ambrogio A. Caiani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139789732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The experience, and failure, of Louis XVI's short-lived constitutional monarchy of 1789–92 deeply influenced the politics and course of the French Revolution. The dramatic breakdown of the political settlement of 1789 steered the French state into the decidedly stormy waters of political terror and warfare on an almost global scale. This book explores how the symbolic and political practices which underpinned traditional Bourbon kingship ultimately succumbed to the radical challenge posed by the Revolution's new 'proto-republican' culture. While most previous studies have focused on Louis XVI's real and imagined foreign counterrevolutionary plots, Ambrogio A. Caiani examines the king's hitherto neglected domestic activities in Paris. Drawing on previously unexplored archival source material, Caiani provides an alternative reading of Louis XVI in this period, arguing that the monarch's symbolic behaviour and the organisation of his daily activities and personal household were essential factors in the people's increasing alienation from the newly established constitutional monarchy.

The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture

The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture PDF Author: T. C. W. Blanning
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198227450
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
In this fascinating new account of Old Regime Europe, T.C.W. Blanning explores the cultural revolution which transformed eighteenth-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV's Versailles was pushed from the centre to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space - the public sphere. The author shows how many of the world's most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library,the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic. It was here that public opinion staked its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of culture and politics. For the established order this new force was to prove both a challenge and an opportunity and the author's comparative study of power and culture shows how regimes sought to keep their balance as the ground moved beneath their feet. In the process he explains, among other things, why Britain won the 'Second HundredYears War' against France, how Prussia rose to become the dominant power in German-speaking Europe, and why the French monarchy collapsed.

The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: William Doyle
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
ISBN: 0192853961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, this work looks at how the ancien régime became ancien as well as examining cases in which achievement failed to match ambition.

Queen of Fashion

Queen of Fashion PDF Author: Caroline Weber
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429936479
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion—the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs—was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 1789 and 1793

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 1789 and 1793 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780947608057
Category : Human rights
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description


The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon PDF Author: Laure Murat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602587X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial—and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship between history and madness. She uncovers countless stories of patients whose delusions seem to be rooted in the historical or political traumas of their time, like the watchmaker who believed he lived with a new head, his original having been removed at the guillotine. In the troubled wake of the Revolution, meanwhile, French physicians diagnosed a number of mental illnesses tied to current events, from “revolutionary neuroses” and “democratic disease” to the “ambitious monomania” of the Restoration. How, Murat asks, do history and psychiatry, the nation and the individual psyche, interface? A fascinating history of psychiatry—but of a wholly new sort—The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon offers the first sustained analysis of the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, history, and political theory.

The Reign of Louis XIV

The Reign of Louis XIV PDF Author: Paul Sonnino
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description