Responses to revolution: The experiences of the English Benedictine monks in the French Revolution, 1789–93

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-128
Author(s):  
Cormac Begadon
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Response Strategies ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Following the formal proscription of the formation of Catholic religious houses in England in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, English Benedictine communities were established on the Continent from 1606 onwards. At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, there were three independent houses belonging to the English Benedictine Congregation in France. The Revolution presented the English monks with a very real and tangible threat to their existence and securities, introducing a series of decrees that impacted on monastic life greatly. The monks responded to these incursions not by assuming the role of passive victims, or religious refugees caught up in a foreign conflict, but rather showed themselves to be shrewd operators, adept at playing the game of revolutionary politics and by navigating legal niceties. This article will illustrate that the monks’ sophisticated networks of information gathering and sharing allowed them to coordinate more coherent response strategies to the Revolution amongst other British and Irish exiled communities, whilst also permitting themselves to employ a series of delaying tactics. The impact of the monks’ responses to the Revolution, however, extended beyond British and Irish exiles, and impacted directly on the local French populations, through their work in the ‘refractory Church’.

The Debate over Theory Before Malthus and Ricardo

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter establishes a new context for reading the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo. It is the extended debate over the role of theory and practice in politics and political reform, a contest that Edmund Burke launched by publishing his hostile response to the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In attempting to defend theory, both Mackintosh and Stewart engaged in sophisticated rhetoric that attempted to portray Burke’s veneration of custom and usage as philosophically naïve at the same time as they insisted on the necessity of theory for a science of politics. It is in these defensive postures that both Mackintosh and Stewart came to articulate the idea of a ‘theorist’ of politics.

The Role of America in the ‘Debate on France’ 1791–5: Thomas Paine's Insertion

Utilitas ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Philp
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Political Principles ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

It is a commonplace of British History that following the onset of the French Revolution and the publication of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France a widespread debate on political principles took place. The ‘debate on France’—the trial of the French Revolution before the enlightened and independent tribunal of the English public, as James Mackintosh referred to it,—was, according to Alfred Cobban, ‘perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in this country’.

The French Revolution: The Explosion of 1789

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Great War ◽  
Detailed Treatment ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Instead of attempting the hopeless task of a full and rounded account of the French Revolution, this chapter selects a few points for more detailed treatment: how the year 1789 opened with a fully developed revolutionary psychology, what the Revolution essentially consisted of, and why the French Revolution, though inspired by much the same principles as the American Revolution, adopted different constitutional forms and took on a magnitude unknown to the upheavals of Western Civilization since the time of the Protestant Reformation. The chapter brings the story, for all countries, to about the year 1791, to the eve of the great war in which all these national and social developments were to be gathered together into one tremendous struggle.

America: Democracy Native and Imported

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indigenous Movements ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter first discusses the impact of the French Revolution on the United States. The development was twofold. On the one hand, there was an acceleration of indigenous movements. On the other, there was an influence that was unquestionably foreign. The latter presented itself especially with the war that began in Europe in 1792, and with the clash of armed ideologies that the war brought with it. The warring powers in Europe, which for Americans meant the governments of France and Great Britain, attempted to make use of the United States for their own advantage. Different groups of Americans, for their own domestic purposes, were likewise eager to exploit the power and prestige of either England or France. The chapter then turns to the impact of the Revolution on the “other” Americas.

The Philosophes and Religion: Intellectual Origins of the Dechristianization Movement in the French Revolution

1971 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles A. Gliozzo
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Supreme Being ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

From Alphonse Aulard to Peter Gay historians have been fascinated with the attitudes of the philosophes toward religion.1 In the present essay attention falls on a neglected aspect of the question, the impact of the philosophes' ideas on the dechristianization movement in the French Revolution. Dechristianization means the attempt to suppress Christianity either by legislation or by force. In the Revolution, dechristianization took the following forms: aggressive anti-clericalism, prohibition of any Christian practice or worship either in public or private life, closing of the churches, the formation of a revolutionary calendar to replace the Christian one, and the establishment of new religious cults—the Cult of Reason and the Cult of Supreme Being. It is argued here that a direct influence can be traced from the philosophes to the dechristianizers of the Revolution. The dechristianizer did not belong to any clearly defined sociological group. He was an aristocrat like Anacharsis Cloots, or bourgeois such as Jacques René Hébert and Pierre Chaumette.2 Their ideas were nurtured from the deistic and atheistic writings of the philosophes.

FIVE RECENT WORKS ON FRENCH POLITICAL HISTORY FROM 1789 TO 1851 Radicals: politics and republicanism in the French Revolution. By Leigh Whaley. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2000. Pp. x+212. ISBN 0-7509-2238-9. £20.00. Massacre at the Champ de Mars: popular dissent and political culture in the French Revolution. By David Andress. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2000. Pp. x+239. ISBN 0-86193-247-1. £35.00. Napoleon and Europe. Edited by Philip G. Dwyer. London: Longman, 2001. Pp. xxi+328. ISBN 0-582-31837-8. £14.99. Politics and theater: the crisis of legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830. By Sheryl Kroen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+394. ISBN 0-520-22214-8. £35.00. Paris between empires, 1814–1852. By Philip Mansel. London: John Murray, 2001. Pp. xi+559. ISBN 0-7195-5627-9. £25.00.

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 765-773
Author(s):  
R. S. ALEXANDER
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political History ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Study of French political history for the period of 1789 to 1851 is exceedingly complex. Not only must one possess knowledge of a succession of regimes (with their varying constitutions, institutions, laws, and conventions), one must also grasp the essentials of political traditions such as royalism, republicanism, and liberalism, all of which altered over time, and familiarize oneself with a plethora of groups or sub groups, such as Montagnards and Girondins, authoritarian and Revolutionary Bonapartists, moderate and ultra royalists, that often adjusted their beliefs and positions according to circumstance. Matters become further complicated when one takes foreign relations into account, assessing the impact of France abroad or the role of foreign relations in shaping French domestic politics.

The Problem of the Midi in the French Revolution

1978 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Massif Central ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

From the earliest moments of the French Revolution, the Midi displayed its own special characteristics within the revolutionary phenomenon. This was the chosen land of political extremes. The outbreak of the Revolution rapidly engendered an aggressive strain of radicalism which, by 1792, had made Marseille in particular the epitome of patriotism, enshrined in the association of its name with the battle-song of the Revolution and in the rôle of its militant fédérés in the overthrow of the monarchy. At the same time, militant counter-revolution appeared with mass support in the Midi well before it achieved notoriety in the Vendée. There were peasant-based insurrections in the Massif Central each year from 1790 to 1795, whilst the Bagarre de Nîmes in 1790 was the first major manifestation of royalist plotting that was to trouble many major low-land towns for the rest of the Revolution. In the earlier years of the decade, the Midi frequently descended into anarchy involving, in its most spectacular instances, civil war in the Comtat Venaissin in 1791 and armed expeditions in the name of patriotism between rival towns in 1791 and 1792. By late 1792, radical groups in Lyon, Marseille and Aix were articulating well developed proto-terrorist programmes. Indeed, at Marseille they had got to the point of largely ignoring the central government by changing the location of administrations and establishing extraordinary institutions. In 1793, it was in the Midi that Federalism developed to the extreme, requiring a campaign and sieges by regular troops for its defeat. Toulon went as far as to call in the English.

Revolution as Vendetta: Patriotism in Piedmont, 1794–1821

1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Broers
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ideological Commitment ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.

scholarly journals An Alarming Lack of Feeling: Urban Travel, Emotions, and British National Character in Post-Revolutionary Paris

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-17
Author(s):  
Victoria E. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
National Character ◽  
Urban Travel ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
The City ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This article analyzes British narratives of voyages made to Paris during three periods: the Peace of Amiens (March 1802 to May 1803), the first Restoration (April 1814 to May 1815), and in the first few years of the second Restoration (June 1815 to ca. 1820). These accounts reveal a consistent use of strong and distressing expressions of emotion when describing locations in the city associated with the events of the French Revolution. An analysis of these “emotional landmarks” allows us to understand the role of trauma in unsettling distinctions between the British and French in the aftermath of the Revolution. It also demonstrates that travel writers participated in an emotional community consistent with the nation, one that used these emotional landmarks to establish a new distinction between the two national characters based on emotion.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

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