The Merovingians from the French Revolution to the Third Republic

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 450-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward James
1997 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-501
Author(s):  
Brian Brennan

Statuary groups, countless illustrations, and colorful stained glass all preserve for us the most famous medieval image of the charitable soldier-saint, Martin of Tours (336–397). The young Martin is depicted seated on his horse dividing his soldier's cape to share it with Christ disguised as a freezing beggar at the gate of Amiens. After abandoning the Roman army, Martin became a monk, an ascetic “soldier of Christ,” and was chosen by the people of Tours as their bishop. Renowned in his lifetime as a wonderworker, Martin's tomb remained for centuries an important pilgrimage center. The later Carolingian kings carried a fragment of Martin's cape into battle as a victory-giving talisman, and French monarchs invoked the saint as their patron. Because of its royalist associations, Saint Martin's basilica at Tours was almost completely destroyed in the French Revolution, and subsequently houses and new municipal streets encroached on the sacred space.


Author(s):  
Michael Rapport

This article describes many facets of the French Revolution. The French Revolution introduced parliamentary government to France, but it was only “an apprenticeship in democracy,” the first step towards modern, democratic politics, not its consummation. François Furet has controversially argued that the values and practices of democracy were not definitively embedded in France until the consolidation of the Third Republic in the 1870s, which he describes as “the French Revolution coming into port.” A continuing focus of research, therefore, are the ways in which the people entered politics outside the formal processes, namely in the dramatic expansion in civil society, which had been developing since the mid-eighteenth century, but which in the Revolution flowered with the collapse of censorship, empowering a wide cross-section of French society.


1986 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-132
Author(s):  
Felicia Hardison Londré

Repeatedly throughout French theatre history two subjects have aroused the passions of the French theatregoer: art and politics. The famous opening-night riots at Le Cid in 1636, Hernani in 1830, and Ubu roi in 1896 all resulted in the overthrow of stale artistic conventions by the new art that each of these works represented. Examples of productions that had political repercussions are abundant – like the historical dramas of Marie-Joseph Chénier that did so much to promote the French Revolution (until his Caius Gracchus in 1792 caused a backlash demonstration), or the 1943 Comédie-Française production of Claudel's mystico-religious Soulier de satin that was gleefully interpreted by the French in German-occupied Paris as ‘resistance theatre’. One noteworthy theatrical event that succeeded in arousing both artistic and political passions was not even a French play – nor was it contemporary, although the most often-repeated comment about it was: ‘It seems to have been written just yesterday.’ This was a production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Comédie-Française in the 1933–4 season, just at the time when the Third Republic was nearly toppled by the public's response to press revelations of the Stavisky scandal.


1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Allen

Most historians of the French Revolution accept the now familiar contention that village curés and vicaires sided with the Third Estate in 1789, presumably out of class solidarity born of common origins and personal contact with the sad lot of ordinary people. Historians also agree that most of these “patriot” curiés (as those who supported reforms and the Third Estate in 1789 called themselves) later deserted the Revolution once it became clear that what the Third had in mind included sweeping restraints on the once vaunted power and property of the church and on the spiritual autonomy and authority of the French clergy.


Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger ◽  
Knox Peden

After the French Revolution, philosophy and the rapid rise of individualism were blamed for the bloodshed. ‘Post-Revolutionary philosophy: the nineteenth century and the Third Republic’ introduces thinkers like Auguste Comte, who ushered in socialism by arguing that Enlightenment ideas had toppled the old order of monarchy and religion, but that their individualism potentially hampered progress. Progress, epitomized by science, was the goal in nineteenth-century French philosophy. Rationalism and the ‘critical idealism’ of Léon Brunschvicg were not the only schools of thought. The Romantic philosopher Henri Bergson tackled the relationship between mind, body, and spirit by defining knowledge as a process.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jessica Whyte

Around 1882, the photographer Albert Fernique photographed a group of Parisian workers gathered around trestles and benches inside a workshop. The floor is strewn with piles of wood and the ceiling beams tower above the workmen. Even so, the space is dwarfed by a massive, sculpted shoulder, draped in Roman robes, which dominates the background of the photograph; two workers watching the scene from a beam just below the roof appear to be perched on it like sparrows. The shoulder belonged to the statue, Liberty Enlightening the World—a gift to the United States from the France of the Third Republic. Work on the statue began here, in the workshop of the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, only a year after the suppression of the Paris Commune. More people were killed in that one Bloody Week (la semaine sanglante) in 1874 than were executed in the entire Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. If the statue was supposed to symbolize liberty, this was to be an orderly liberty far removed from the license of the armed Parisian workers and their short-lived utopian government. Unlike her ancestor Marianne, immortalized by Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, the statue does not wear the red cap that, since ancient Rome, had symbolized freedom from slavery. In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Third Republic banned the cap and sought to banish the unruly freedom it represented.


1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-283
Author(s):  
ISSER WOLOCH

Becoming a revolutionary: the deputies of the French National Assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture, 1789–1790. By Timothy Tackett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+355. ISBN 0-69-104384-1. $29.95.Elections in the French Revolution. By Malcolm Crook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+221. ISBN 0-521-45191-4. $35.00.The notion of a revolutionary change in collective psychology has long been present in certain master narratives of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre deployed this concept in his analysis of the psychodynamics that propelled revolutionary crowds. He also introduced the notion more casually in discussing the ‘patriot’ elites who experienced a psychological upheaval when the parlement of Paris ruled in September 1788 that the forthcoming Estates General should be organized as in 1614, meaning that the third estate would be submerged under the weight of the two privileged orders. While William Doyle's revisionist synthesis has plausibly argued that the parlement's intention was less nefarious (it wished to prevent the king from using new ground rules to pack the Estates with pliant deputies), it does not change the fact that public opinion would never be the same after that consciousness-raising event. More broadly, R. R. Palmer, in trying to convey the uniquely revolutionary thrust of the French experience in 1789 – having already contextualized it in relation to other European and American upheavals – wrestled with that issue in a section that he called ‘The formation of a revolutionary psychology’.


2020 ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Przemysław Maj

The aim of the article is to give arguments against the presence of three stereotypes in political science concerning leftism, centrism and rightism. The first one involves the classification of political entities by indicating their place on the left-centre-right axis. The second is based on the belief that leftism, centrism and rightism can be narrowed down to specific levels of competition (e.g. views on the economy or religion). The third stereotype is “dogma” that the conflict over political values was initiated during the French Revolution. The author explains his position with reference to the psychological theory of Shalom H. Schwartz and the circular matrix of meta-value.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document