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.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

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.

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’.

Grabbe's Don Juan und Faust and Büchner's Dantons Tod: Epicureanism and Weltschmerz

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 342-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy C. Cowen
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In many respects Danlons Tod represents a radical departure from the drama of its time. Yet it, like any other work of art, is not without predecessors, nor did it arise in an intellectual vacuum. Much has been said, for example, about Lenz's influence on Biichner's view of art and on the structure and content of his dramas. Furthermore, one of the names most commonly linked with Biichner's is that of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, his contemporary. In their search for a relationship between these two iconoclastic forerunners of modern drama, most scholars turn to Grabbe's Napoleon. We know from Biichner's correspondence with Gutzkow that he was indeed acquainted with Grabbe's panoramic picture of the still present forces of the Revolution. Although he never admitted any indebtedness to Napoleon, there are nevertheless many obvious similarities linking the two plays, particularly in the mass scenes. Yet the protagonists of the two dramas have very little in common. The following study will, however, endeavor to show that there are just such important points of comparison between Danton and the protagonists of another, often unjustly neglected drama by Grabbe: Don Juan und Faust. These similarities, while themselves not conclusive proof of a direct influence of Grabbe's only “Ideendrama” on Biichner's more intellectual portrayal of the French Revolution, will show that Dantons Tod and Don Juan und Faust, as dissimilar as their subjects are, reflect a common approach to an acute intellectual problem of the time.

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.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

Contemporary visions of France: the Revolution, Women and History: A Summary of the 1989 Fall Colloquia, New York University’s Institute of French Studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Studies ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The seven colloquia held at New York University’s Institute of French Studies during the Fall 1989 semester offered some new perspectives on the French Revolution, and took stock of various elements of French Society and history two hundred years after the taking of the Bastille.

Considerations with regard to Hereditary Influence

1864 ◽  
Vol 9 (48) ◽  
pp. 506-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Black Child ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Embryonic Life ◽  
The French Revolution

Passing on from the consideration of influences which, before an individual's birth, and during the act of his generation, seem to have much to do with the determination of his destiny, it remains only to indicate the circumstances which may affect his nature during embryonic life. And although the effects which may then be produced are not truly hereditary, but in strict language connate, it is generally quite impossible to discriminate between them and such as are really inherited. There is no need to quote here any of the multitude of examples on record, testifying to the influence of the mother upon the embryo during gestation. It might be amusing, but it would scarce be profitable, to relate how that when Persina, Queen of Ethiopia, as Heliodorus tells, saw a very beautiful image of Andromeda, she brought forth a child, which was not only not an Ethiopian, but which was very like the image; how that children were born during the French Revolution who, as they grew up, were subject to unnatural terrors, and easily became insane, as Esquirol witnesses; and how that Hippocrates saved a woman who had a black child of a white husband, and who was thereupon accused of adultery, by attributing the result to the portrait of an Ethiopian on which the woman had gazed. Suffice it to say, that the direct influence of the mother's state of mind upon the embryo, has been popularly accepted at all times. Good use was made of the fact by the Jewish patriarch, who certainly never lacked advancement from want of worldly cunning, when he peeled the rods and “set them up before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs, when the flocks came to drink,” so that the flocks “brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted,” “and the man increased exceedingly.”

Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document