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.

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’.

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’.

Bangladesh: An Unfinished Revolution?

1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talukder Maniruzzaman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Authoritarian Regime ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Revolutionary mass upheaval generally weakens the people's respect for authority, law, and discipline; and it brings in its wake social, economic, and political disorders, facilitating the establishment of an authoritarian regime. The French Revolution was based on the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but the destruction of the old social and political fabric, and the failure to institutionalize the new ideas, led Frenchmen to search for “the man of genius destined at once to carry on and to abolish the revolution.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 was also followed by several years of civil war, which led to the establishment of the ruthless totalitarian regime of Stalin, itself reminiscent of the Thermidorian Reaction. In Algeria, Cuba, China, and North Vietnam, successful mass armed revolutions have been consolidated only because of their one-party dictatorships.

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.

‘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.

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.

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