scholarly journals The Transformations of Travel during the Revolution and the Empire: the Italian Case

Viatica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilles BERTRAND ◽  

This article studies the situation of French travellers in Italy during the Revolution and the First Empire. Revolutionary unrest and breaks with the Ancien Régime had a strong impact on the way Europeans travelled during this period. In addition to the nobles and the literate who continued to travel, other members of the population and new travel areas for exploration appeared. According to the Venetian archives dating from 1789 to 1796, Italy, a welcoming land for some, became an experimental field for strategies with political and scientific stakes.

1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (x) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo

For Americans, long accustomed to judicial review of the law, the traditional absence of a similar system of constitutional control in France comes as a surprise. Closer examination however, reveals that the French politico-historico-judicial tradition inherited from the Ancien Régime and the Revolution of 1789 is deeply opposed to the development of "government by the judges." Why did the Revolution react against the judiciary? How has the idea of constitutional control evolved in modern France? What are the possible sources of legitimacy for an institution (the Conseil constitutionnel) and a concept (judicial review) cut off from the sanction of tradition? What is the future of the Conseil?


Author(s):  
Alan Forrest

The chapter examines the moral threat to slaving in the last years of the Ancien Régime with the rise of abolitionism, first in Britain, then more gradually, in France. Moral qualms about slavery had first been expressed by Enlightened authors like Raynal and Condorcet; but the writings of some English abolitionists, notably Thomas Clarkson, proved equally powerful. However, in merchant circles, especially the chambers of commerce, slaves continued to be seen as a commodity, and the slaving interest was violently defended as the Revolution approached. The chapter examines pamphlets produced by both sides in the debate, and discusses the role of masonic lodges, clubs, and learned societies in the port cities themselves.


In this book, a team of contributors surveys and presents current thinking about the world of pre-revolutionary France and Europe. The idea of the Ancien Régime was invented by the French revolutionaries to define what they hoped to destroy and replace. But it was not a precise definition, and although historians have found it conceptually useful, there is wide disagreement about what the Ancien Régime's main features were, how they worked, how old they were, how far they stretched, how dynamic or inert they were, and how far the revolutionaries succeeded in their ambitions to eradicate them. In this collection, old and newer areas of research into the Ancien Régime are presented and assessed, and there has been no attempt to impose any sort of consensus. The result shows what a lively field of historical enquiry the Ancien Régime remains, and points the way towards a range of promising new directions for thinking and writing about the intriguing complex of historical problems that it continues to pose.


2019 ◽  
pp. 91-101
Author(s):  
David Sorkin

This chapter addresses how the French Revolution's alteration of the Jews' political status was truly fundamental and ambiguous. The National Assembly's legislation did not have an unalloyed revolutionary pedigree. The ancien régime persisted in the legislation of January of 1790 that granted political rights to the Jews of Bordeaux as an extension of privilege. Rights for the Jews of Alsace were deferred for twenty-one months until September of 1791 when a lame-duck assembly finally resolved the issue as a matter of constitutional integrity. Despite these ambiguities, the Revolution introduced the pattern of unconditional emancipation “out of” estates, which became a potent model for polities aiming to create a civil or bourgeois society. Through conquest and occupation over the next quarter century, France would export that model to the rest of Europe. Ultimately, the Revolution polarized Europe. Full emancipation or equal rights irrevocably became associated with the ideas of 1789. When and where those ideas triumphed, so did Jewish emancipation. When and where opponents triumphed, Jewish emancipation suffered either abridgment or outright abrogation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Barden

In the foreword to his The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “No nation had ever before embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with the past, to make, as it were, a scission in their life line and to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired to be. …in a word, they spared no pains in their endeavour to obliterate their former selves.”


2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Fischer Taylor

In the revolution of 1789, France set out to replace its absolute monarchy with a government based on a separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers. In Geometries of Power: Royal, Revolutionary, and Postrevolutionary French Courtrooms, Katherine Fischer Taylor asks how the goal of separating powers affected the reform of French justice through its physical housing. Providing the first overview of French courtroom layout, Taylor identifies four geometric configurations that characterize in turn the late ancien régime, the revolutionary decade, and the Napoleonic era and beyond. While taking account of changes in the conduct of trials, the analysis emphasizes instead how the courtroom’s spatial arrangement expresses the political source and status of justice. The revolution’s hitherto-unstudied circular layout is placed in the context of the novel curvilinear legislative chamber and influential theater reform. It proposes that the Napoleonic replacement, a rectangular layout inspired by contemporaneous basilican church interiors, instead reframed justice as a sacral power distinct from the theatrical legislature.


1995 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Munro Price

ABSTRACTThis article explores the domestic political aspects of the last great disaster of French foreign policy before the revolution: the unsuccessful intervention in Holland between 1784 and 1787. These have been largely ignored by historians, although much attention has been given both to the internal politics of the Dutch republic as well as to British involvement in her affairs during this period. The article argues that the increasing incoherence of French policy towards the United Provinces was caused by profound splits within the king's council. These culminated in a series of attacks on the diplomacy of the powerful foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, by his ministerial opponents. The Dutch affair reveals the fragmentation of foreign policy during the last years of theancien régime,and also paints a wider picture of a deeply divided royal government on the eve of the revolution.


Author(s):  
Philip Dwyer

In the face of the long line of political failures that was the Revolution, the foundation of the Empire in 1804 was an attempt to create a new polity, a third way between radical republicanism and royalism. The regime created by Napoleon was a curious mixture of the modern and the traditional, a new social and political fusion between the old and the new France. The Empire, and the reforms that emanated from it, had its roots in the Revolution. Despite the opposition that they sometimes encountered, they were all conceived as instruments of social and political cohesion. The imperial regime represented a new polity that both broke with the past and relied on ancien régime institutions and people to help implant the new order.


2020 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Michel Figeac

At the end of the Ancien Régime, theatre in Bordeaux was particularly renowned due to the construction by Victor Louis of one of the most beautiful performance halls in France. This study aims to describe the theatrical activity during the Revolution and to show how theatres proliferated because control of the stage had become a real political issue. The theatre, indeed, was both an educational place for the emergence and propagation of the new ideas, a format convenient for ci-tizens, but also a closed space favourable to contestation. We also consider the consequences of this political activism on the actors.


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