Download or read book The French Revolution written by Ian Davidson and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 has become the commemorative symbol of the French Revolution. But this violent and random act was unrepresentative of the real work of the early revolution, which was taking place ten miles west of Paris, in Versailles. There, the nobles, clergy and commoners of France had just declared themselves a republic, toppling a rotten system of aristocratic privilege and altering the course of history forever. The Revolution was led not by angry mobs, but by the best and brightest of France's growing bourgeoisie: young, educated, ambitious. Their aim was not to destroy, but to build a better state. In just three months they drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was to become the archetype of all subsequent Declarations worldwide, and they instituted a system of locally elected administration for France which still survives today. They were determined to create an entirely new system of government, based on rights, equality and the rule of law. In the first three years of the Revolution they went a long way toward doing so. Then came Robespierre, the Terror and unspeakable acts of barbarism. In a clear, dispassionate and fast-moving narrative, Ian Davidson shows how and why the Revolutionaries, in just five years, spiralled from the best of the Enlightenment to tyranny and the Terror. The book reminds us that the Revolution was both an inspiration of the finest principles of a new democracy and an awful warning of what can happen when idealism goes wrong.

Download or read book The Calendar in Revolutionary France written by Sanja Perovic and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Maréchal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action.

Download or read book Fair Shares for All written by Jean-Pierre Gross and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-13 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the egalitarian policies pursued in the provinces during the radical phase of the French Revolution, but moves away from the habit of looking at such issues in terms of the Terror alone. It challenges revisionist readings of Jacobinism that dwell on its totalitarian potential or portray it as dangerously utopian. The mainstream Jacobin agenda emphasised 'fair shares' and equal opportunities for all in a private ownership market economy. It sought to achieve social justice without jeopardising human rights and tended thus to complement, rather than undermine, the liberal, individualist programme of the Revolution. The book stresses the relevance of the 'Enlightenment legacy', the close affinity between Girondins and Montagnards, the key role played by many lesser-known figures and the moral ascendancy of Robespierre. It reassesses the basic social and economic issues at stake in the Revolution, which cannot be understood solely in terms of political discourse.

Download or read book The Great Cat Massacre written by Robert Darnton and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

Download or read book Memoirs written by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (prince de Bénévent) and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Discours Sur L esclavage Des Negres Et Sur L id e de Leur Affranchissement Dans Les Colonies written by David Duval-Sanadon and published by . This book was released on 1786 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Festivals and the French Revolution written by Mona Ozouf and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.

Download or read book The Architecture of Death written by Richard A. Etlin and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 1987-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth century Paris underwent a remarkable transformation in Western attitudes about life and death. The Architecture of Death traces this change through six pivotal decades, and analyzes the intellectual and social concerns that led to the establishment of a new kind of urban institution - the municipal cemetery. Drawing heavily on new materials and archival sources, supported by nearly 270 plans, photographs, and drawings, the book is not only a definitive work on the design of cemeteries but is also the cultural history of an age.

Download or read book Realism and Revolution written by Sandy Petrey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sandy Petrey here looks at the emergence of nineteenth-century French realism in the light of the concept of speech acts as defined by J. L. Austin and as exemplified by the history of the French Revolution. Through analysis of the techniques of representation in works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, Petrey suggests that the expression of a truth depends on the same collective forces necessary to change a regime. According to Petrey, political legitimacy in the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration was established by means of a series of demonstrations that what words say cannot be interpreted without reference to the community to which they speak. Petrey first discusses the creation of France's National Assembly in 1789 as a foundational example of how speech acts can bring about historical transformation. He then challenges the most powerful twentieth-century assault on realist aesthetics, Roland Barthes's S/Z, and also considers the views of such contemporary critics as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and Stanley Fish. During the Revolution, Petrey says, statements of truth were not descriptions of what was, but rather exhortations to produce what was not. Nineteenth-century French fiction represents in literary form a similar collectively authorized linguistic performance; the "real" in realism comes from representing facts not as they are in themselves but as they are produced and rejected in society. In the course of illuminating readings of three central realist works—Balzac's Pere Goriot, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, and Zola's Germinal—Petrey takes the position that the dilemmas of representation, far from being one of realism's blind spots, figure among its major narrative subjects.

Download or read book A History of Private Life written by Philippe Ariès and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Library has Vol. 1-5.

Download or read book Education and the French Revolution written by H. C. Barnard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Revolution was the first of the great social upheavals which transformed European society; its effects on the French national educational system and its wider influence on education is obviously important. Little has been written on the topic and Professor Barnard offers a modern study. He begins with a survey of the educational system under the Ancien Régime and describes the criticisms and schemes of reform which had already been offered before the Revolution. Then follow accounts of the educational activities of the revolutionary assemblies and the individual institutions set up during the period. The story ends with an account of the lasting influence of these reforms. Throughout, Professor Barnard emphasises the importance of the concept of education as a fundamental civic right and the duty of the state to provide and regulate it. The book gives the student of the history of education, of social history and modern France a useful survey of a central topic.

Download or read book Expositions written by Philippe Hamon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Expositions, Philippe Hamon leads us on an engaging intellectual stroll through the spaces and representations of the nineteenth-century French metropolis. Inspired by the cultural histories of Walter Benjamin and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Expositions explores the spatial and cultural logic of Haussmann's sweeping Paris boulevards, classic novels by Balzac and Zola, the Bon March� department store, and the poetry of Baudelaire.

Download or read book The People of Paris written by Daniel Roche and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987-05-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his collective portrait of the common people, Roche offers a rich and fascinating description of their lives—their housing, food, dress, financial dealings, literature, domestic life, and leisure time. Roche’s highly readable style and use of contemporary quotations enliven the reader’s view of eighteenth-century Paris and Parisians.

Download or read book Engineering the Revolution written by Ken Alder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Download or read book French Finances 1770 1795 written by J. F. Bosher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1970-11-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monarchy of Louis XVI suffered revolution and then destruction after failing to settle its financial difficulties. What precisely were those difficulties? In this book, Professor Bosher shows that the monarchy was financed by a chaotic system of private enterprise which proved increasingly unmanageable and wasteful. Hundreds of profit-seeking accountants - 'capitalists', in the language of the time - stood in the way of reform and even of clear accounting until governments of the French Revolution eventually nationalized the financial system and changed it 'from capitalism into a bureaucracy'. From his close study of the administrative changes Professor Bosher concludes that the National Assembly planned to guard the public finances by bureaucratic organization. 'With a vision of mechanical efficiency and articulation', he writes, 'systems of clock-like checks and balances such as eighteenth-century Frenchmen found everywhere, even in nature itself, the revolutionary planners hoped to prevent corruption, putting their faith in the virtues of organization to offset the vices of the individual men.'

Download or read book Pleasures of the Belle poque written by Charles Rearick and published by . This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the Bastille Day celebrations, costume balls, music halls, world's fairs, circuses, and street entertainment popular from 1880 to 1900.

Download or read book Commentaire sur l Esprit des lois de Montesquieu written by comte Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy and published by . This book was released on 1828 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: