Download or read book The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon written by Robert Darnton and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-11-27 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it a topic unworthy of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, and the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment. In The Devil in the Holy Water, Darnton—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France and author of his own best-sellers, The Great Cat Massacre and George Washington's False Teeth—offers a startling new perspective on the origins of the French Revolution and the development of a revolutionary political culture in the years after 1789. He opens with an account of the colony of French refugees in London who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and of the secret agents sent over from Paris to squelch them. The libelers were not above extorting money for pretending to destroy the print runs of books they had duped the government agents into believing existed; the agents were not above recognizing the lucrative nature of such activities—and changing sides. As the Revolution gave way to the Terror, Darnton demonstrates, the substance of libels changed while the form remained much the same. With the wit and erudition that has made him one of the world's most eminent historians of eighteenth-century France, he here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, The Devil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places.
Download or read book Forging Napoleon s Grande Arm e written by Michael J. Hughes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The men who fought in Napoleon’s Grande Armée built a new empire that changed the world. Remarkably, the same men raised arms during the French Revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In just over a decade, these freedom fighters, who had once struggled to overthrow tyrants, rallied to the side of a man who wanted to dominate Europe. What was behind this drastic change of heart? In this ground-breaking study, Michael J. Hughes shows how Napoleonic military culture shaped the motivation of Napoleon’s soldiers. Relying on extensive archival research and blending cultural and military history, Hughes demonstrates that the Napoleonic regime incorporated elements from both the Old Regime and French Revolutionary military culture to craft a new military culture, characterized by loyalty to both Napoleon and the preservation of French hegemony in Europe. Underscoring this new, hybrid military culture were five sources of motivation: honor, patriotism, a martial and virile masculinity, devotion to Napoleon, and coercion. Forging Napoleon's Grande Armée vividly illustrates how this many-pronged culture gave Napoleon’s soldiers reasons to fight.
Download or read book The Revolutionary Temper Paris 1748 1789 written by Robert Darnton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant account of the coming of the French Revolution, and the culminating work of this most distinguished historian. When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. In retrospect we understand the French Revolution as the outcome of such factors as a faltering economy and Enlightenment thought. But what did the Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton draws on decades of study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents—entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. With public trust eroding as new aspirations soared, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution.
Download or read book Journalism and the Nsa Revelations written by Adrienne Russell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Snowden's revelations about the mass surveillance capabilities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other security services triggered an ongoing debate about the relationship between privacy and security in the digital world. This discussion has been dispersed into a number of national platforms, reflecting local political realities but also raising questions that cut across national public spheres. What does this debate tell us about the role of journalism in making sense of global events? This book looks at discussions of these debates in the mainstream media in the USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China. The chapters focus on editorials, commentaries and op-eds and look at how opinion-based journalism has negotiated key questions on the legitimacy of surveillance and its implications to security and privacy. The authors provide a thoughtful analysis of the possibilities and limits of 'transnational journalism' at a crucial time of political and digital change.
Download or read book Royalists Radicals and les Mis rables written by Eric Martone and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year of 1832 marked a turning point in France as the country struggled to find its way in the wake of the French Revolution. Following the Revolution of 1830, Legitimists, supporters of the recently ousted Bourbon dynasty’s claim to the throne, continued to plot against King Louis-Philippe and his “July Monarchy.” In early 1832, after failing to launch a coup in Southern France, Legitimists plotted an unsuccessful uprising in the Vendée, a region in Western France that had supported the royalist cause during the French Revolution. The Duchesse de Berry led the rebellion in the hopes of placing her son, the Bourbon heir, on the French throne. The revolt marked the last attempt by the Bourbons to retake the throne by force and helped solidify the end of the Bourbon dynasty. During the cholera outbreak, which also spread throughout France in 1832, lower income areas suffered higher losses to the disease, for they were more likely to have contaminated water supplies. The lower classes spread rumors that the outbreak was an elitist plot to subdue the masses and the epidemic exacerbated class tensions. Meanwhile, conditions in France continued to be characterized by violence during the early 1830s as Louis-Philippe attempted to establish his regime’s authority. The most significant of these uprisings was the republican-dominated June Revolution of 1832. Victor Hugo and other contemporaries perceived the barricades of June as natural extensions of the cholera epidemic, or the “political continuation of a biological crisis.” The sad fate of the uprising, however, prompted republicans to regroup and develop new strategies for success. As a whole, then, 1832 helped solidify the end of the Bourbon monarchy and class identities, and was a crucial moment in the (re)organization and growing solidification of French republicanism that paved the way for the Revolution of 1848. This edited collection examines these three pivotal events in French history in 1832—a royal Legitimist uprising led by the Duchesse de Berry, the cholera epidemic, and the June Revolution (featured in the climax of Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables)—within the context of the legacy of the French Revolution. While the events of 1832 are significant, they have been relatively ignored because scholars have been distracted by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. This collection is the first piece of scholarship to examine these three events in an interconnected pattern to better examine France as it transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. As a result, this collection will be of value to both historians and academics studying diverse subfields within French and European studies.
Download or read book Progressive Violence written by Michael Blain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of collective violence in the achievement of solidarity, shedding light on the difficulty faced by sociology in theorizing violence and warfare as a result of the discipline’s tendency to idealize society in an attempt to legitimize the idea of progressive social change. Using the global War on Terror as a focal point, the authors develop this argument through the related issues of power, knowledge, and ethics, explaining the War on Terror in terms of the Anglo-American tradition of imperial power and domination. Exploring the victimage rituals through which society is brought together in the ritual domination and destruction of a constructed "villain," Progressive Violence: Theorizing the War on Terror also considers the price of the liberal moral values in terms of which the global war on terror is frequently justified, and the volume of "progressive violence" involved in advancing the cause of freedom. The authors use this case to theorize the general role of vicarious victimage ritual in the social genesis of political violence and sadism, and its calculated use by politicians to achieve their imperial aims. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in terrorism, violence, and geopolitics.
Download or read book Experimental Selves written by Christopher Braider and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the generous semantic range the term enjoyed in early modern usage, Experimental Selves argues that ‘person,’ as early moderns understood this concept, was an ‘experimental’ phenomenon—at once a given of experience and the self-conscious arena of that experience. Person so conceived was discovered to be a four-dimensional creature: a composite of mind or 'inner' personality; of the body and outward appearance; of social relationship; and of time. Through a series of case studies keyed to a wide variety of social and cultural contexts, including theatre, the early novel, the art of portraiture, pictorial experiments in vision and perception, theory of knowledge, and the new experimental science of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book examines the manifold shapes person assumed as an expression of the social, natural, and aesthetic ‘experiments’ or experiences to which it found itself subjected as a function of the mere contingent fact of just having them.
Download or read book Who Should Rule written by Mónica Ricketts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial reform: contentious consequences, 1760-1808 -- Towards a new imperial elite -- Merit and its subversive new roles -- The king's most loyal subjects -- From men of letters to political actors -- Imperial turmoil: conflicts old and new, 1805-1830 -- Liberalism and war, 1805-1814 -- Abascal and the problem of letters in Peru, 1806-1816 -- Pens, politics, and swords: a path to pervasive unrest, 1820-1830
Download or read book Anecdotal Modernity written by James Dorson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.
Download or read book Artificial Intelligence and Democracy written by Duberry, Jérôme and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This insightful book explores the citizen-government relation, as mediated through artificial intelligence (AI). Through a critical lens, Jérôme Duberry examines the role of AI in the relation and its implications for the quality of liberal democracy and the strength of civic capacity.
Download or read book The Secret History in Literature 1660 1820 written by Rebecca Bullard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secret history, with its claim to expose secrets of state and the sexual intrigues of monarchs and ministers, alarmed and thrilled readers across Europe and America from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars have recognised for some time the important position that the genre occupies within the literary and political culture of the Enlightenment. Of interest to students of British, French and American literature, as well as political and intellectual history, this new volume of essays demonstrates for the first time the extent of secret history's interaction with different literary traditions, including epic poetry, Restoration drama, periodicals, and slave narratives. It reveals secret history's impact on authors, readers, and the book trade in England, France, and America throughout the long eighteenth century. In doing so, it offers a case study for approaching questions of genre at moments when political and cultural shifts put strain on traditional generic categories.
Download or read book How to Ruin a Queen written by Jonathan Beckman and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A hell of a tale and Jonathan Beckman gives it all the verve and swagger it deserves . . . I read it with fascination, delight and frequent snorts of incredulity' The Spectator On 5 September 1785, a trial began in Paris that would divide the country, captivate Europe and send the French monarchy tumbling down the slope towards the Revolution. Cardinal Louis de Rohan, scion of one of the most ancient and distinguished families in France, stood accused of forging Marie Antoinette's signature to fraudulently obtain the most expensive piece of jewellery in Europe - a 2,400-carat necklace worth 1.6 million francs. Where were the diamonds now? Was Rohan entirely innocent? Was, for that matter, the queen? What was the role of the charismatic magus, the comte de Cagliostro, who was rumoured to be two-thousand-years old and capable of transforming metal into gold? This is a tale of political machinations and extravagance on an enormous scale; of kidnappings, prison breaks and assassination attempts; of hapless French police disguised as colliers, reams of lesbian pornography and a duel fought with poisoned pigs. It is a detective story, a courtroom drama, a tragicomic farce, and a study of credulity and self-deception in the Age of Enlightenment.
Download or read book The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II written by Simon Burrows and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a rich and path-breaking comparative study of reading tastes in the final years of old regime Europe. Based on extensive research in the account books of the Swiss publishers, the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), and related archives, it charts the dissemination of literature and reading tastes across Europe in the years leading up to the French revolution. In the process, it recasts our understanding of late 18th-century print culture and the contours of the enlightenment. The fruit of a widely acclaimed five year database project, the STN database, it is also a story of pioneering efforts to apply the latest digital technology and GIS mapping techniques to traditional historical and bibliographic problems. Although written to serve as a standalone study, this book is ideally complemented by its companion volume, Mark Curran's The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment, which offers a radical reinterpretation of the structure and practices of the European book trade. The STN database is now recognised as a cutting-edge digital project of global significance. Robert Darnton has called it "a prodigious accomplishment and a joy to use" while Jeremy Popkin adds, "No one working in the field of French Enlightenment studies ... can afford to ignore the rich mine of data that Simon Burrows and his collaborators have made accessible, in an eminently usable form, and the new possibilities it opens up for scholars." The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I and II offer a roadmap of that data and what it can show us.
Download or read book Writing on the Wall written by Tom Standage and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are endlessly connected: constantly tweeting, texting or e-mailing. This may seem unprecedented, yet it is not. Throughout history, information has been spread through social networks, with far-reaching social and political effects. Writing on the Wall reveals how an elaborate network of letter exchanges forewarned of power shifts in Cicero's Rome, while the torrent of tracts circulating in sixteenth-century Germany triggered the Reformation. Standage traces the story of the rise, fall and rebirth of social media over the past 2,000 years offering an illuminating perspective on the history of media, and revealing that social networks do not merely connect us today – they also link us to the past.
Download or read book The Whispers of Cities written by John-Paul A. Ghobrial and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores interactions between early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire through the experiences of the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1687 to 1692, showing how information flows between Istanbul, London, and Paris were rooted in the personal exchanges between Ottomans and Europeans in everyday encounters.
Download or read book Rumours of Revolt written by Rosanne M. Baars and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reception of foreign news during the Dutch Revolt and the French Wars of Religion, shedding new light on the connections between these conflicts and demonstrating the emergence of critical news audiences.
Download or read book The Broadview Reader in Book History written by Michelle Levy and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book History has emerged as one of the most exciting new interdisciplinary fields of study in the humanities. By focusing on the production, circulation and reception of the book in all its forms, it has transformed the study of history, literature and culture. The Broadview Book History Reader is the most complete and up-to-date introduction available to this area of study. The reader reprints 33 key essays in the field, grouped conceptually and provided with headnotes, explanatory footnotes, an introduction, a chronology, and a glossary of terms.
