The reordering of France into a new hierarchy of administrative and judicial regions in 1791 unleashed an intense rivalry among small towns for seats of authority, while raising vital issues for the ...vast majority of the French population. Here Ted Margadant tells a lively story of the process of politicization: magistrates, lawyers, merchants, and other townspeople who petitioned the National Assembly not only boasted of their own communities and denigrated rival towns, but also adopted revolutionary slogans and disseminated new political ideas and practices throughout the countryside. The history of this movement offers a unique vantage point for analyzing the regional context of town life and the political dynamics of bourgeois leadership during the French Revolution. Margadant explores the institutional crisis of the old regime that brought about the reordering, considers the rhetoric and politics of space in the first year of the Revolution, and examines the fate of small towns whose districts and law courts were suppressed. Combining descriptive narrative with statistical analysis and computer mapping, he reveals the important consequences of the new hierarchy for the urban development of France in the post-Revolutionary era.
Giving close consideration to previously neglected debates, Matthew Mason challenges the common contention that slavery held little political significance in America until the Missouri Crisis of ...1819. Mason demonstrates that slavery and politics were enmeshed in the creation of the nation, and in fact there was never a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went uncontested.The American Revolution set in motion the split between slave states and free states, but Mason explains that the divide took on greater importance in the early nineteenth century. He examines the partisan and geopolitical uses of slavery, the conflicts between free states and their slaveholding neighbors, and the political impact of African Americans across the country.Offering a full picture of the politics of slavery in the crucial years of the early republic, Mason demonstrates that partisans and patriots, slave and free--and not just abolitionists and advocates of slavery--should be considered important players in the politics of slavery in the United States.
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.
The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740-1815 examines a key development in modern European history: the origins and emergence of a competitive state system.
H.M. Scott demonstrates how the well-known ...and dramatic events of these decades - the emergence of Russia and Prussia; the three partitions of Poland; the continuing retreat of the Ottoman Empire; the unprecedented territorial expansion of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, halted by the final defeat of Napoleon - were part of a wider process that created the modern great power system, dominated by Europe's five leading states.
Enhanced by maps and a chronology of principal events, this comprehensive and accessible textbook is fully up-to-date in its coverage of recent scholarship. Unlike many other treatments of this period, Scott extends his beyond the French Revolution of 1789 in order to demonstrate how events both before and after this great upheaval merged to produce the central political development in modern European history.
This book addresses the crucial phase in the emergence of the modern international system which, with the subsequent addition of the USA, Japan and Russia, has prevailed until the present day.
In Napoleon and the Operational Art of War, the leading scholars of Napoleonic military history provide the most authoritative analysis of Napoleon's battlefield success and ultimate failure in a ...work that features the very best of campaign military history.
Written by an experienced author and expert in the field, Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792-1815 provides a thorough re-examination of the crucial period in the history of France for ...students of history and military studies.
Based on extensive research, and including twenty detailed maps, this study is unique in its focus on the wars of both the French Revolution and Napoleon. Owen Connelly expertly analyzes them both to provide a broader context for warfare.
Examining the causes of the wars, and how the practices of warfare during this period were to influence mode of combat throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Connelly also establishes trends discernable in the First and Second World Wars and examines key issues including:
the impact of the population explosion on armies and war
the legacy of the ancient regime impact on revolutionary armies
the impact of the Revolution on leadership, strategy, organization and weaponry
Was Napoleon's leadership style unique, or could another have played his role?
contributions from the governments of the early Revolution, the Terror, the Directory and the Napoleonic regime
What did twenty-three successive years of war accomplish?
Was this era a turning point in the history of warfare?
This book examines the interface between the old and the new France in the period 1760–1820. It adopts an unusual 'comparative micro-historical' approach in order to illuminate the manner in which ...country dwellers cut themselves loose from the congeries of local societies that made up the Ancien Régime, and attached themselves to the wider polity of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic state. The apprehensions and ambitions of six groups of villagers located in different parts of the kingdom are explored in close-up across the span of a single adult lifetime. Contrasting experiences form a large part of the analysis, but the story is ultimately one of fusion around a set of values that no individual villager could possibly have anticipated, whether in 1750 or 1789. The book is at once an institutional, a social and a political history of life in the village in an epoch of momentous change.
Dans le régime présidentiel de la Ve République, il n’est guère de jour qui ne nous rappelle les relations, parfois incestueuses, qui unissent pouvoir politique et médias sur la scène publique comme ...dans la sphère privée. Ce constat pessimiste sur l’un des aspects de l’actuel « mal français » incitait à faire un retour aux origines, à la construction de la démocratie française, qu’elle soit ou non républicaine, à l’heure où la possibilité du suffrage et la liberté de la presse étaient en débat.De la Révolution française à la Monarchie de Juillet, de Camille Desmoulins à Émile de Girardin, qui invente les médias de masse, quels liens se tissaient- ils entre les représentants de la nation et des journaux en pleine efflorescence ? Entre les citoyens, lecteurs et auditeurs, les feuilles et leurs élus ? Entre les débats d’actualité et les orateurs qui les incarnaient, entre les faits et leurs protagonistes les plus en vue ? Relais d’opinion, miroirs d’une action, marécages des passions, c’est à tous ces titres que les pages des périodiques ont été une nouvelle fois tournées.
