From revolution to ethics Bourg, Julian
From revolution to ethics,
c2007, 20070514, 2007, 2007-05-14, 20070101
eBook
Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics demonstrates that intellectuals and activists turned to ethics as the touchstone for ...understanding interpersonal, institutional, and political dilemmas. In absorbing and scrupulously researched detail Bourg explores the developing ethical fascination as it emerged among student Maoists courting terrorism, anti-psychiatric celebrations of madness, feminists mobilizing against rape, and pundits and philosophers championing human rights.
This is an innovative study of how race and empire transformed French republican citizenship in the early Third Republic. Elizabeth Heath integrates the histories of the wine-producing department of ...Aude and the sugar-producing colony of Guadeloupe to reveal the ways in which empire was integral to the Third Republic's ability to stabilize a republican regime that began to unravel in an age of economic globalization. She shows how global economic factors shaped negotiations between local citizens and the Third Republic over the responsibilities of the Republic to its citizens leading to the creation of two different and unequal forms of citizenship that became constitutive of the interwar imperial nation-state and the French welfare state. Her findings shed important new light on the tensions within republicanism between ideals of liberty and equality and on the construction of race as a meaningful social category at a foundational moment in French history.
How did the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror? Timothy Tackett offers a new interpretation of this turning point in world history. ...Penetrating the mentality of Revolutionary elites on the eve of the Terror, he reveals how suspicion and mistrust escalated and helped propel their actions.
How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of ...eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau's writings to Old Regime protest tactics.A Natural History of Revolutionsuggests that it is perhaps on a different shelf of the Enlightenment library that we might find the best clues for understanding the French Revolution: namely, in studies of the natural world. In their attempts to portray and explain the events of the Revolution, political figures, playwrights, and journalists often turned to the book of nature: phenomena such as hailstorms and thunderbolts found their way into festivals, plays, and political speeches as descriptors of revolutionary activity. The particular way that revolutionaries deployed these metaphors drew on notions derived from the natural science of the day about regeneration, purgation, and balance.
In examining a series of tropes (earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes) that played an important role in the public language of the Revolution,A Natural History of Revolutionreveals that understanding the use of this natural imagery is fundamental to our understanding of the Terror. Eighteenth-century natural histories had demonstrated that in the natural world, apparent disorder could lead to a restored equilibrium, or even regeneration. This logic drawn from the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. If thunder could restore balance in the atmosphere, and if volcanic eruptions could create more fertile soil, then so too could episodes of violence and disruption in the political realm be portrayed as necessary for forging a new order in revolutionary France.
Paris in 1871 was a shambles following military defeat, siege, and a bloody uprising, and the question loomed, could this extraordinary city even survive? By 1900, the Belle Epoque was in full ...flower, but the decades between were marked by tension and conflict, as the new challenged the old in everything from politics to art, literature, music, science, and engineering. With the addition of an evocative new preface, Mary McAuliffe takes the reader back to these perilous years following the abrupt collapse of the Second Empire and France's uncertain venture into the Third Republic--examining this era through the eyes of Monet, Zola, Debussy, Eiffel, Marie Curie, and others as they struggled with the forces of tradition. Through rich illustrations and vivid narrative, McAuliffe brings this vibrant and seminal era to life.
Epicentre of the Revolution of 1789, erstwhile bastion of the skilled working-class and centre of radical agitation, along with Pigalle and Montmartre a focus for popular and raffish night-life in ...the early twentieth century, the Bastille area of Eastern Paris (also known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine) is now an ethnically and socially mixed quartier which still bears the traces of its previous avatars. In a fascinating tour, Keith Reader charts the history and cultural geography of this unique area of Paris, from the fortress and prison that gave the area its name to the building of the largest and costliest opera house in the world.
Louis XVI was a gentle and unassuming man who did not want to be king but attempted to work for the welfare of his people--until his government was engulfed by the violent upheavals of the French ...Revolution. Facing the rapidly changing desires of his subjects, he gradually gave way to the policies they demanded. Few rulers have acquiesced to such startling changes of government within such a brief span of time. Louis XVI lacked the charisma of Marie Antoinette, but he is remarkable for the courage he exhibited when facing violent armed men only a few feet away. The quiet dignity and courage with which he approached his execution has been praised by countless people, including Albert Camus and Victor Hugo. This biography traces the painfully exciting events involving Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their two children. The royal family was first taken by a violent mob from Versailles to Paris. They attempted an escape but it failed when they had almost reached safety. A year later the king and queen were guillotined.
For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military ...odds. For many others, he was the first modern dictator, a fanatic who instigated the murderous Reign of Terror in 1793-94. This masterful biography combines new research into Robespierre's dramatic life with a deep understanding of society and the politics of the French Revolution to arrive at a fresh understanding of the man, his passions, and his tragic shortcomings.
Peter McPhee gives special attention to Robespierre's formative years and the development of an iron will in a frail boy conceived outside wedlock and on the margins of polite provincial society. Exploring how these experiences formed the young lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789, the author discovers not the cold, obsessive Robespierre of legend, but a man of passion with close but platonic friendships with women. Soon immersed in revolutionary conflict, he suffered increasingly lengthy periods of nervous collapse correlating with moments of political crisis, yet Robespierre was tragically unable to step away from the crushing burdens of leadership. Did his ruthless, uncompromising exercise of power reflect a descent into madness in his final year of life? McPhee reevaluates the ideology and reality of "the Terror," what Robespierre intended, and whether it represented an abandonment or a reversal of his early liberalism and sense of justice.
