The indispensable corollary to shameful memories ought to be repentance. Tellingly so, no such notion appears in Edmund Burke’s writings about the French Revolution and Ireland. After all, the French ...revolutionaries with their tabula rasa were, as if necessarily so, immune to repentance: they, and their British supporters, were content to repeat those hallowed moments in the past where some supposed evil had been stifled, as with the execution of Charles I; as for Irish Protestants, they were not inclined to abandon what enabled them to crush their coreligionists of the older persuasion, even though this led them to overlook that English oppression bore on them and Catholics alike. Burke engaged in historiographical issues that, by redressing erroneous outlooks on past events, might have provided a sense of unity against a common enemy. His efforts were as damningly shaky as could be found, and he could not have been entirely convinced by his own rhetoric which tried to identify early forms of worship and/or political arrangements that could have supplied the solution. The foundation of such political analyses seems to derive from his juvenilia, specifically his Sublime and Beautiful, where the figure of Job casts doubt on the very relevance of repentance. Ultimately, shameful memories, with their nonexistent sequel, repentance, have precious little to tell of Burke’s engagement with the future where the latter emerges as the bottom line of one who is only too easily regarded as an exponent of the pleas of the past against the present day.
Of all the images generated by the French Revolution it is the guillotine that is the most notorious. From the beginning the apparatus constituted an elaborate visual spectacle, one that not only ...efficiently dispensed justice but also offered up a form of popular entertainment and ritualised collective vengeance. The paper seeks to shed fresh light on one of the most perplexing mysteries of the revolutionary era. How did enlightened individuals who had helped create the most democratic and egalitarian society yet seen in the world, descend into a totalitarian regime in which many thousands were arrested, tried without appeal and executed? Why did revolutionaries begin to kill one another, and how did the guillotine come to represent an ideal of Revolution? To answer these questions, the paper begins by looking more closely at the relationships between popular violence and state violence in the Revolution, before describing the invention of the guillotine and how audiences had to adjust to a new kind of spectacle, where terror emerges as a principle of government.
This paper argues that the concept of dignity played an important role in the political thought of Edmund Burke. It seeks to show that, in contrast with the egalitarian and individual version of ...dignity associated with Immanuel Kant, Burke devised a conception of dignity that rested on reverence, grandeur and formality, to be manifested through institutions, customs, and social relations. Burkean dignity was thus closely linked with the ancient constitution. In his thought, dignity played an essential role in maintaining social stability and ensuring wise governance. This conviction informed Burke's opposition to the French Revolution, which he feared would destroy the conditions necessary for dignity to thrive. Unpicking Burke's understanding of dignity thus gives us new insights into the intricacies of his political thought and another perspective on his opposition to the French Revolution.
Rewriting and remediation Marius Warholm Haugen
Media history,
08/2020, Letnik:
26, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The reviews in the Monthly Review and La Décade philosophique of Bartolomeo Benincasa's travelogue from revolutionary France, Journal d’un voyageur neutre (1796), offer valuable insight into the ...periodical practice of the travel review. The present article examines the processes of rewriting and remediation at work in these reviews, showing how they were driven by political concerns, but also by different views on the function of the review within the larger framework of the periodicals. The article argues that rewriting and remediation are important analytical tools to be put to use if book reviews are to be better exploited as historical sources. We can thereby acquire a better understanding of the role of the travel review in late-eighteenth-century literary culture, notably of its complexity in transmitting and constructing perceptions of major historical events such as the French Revolution.
The article describes a little-known period in the life of one of the major figures of the French Revolution — Paul Barras (1755-1829). That was the time of his youth, attempts to make a career as a ...professional military man. At the same time, the formation of his socio-political ideas took place. The study of this figure is undoubtedly important, since Barras played a key role in such turning points of the revolution as: 9 Thermidor — the overthrow of the Jacobin dictatorship and 13 Vendemière (October 5, 1795) — the defeat of a dangerous royalist uprising that almost destroyed the Republic. He will go down in world history as the leader of the Directory regime. The economic troubles of this stage of the French Revolution, the machinations of corrupt officials, political instability — all this will be blamed primarily on him. He was presented as a certain deputy — a businessman closely connected with the so-called new bourgeoisie. A careful study of his youth does not seem to fit well with such ideas and versions. Neither by origin, nor by his way of life, Paul Barras had anything to do with the French bourgeoisie, neither with the old — Rentier, nor with the new — business. It was a typical representative of the noble nobility of the «sword». His attitude to material values was also appropriate. Such people could squander funds, «burn life», but they were not adapted to entrepreneurial activity. Barras was attracted by service in the navy, adventures in the French colonies. Under these conditions, Barras showed himself to be an independent and courageous military officer, able to show ingenuity at a critical moment. And in another way, his behavior resembled the lifestyle of many young nobles of his time. Just like them, he was a member of the Masonic lodge, visited salons, and was attentive to new social trends. Already under the Old Order, this nobleman and naval officer was inclined towards change. The outbreak of the revolution accelerated this process. This study focuses on the previously little-studied moments of Barras’s biography, such as his military career and social life in Paris before the revolution. The work is based on the memoirs of Barras, parliamentary materials, as well as on domestic and foreign scientific literature.
Cet article analyse l’ensemble des portraits des hommes de la Révolution contenus dans les écrits autobiographiques et historiques de Marie-Jeanne Roland. Cet anti-panthéon, très critique des hommes ...qui occupèrent l’avant-scène de ce tournant des Lumières, sert à dresser, en négatif, le portrait du prototype du héros révolutionnaire, du nouvel être reconstruit après 1789, un idéal tout contraire à cette masculinité en branle que représentent ces hommes lâches, intrigants, incultes et petits, un idéal configuré à partir d’un modèle façonné par elle-même… et qui n’est autre qu’elle-même : en effet, pour Roland, la seule personne capable de prendre les rênes de la Res publica française, le seul vrai homo politicus de son époque, c’est elle-même.
This article demonstrates how digital games can confirm or subvert national historical discourses. The author analyzes selected 20th-century French historical adventure digital games about absolutist ...France and the subsequent French Revolution. Although most of them focused on reconstructing the era (e.g., the state-funded Versailles 1685), the emphasis is placed on two games by Patrick Beaujouan (Le Passager du temps and Conspiration de l’an III). Their subversive content undermined the sense of reconstructing historical events on the screen. However, as the author concludes, the subversive content of Beaujouan’s games had its prize because they lacked the technical and institutional support that restorative projects such as Versailles 1685 had. However, Beaujouan’s games show that every “historical” game tells us more about contemporary discourses than past events.
This article analyses the portraits of the men of the Revolution contained in the autobiographical and historical writings by Marie-Jeanne Roland. This anti-pantheon, highly critical of the men who ...occupied the forefront of this part of the Enlightenment, serves to draw, in negative, the portrait of the prototype of the revolutionary hero, of the new being rebuilt after 1789, an ideal quite the opposite of the masculinity in motion represented by these cowardly, scheming, uneducated and petty men, an ideal configured from a model fashioned by herself... and which is none other than herself: Indeed, for Marie-Jeanne Roland, the only person capable of picking up the reins of the French Res publica, the only true homo politicus of her time, is herself.
Scholarship has paid scant attention to affinities between the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt and that of Heinrich von Kleist. Both were, at different times, fascinated by the aftermath of the ...French Revolution and its influence on the shape of contemporary Europe. Humboldt's essays of the 1790s plead the cause of individual ‘Bildung’ against the hegemony of an interventionist state. His verdict on the new French constitution is ultimately pessimistic as he denies that history permits successful and sudden reversals of political structures. Kleist sees the Revolution as betrayed by Napoleon's ascendancy. His first work on his tragedy Penthesilea is dated between 1805 and 1806 in Königsberg, where he would have had ready access to Humboldt's publications. The calamitous defeat of Prussia in October 1806 overshadowed the play's completion in 1807. It is in this climate of the disintegration of a traditional order that Kleist invents the Amazon state as the tragic sequel to a revolution. Suppressing all individual freedom, it is the opposite of what Humboldt imagined a state should be, thus suggesting we may find in Humboldt's political thought a hitherto neglected source for Penthesilea.
Zusammenfassung
Die Forschung hat die Affinitäten des politischen Denkens Heinrich von Kleists und Wilhelm von Humboldts zum Zeitgeschehen wenig beachtet. Die Nachwirkungen der Französischen Revolution auf die Umgestaltung Europas übten jedoch auf beide Autoren eine starke Faszination aus. Die Aufsätze, die Humboldt in den 1790er Jahren veröffentlichte, nehmen das Ideal einer individuellen Bildung gegen die Zwänge staatlicher Intervention in Schutz. Humboldts Urteil über die neue französische Verfassung fällt negativ aus, weil seine Geschichtsauffassung die Möglichkeit einer erfolgreichen Umkehrung politischer Strukturen durch revolutionäres Handeln verneint. Für Kleist galt die Herrschaft Napoleons über weite Teile Europas als Verrat an der Revolution. Kleists erste Arbeit an seiner Tragödie Penthesilea datiert von seinem Königsberger Aufenthalt in den Jahren 1805 und 1806. In dieser Zeitspanne waren ihm die einschlägigen Schriften Humboldts ohne Weiteres zugänglich. Die katastrophale Niederlage Preußens bei Jena und Auerstedt im Oktober 1806 schuf ein denkbar ungünstiges Klima für die Vollendung der Tragödie. Unter dem Eindruck dieser ʻschrecklichen Zeitenʼ erfindet Kleist den Staat der Amazonen. Durch seine Verneinung individueller Freiheit stellt dieser das Gegenteil eines jeden Staatsgebildes dar, das Humboldt gutheißen konnte. Die genauen Entsprechungen zum kritischen Staatsdenken Humboldts lassen einen bislang unerkannten Einfluss auf Kleists Penthesilea vermuten.
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