Desacralizing Joy: The Travel Writings of Two British Female Loyalists in Revolutionary France

In recent years a number of works have appeared in the United States in which the American Revolution is compared with other revolutions, especially the French Revolution, the one closest to it in time. This is indeed a topic of great interest. It is currently receiving special attention in connection with the major propaganda campaign now under way in the United States in preparation for the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution. One of the goals of this campaign is to prove the superiority of the American type of revolution. The author of the present note does not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the problem but seeks to focus on some of the current questions in the comparative history of the two revolutions. This topic has always had a political coloration, from the first tracts written in the immediate aftermath of the events of those far-off years to the most recent historical and sociological scholarship. The first writer to examine the topic at some length was F. Gentz, who published an essay entitled Comparison of the French and American Revolutions in the spring of i8oo in the Historisches Journal of Berlin, of which he was the editor. The essay was translated into English and published in book form in Philadelphia by John Quincy Adams, who was then American ambassador to Prussia. The translator, like the author, addressed himself directly to American public opinion. In comparing the two revolutions he showed a predilection for the American, which he reviewed as more moderate and less destructive whereas the French Revolution came in for sharp criticism for its radicalism. Gentz, the publisher of a reactionary journal and later secretary to Austrian Chancellor Metternich, devoted his entire life to the struggle against the French Revolution. He was a conservative in his political views and a supporter of legitimacy. A republic, like the one that had been established in the United States, was by no means his ideal. In a recently published work the French historian A. Gerard remarks that Gentz's reactionary philosophy was like a vaccine, which, it was hoped, could protect his

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

Reviewed by: Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe by William S. Cormack Deirdre T. Lyons Cormack, William S. – Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 400 p. While much scholarship on the French Revolution in the Caribbean has concentrated on Saint-Domingue, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies examines the political and social turmoil that erupted in Martinique and Guadeloupe from c. 1789–1802. William Cormack argues that the revolutionary conflicts in the Windward Islands were shaped as much by the “realities of race and slavery” as they were “inspired by the political drama unfolding in France” (p. 262). By exploring Martinique and Guadeloupe as central sites of revolutionary upheaval and transformation, Cormack highlights the ways in which they “should be seen as part of the larger story of the French Revolution” (p. 263). Through an analysis of administrative reports, official correspondence, and the records of colonial councils, the book’s eight chapters offer a chronological account of the French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Cormack makes a compelling case for how metropolitan rumors, discourse, signs, symbols, and communications (the “revolutionary script”) shaped social and political upheaval in the Windward Islands. This approach expands our understanding of how the civil wars, slave uprisings, and inter-island conflicts that exploded in the Caribbean from 1789 to 1802 emerged from the ways in which colonial populations experienced, understood, and contested the French Revolution (p. 3). Different factions of the colonial population (which Cormack classifies as “patriots,” “royalists,” or “terrorists”) seized on the revolutionary script from the metropole, which they applied to their specific circumstances—generating “competing claims to speak for the nation” (p. 263). Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies thus argues that even as events in France furnished colonial actors with a continuously evolving “script for revolutionary action,” it was local political, social, and economic [End Page 696] contingencies that shaped how these populations grappled with revolutionary transformation (p. 3). Cormack predominantly focuses on the White populations of the Windward Islands—composed of grand blancs (colonial administrators, planters, and elite merchants), as well as petits blancs (soldiers, sailors, clerks, tradesmen, and poor Whites)—and examines their role in exacerbating revolutionary conflict. While Cormack gives less attention to free people of colour and enslaved persons, which constituted the majority of the colonial population, his examination of factional fighting between grands blancs and petits blancs offers insight into how this discord rendered Martinique and Guadeloupe vulnerable to crises of political legitimacy, civil wars, invasions, and rebellions in which free people of colour and enslaved persons played central roles. The book’s chapters correspond to different phases of the Revolution in the Windward Islands. Chapter 1 offers a particularly rich account of Martinique and Guadeloupe on the eve of the Revolution and argues that, despite serving as integral “sources of tremendous national wealth,” France’s control of the Windward Islands was “neither secure nor stable,” as social and political order were weakened by bitter internal social divisions (p. 12). Economic disparity between the grands blancs and petits blancs, as well as the increasing demands of free people of colour for social and political equality, all compounded tensions among the free population. Combined with the fact that over 80% of the population were enslaved Africans or people of African descent, these dynamics all converged to make “the Windward Islands a powder keg” by 1789 (p. 13). The outbreak of the Revolution in the metropole exposed these internal divisions in Martinique and Guadeloupe, as “the communication of new political forms, radical concepts, and subversive language from France” ignited local conflicts (p. 38). Newly formed colonial assemblies seized the opportunity to demand greater local autonomy, planters challenged the authority of colonial administrators and mercantile restrictions, free people of colour demanded civil rights, and enslaved persons tried to seize freedom. The outbreak of the Revolution thus provided the framework for these groups to contest or reaffirm racial, economic, and social hierarchies in Martinique and Guadeloupe. The next five chapters trace successive phases of the Revolution in the Windward Islands between...

Book Review

The impact of the French Revolution on the development of philosophy

Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928) was the first French historian to use nineteenth-century historicist methods in the study of the French Revolution. Pioneered by German historians such as Leopold van Ranke, this approach emphasised empiricism, objectivity and the scientific pursuit of facts, rather than the philosophical and literary concerns that had guided earlier scholars. Aulard's commitment to archival investigation is evidenced by the many edited collections of primary sources that appear in his extensive publication record. In these eight volumes of papers analysing the French Revolution (published 1893–1921), Aulard sought to apply the principles of historicism to reveal the truth. The work draws on earlier journal articles and lectures which Aulard delivered as Professor of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, a post he had held since 1885. Volume 8 (1921) describes the annexation by France of land in the Rhine Valley, and compares the French and American Revolutions.

Reviewed by: Adolphe Gouhenant: French Revolutionary, Utopian Leader, and Texas Frontier Photographer by Paula Selzer and Emmanuel Pécontal Gerald D. Saxon Adolphe Gouhenant: French Revolutionary, Utopian Leader, and Texas Frontier Photographer. By Paula Selzer and Emmanuel Pécontal. Texas Local Series. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2019. Pp. xxii, 430. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-57441-769-2.) Adolphe Gouhenant: French Revolutionary, Utopian Leader, and Texas Frontier Photographer is a well-researched and engagingly written biography of Adolphe Gouhenant (“pronounced Gounah”), an individual whom most people will know little about, unless they are familiar with the early history of [End Page 122] the north Texas region, especially Dallas, Denton, Fort Worth, and Pilot Point (p. xvii). Gouhenant, born in 1804 in the small village of Flagy in revolutionary France, had a remarkable life, which authors Paula Selzer and Emmanuel Pécontal divide into three parts (as noted in the subtitle of the book). First, he was a French revolutionary and artist/scientist who pushed for workers’ rights and was briefly imprisoned for his political activities. Gouhenant emerged later to become a Utopian leader, in the vanguard of an attempt to establish a communist settlement, Icaria, in north Texas in 1848. Despite being blamed for the settlement’s failure, he stayed in north Texas and reinvented himself yet again, this time as a photographer, teacher, doctor, landholder, and owner of the “first cultural institution” in Dallas (p. xix). The authors argue that Gouhenant was as “an outrageously complex character who wandered around grasping at the edges of a successful career, staking small claims along the way” (p. 336). Gouhenant “was complicated and misunderstood. His motives were sometimes unclear and his actions tested the limits of the law in both France and America” (p. 337). He had a penchant to reinvent himself after personal and professional failures and a resilience to try again—to try anything again! The authors find that the major challenge in researching Gouhenant is the fact that documents, manuscripts, official records, and newspapers have spelled his last name at least twenty-four different ways, which makes research a challenge in both France and the United States. Selzer is a third-generation granddaughter of Gouhenant, and Pécontal is a French historian of astronomy; their styles blend seamlessly in the narrative. One of the book’s most important contributions is tracing Gouhenant’s life in France before he immigrated to Texas. “In 1831, he petitioned the Duc d’Orléans requesting funds to build a monument to science” in Lyon (p. xviii). Though his request was denied, Gouhenant did construct “a one-hundred-foot observatory” on a hill overlooking the city (p. xviii). He financed the construction with loans but later defaulted on paying them back, sparking a series of civil cases against him, after which he declared bankruptcy. He reemerged and worked as “an art dealer, painter, and restorer, and fought for workers’ rights during the final years of the French monarchy” (p. xviii). His zeal and enthusiasm got him arrested in Toulouse, where he was tried and acquitted of revolutionary activity in 1843. He became a convert to Icarian communism and advocated installing it in France by force. Leaving behind his wife and two children in France, Gouhenant led the vanguard of a Utopian dream to establish an Icarian settlement in Denton County in north Texas in 1848. The settlement failed, and Étienne Cabet, the founder of Icarian communism, accused Gouhenant of treachery, incompetence, and a double cross. The authors, however, write that “Gouhenant was none of these, and it is to his credit that he was able to hold together the men in his charge for as long as he did” (p. 197). Trying to rebuild his life again, Gouhenant drifted from Fort Worth to Dallas and back, teaching music, drawing, and French and buying and selling property in both towns—property transactions that got him entangled in countless court cases. In 1851 he established the Arts Saloon, the first art gallery and ballroom in Dallas, and in 1853 he was the first to be naturalized in the city. He also became the first photographer in Dallas, and his daguerreotypes provide some [End Page...

Book reviewed in this article:Society, Theory and the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary. By Brian C. J. Singer.France on the Eve of Revolution: British Travellers' Observations 1763–1788. By John Lough.The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Edited by Keith M. Baker.The Parisian Order of Barristers and the French Revolution. By Michael P. Fitzsimmons.The French Revolution. By L. W. Cowie.A Conspiracy of Well‐Mentioned Men. The Society of Thirty and the French Revolution. By Daniel L. Wick.The People of Pans. An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century. By Daniel Roche.William Hunter and the Eighteenth‐Cenfury Medical World. Edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter.Charles Gravier de Vergennes, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution: 1719–1787. By Orville T. Murphy.Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797. By Peter Hulme.The English Atlantic, 1675‐1 740: an Exploration of Communication and Community. By Ian K. Steele.Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower. The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France. By Michael Duffy.The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Jeremy Black.Truth, Liberty, Religion. Essays Celebrating Two Hundred Years of Manchester College. Edited by Barbara Smith.The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. By Bernard Bailyn.Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution. By Bernard Bailyn, with the assistance of Barbara DeWolfe.Allies of Convenience. Diplomatic Relations between Great Britain and Austria 1714‐1 719. By Derek McKay.Joseph II: 1. In the Shadow of Maria Theresa.French Higher Education in the Seventeenth andEighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History. By L. W. B. Brockliss.Barbary and Enlightenment. European Attitudes towards the Maghreb in the Eighteenth Century. By Ann Thomson.The Militury Experience in the Age of Reason. By Christopher Duffy.Andrew Mitchell and Anglo‐Prussian Diplomah'c Relations during the Seven Years War. By Patrick Francis Doran.The Protestant Succession in International Politics, 1710–1716. By Edward Gregg.Gold‐tooled Book Bindings Commissioned by Trinity College Dublin in the Eighteenth Century. By Joseph McDonneU and Patrick Healy.New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800. By David Dickson.Anglo‐Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt. By Gerard O'Brien.War and Politics in Ireland, 1649–1730. By J. G. Simms. Edited by David Hayton and Gerard O'Brien.La Mkditerrannke au XVIIIe si2cle. Actes du colloque international tenu a Air‐en‐Provence les 4, 5, et 6 septembre 1985. Ed. by F. Paknadel.Aberdeen and the Enlightenment. Edited with an introduction by Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock.David Williams. The Hammer andthe Anvil. By Whitney R. D. Jones.Philosophers and Pamphleteers. Political Theorists of the Enlightenment. By Maurice Cranston.Britain in the First Age of Party. 1680‐1 750: Essays presented to Geoffrey Holmes. Edited by Clyve Jones.The Extratem'torial Life Debate 1750–1900. The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lovell. By Michael J. Crowe.Hegel. Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit 1770–1807. By Laurence Dickey.The Judgment of Sense. Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. By David Summers.Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career. By Jerome Christensen.William Cowper: A Biography. By James King.The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth‐Century Literary Form. By Elizabeth R. Napier.Sensibility: An Introduction. By Janet Todd.Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. By Stanley Gardner.The Scattered Portions. William Blake's Biological Symbolism. By Rodney M. Baine (with the assistance of Mary R. Baine).Charlotte Temple. By Susanna Rowson. With an introduction by Cathy N. Davidson.The Coquette. By Mrs Hannah W. Foster. With an introduction by Cathy N. Davidson.Johnson after Two Hundred Years. Edited by Paul Korshin.Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning. By Robert De Maria Jr.Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare. Edited by Bertrand H. Bronson and Jean M. O'Meara.Order from Confusion Sprung. By Claude Rawson.Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Struever.The Happy Island: Images of Childhood in the Eighteenth‐Century French “Thedtred Education”. By James Herbert Davis, Jr.En Marge du Classicisme: Essays on the French Theatre from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Edited by Alan Howe and Richard Waller.Le Destin extraordinaire du baron de Trenck. Edited by Richard Bolster.Journal of My Life. By Jacques‐Louis Menetra. Edited by Daniel Roche. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.Jean Calns. By Marie‐Joseph de Chenier. Edition critique par Malcolm Cook.Contesparodiques et licencieux du I8e siecle. Textes reunis et presentes par Raymonde Robert.Le Philosophe sans le savoir. By Michel‐Jean Sedaine. Edited by Graham Rodmell.Was aber (bleibet) stiften die Dichter? Zur Dichtertheologie der Goethezeit. Edited by Gerard vom Hofe, Peter Pfaff, Hermann Timm.Literarische Basisoffentlichkeit als politiscke Kraft. Lesegesellschaften des 17ten bis 19ten Jahrhunderts unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung des ldten Jahrhunderts. By Robert Galitz.Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht. By Benjamin Bennett.Jacques‐Louis David. By Anita Brookner.

Reminiscing about her encounters with Zhang Zhilian, who was a professor at Peking University and a specialist in the French Revolution and French history, Hunt offers her thoughtful reflections on the issue of politics in modern times. She states that during revolutionary times, such as the French Revolution, one becomes more aware of the multilayered meaning and processes of politics. It is also during revolutionary times that the intricate and intrinsic relationship between politics and society is displayed in its fullest sense, and its revelation demands an interdisciplinary as well as a comparative perspective.

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments The Historical economy of emotions: Introduction Brussels, 2010: Emotional politics and the politics of emotion - The Economy of emotions: How it works and why it matters - The modern and the pre-modern Chapter 1. Losing emotions Losing emotions in trauma - Losing emotions in psychology and historiography - Losing emotions in the civilising process - Losing emotions in words: acedia and melancholia - Losing the mot-force: honour - Honour as an emotional disposition: internal/external - Honour practices: The duel - The emotional power of duelling - Shaming the coward - Equality and group cohesion - Crimes of honour, now and then - Chastity and family honour - Rape, sex, and national honour - The decline of honour, or its return? Chapter 2. Gendering emotions Rage and insult - Power and self-control - Women's strength, women's weakness - Modernity and the natural order - Emotional topographies of gender - Sensibility - Romantic families, passionate politics - Intense emotions versus creative minds - Schools of emotions: the media - Self-help literature - More schooling: armies, peer groups, politics - Collective emotions and charismatic leadership - New emotional profiles and social change - Angry young men, angry young women - Winds of change Chapter 3. Finding emotions Empathy and compassion - Social emotions in 18th-century moral philosophy - Self-love and sympathy - Suffering and pity - Fraternite and the French Revolution - Human rights - Abolitionism and the change in sensibility - Sympathy, lexical - Schopenhauer's Nachstenliebe versus Nietzsche's Fernsten-Liebe - Compassion and its shortcomings - Counter-forces and blockades - Suffering, pity and the education of feelings - Modern dilemmas - Humanitarianism and its crises Emotions lost and found: Conclusions and Perspectives Index

Archibald Alison (1792–1867) was a Scottish historian with a particular interest in the French Revolution. He wrote from a deeply conservative standpoint and was a fierce opponent of the 1832 Reform Act. Although mocked by Disraeli in Coningsby as 'Mr Wordy', he wrote works which became bestsellers in the nineteenth century. This ten-volume History of Europe during the French Revolution, published between 1833 and 1842, regarded the French Revolution as the origin of all that was wrong with modern Europe. Alison feared that while Britain had escaped revolution in 1789, democratic reform could still lead to anarchy, as in the French July Revolution of 1830. Although criticised by Acton and J. S. Mill for his methodology, Alison has more recently been studied by scholars for insights into nineteenth-century historiography. Volume 2 covers the period from Louis XVI's execution to the establishment of the Directory in November 1795.

Archibald Alison (1792–1867) was a Scottish historian with a particular interest in the French Revolution. He wrote from a deeply conservative standpoint and was a fierce opponent of the 1832 Reform Act. Although mocked by Disraeli in Coningsby as 'Mr Wordy', he wrote works which became bestsellers in the nineteenth century. This ten-volume History of Europe during the French Revolution, published between 1833 and 1842, regarded the French Revolution as the origin of all that was wrong with modern Europe. Alison feared that while Britain had escaped revolution in 1789, democratic reform could still lead to anarchy, as in the French July Revolution of 1830. Although criticised by Acton and J. S. Mill for his methodology, Alison has more recently been studied by scholars for insights into nineteenth-century historiography. Volume 1 compares pre-Revolutionary France with England, and carries the narrative up to the execution of Louis XVI.

Archibald Alison (1792–1867) was a Scottish historian with a particular interest in the French Revolution. He wrote from a deeply conservative standpoint and was a fierce opponent of the 1832 Reform Act. Although mocked by Disraeli in Coningsby as 'Mr Wordy', he wrote works which became bestsellers in the nineteenth century. This ten-volume History of Europe during the French Revolution, published between 1833 and 1842, regarded the French Revolution as the origin of all that was wrong with modern Europe. Alison feared that while Britain had escaped revolution in 1789, democratic reform could still lead to anarchy, as in the French July Revolution of 1830. Although criticised by Acton and J. S. Mill for his methodology, Alison has more recently been studied by scholars for insights into nineteenth-century historiography. Volume 4 covers the period of the Consulate from 1799 until Napoleon's coronation as Emperor in December 1804.

Archibald Alison (1792–1867) was a Scottish historian with a particular interest in the French Revolution. He wrote from a deeply conservative standpoint and was a fierce opponent of the 1832 Reform Act. Although mocked by Disraeli in Coningsby as 'Mr Wordy', he wrote works which became bestsellers in the nineteenth century. This ten-volume History of Europe during the French Revolution, published between 1833 and 1842, regarded the French Revolution as the origin of all that was wrong with modern Europe. Alison feared that while Britain had escaped revolution in 1789, democratic reform could still lead to anarchy, as in the French July Revolution of 1830. Although criticised by Acton and J. S. Mill for his methodology, Alison has more recently been studied by scholars for insights into nineteenth-century historiography. Volume 6 covers the period from 1807 to the beginning of the Peninsular War in 1808.

Archibald Alison (1792–1867) was a Scottish historian with a particular interest in the French Revolution. He wrote from a deeply conservative standpoint and was a fierce opponent of the 1832 Reform Act. Although mocked by Disraeli in Coningsby as 'Mr Wordy', he wrote works which became bestsellers in the nineteenth century. This ten-volume History of Europe during the French Revolution, published between 1833 and 1842, regarded the French Revolution as the origin of all that was wrong with modern Europe. Alison feared that while Britain had escaped revolution in 1789, democratic reform could still lead to anarchy, as in the French July Revolution of 1830. Although criticised by Acton and J. S. Mill for his methodology, Alison has more recently been studied by scholars for insights into nineteenth-century historiography. Volume 8 covers the Peninsular War and Napoleon's invasion of and retreat from Russia in 1812.