French Revolution Research Articles

Science in the service of politics. The cartographic representation of a local territorial context of the Kingdom of Naples in the early nineteenth century

The erudite priest Marciano Di Leo (1751–1819), a prominent personality in the historical and geographical panorama of his time, not only in his home territory, authored a vast literary and poetic production, but also tried his hand at producing some maps, referring to a province of the Kingdom of Naples. At a time when the principles of geodetic cartography had become increasingly known, even locally, hand in hand with improvements in technology and accuracy of measurements, the author reflects the historical narratives of progress of the European (and Neapolitan) Enlightenment and translates them into an unpublished manuscript of statistical, historical, and geographical nature, accompanied by numerous maps of various scales. The rediscovery of a largely unknown—and therefore not very thorough—minor cartographic production underscores the spread even in more marginal contexts of the most innovative ideas and increasingly precise scientific foundations in the cartographic-mathematical representation of the territory. It also illustrates the role of a number of intellectuals in the service of the political choices of their time, in an attempt-often unrealized-to bring about a decisive change of course in public administration, in accordance with Enlightenment ideals and in the spirit of reform that spread throughout Europe thanks to the French Revolution.

Colonialism and the Sovereignty of Peoples: A Dialogue between Hegel and the French Revolution

Abstract This article discusses the relation between colonialism and the sovereignty of peoples through a dialogue between Hegel and the thought of the French Revolution. These two sides are relevant to each other not only because of their historical proximity, but also because of the connections that can be established when we approach the topic of colonialism through these two manifestations. Hegel is explicit that his philosophy of history and his philosophy of right are supposed to be philosophies of freedom. Yet despite the importance that he lends to freedom, Hegel also explicitly defends, in the very same text, colonial domination when he deals with the relation between peoples. A similar problem had arisen in the course of the French Revolution. Following the declarations of war, France is confronted on various occasions with the question of how to deal with other peoples and countries. With the foundation of the Republic in 1792, the relation with other peoples becomes central in the revolutionary debates. The topic of colonialism is part of the constituting debates, and not only because of the uprisings in then Saint Domingue leading to the Haitian Revolution. This article is a part of a larger research project that attempts to reassess the relations between Hegel and the French Revolution, and deals with the question of how we can re-read Hegel's interpretation of the French Revolution based on the evolving historiography of the Revolution. After an introduction of both sides of this dialogue, the paper discusses how Hegel's political philosophy can be applied to understand the debates about the emancipation of colonies that take place during the French Revolution. The next part further analyses some issues, such as the notion of sovereignty and, in the concluding remarks, I summarize my discussion and point to some avenues for further research.

Swedish consuls in Galicia: the economic function of consuls in turbulent times (1793–1806)

ABSTRACT This article is about the creation of a Swedish network of consuls in Galicia during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Contrary to previous findings that show consuls with weak positions vis-à-vis the host authorities or the merchant community could do little to aid merchants and ships, the paper demonstrates that consuls could provide economic functions despite having no jurisdiction or official recognition from the receiving state. In contrast to those who view self-interest as something that hindered consuls from executing economic functions, the paper demonstrates a synergy between self-interest and public goods. The paper also shows a growth in Swedish trade with Galicia, but it is unclear if the network members facilitated this development. Lastly, the article argues that the creation of the Swedish consular service, contrary to previous research, cannot be seen as driven by the Swedish central authorities with a mercantilistic agenda in mind. Instead, the process was rather dynamic and involved various actors and agendas.

“Des peines en général” in the French “Code pénal” of 1791

The publication is a continuation of the author’s studies on the history of judicial law of revolutionary France, with the author seeking to shed light on the sometimes underestimated first French criminal codification, adopted by the National Assembly in 1791. The researcher’s interests focus on the regulations determining the system of penalties adopted in the codification. Although the author’s dominant research method is exegesis of the normative text in the formal-dogmatic convention, the instruments of comparative legal studies have been used as well. Confronting the provisions of the code with the doctrinal assumptions and demands of the Enlightenment, the author seeks to show the complexity of multifaceted issues and specificity of the realities of revolutionary legislators, which necessitated compromises that are controversial for some researchers. Regardless of the critical remarks that have often been made about the French legislators, it is impossible to underestimate the crucial importance of the Code for the development of a European legal culture, which the author has tried to demonstrate by emphasising the pioneering nature of the law from the point of view of the development of new legal institutions.

‘Ambrosio’ Taylor Coleridge: Investigating Three Issues in Banning The Monk

This paper investigates the banning in 1897 of Matthew Lewis's novel The Monk, taking special interest in the dismissal of the text by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sources reveal how British decency laws and the French Revolution together create a public repression which the Gothic novel both threatens and relieves in the 1890s. By highlighting journalistic reliance on Gothic terminology, the paper argues that banning art to protect citizenry is often a result of public insecurity rather than immoral content.

The myth of ‘Jacobin Kemalism’?: influence of the French Revolution on Kemalist elite and ideology during the early republican period

ABSTRACT This study examines the first-hand sources of Kemalism to understand how and to what extent the French Revolution inspired the Kemalist elite and influenced Kemalism during the early republican period. In the literature, there is a general perception that the French Revolution and Jacobinism were highly influential on the Kemalists, but this perception mainly depends on broad interpretations without systematic empirical research. This study shows that there was really an influence, but not necessarily on the secular/Westernist reforms as proposed in the literature. Moreover, the alleged impact of Jacobinism on Kemalism was limited to only a few regime elites.

Feudalism on the Loango Coast?

Feudalism on the Loango Coast?

William Wordsworth and the French Revolution: A Study of Ideals and Realities

This research paper delves into the profound impact of the French Revolution on the poetry of William Wordsworth, one of the most eminent Romantic English poets. Through an analysis of Wordsworth's life, works, and ideological evolution, this paper explores the intersection of revolutionary fervor and poetic expression during a tumultuous period in European history. Drawing on primary sources and literary analysis, the paper investigates Wordsworth's initial enthusiasm for the Revolution, his subsequent disillusionment, and the enduring legacy of his poetic response to the transformative events of his time.

Left or centre? Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions from the French Revolution to today

Left or centre? Theda Skocpol’s <i>States and Social Revolutions</i> from the French Revolution to today

The ‘Palladium of prosperity’: Lobbying between Marseilles and Paris from the revolution to the restoration (1789-1817)

This article investigates the multifaceted lobbying activities carried out by the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles (CoC) from the French Revolution to the Restoration periods (ca. 1789-1817). Part of historical literature recognises this crucial period as the birth of modern-day lobbyism. I will examine the long and heated political debates regarding the free port of Marseilles, definitively abolished in 1817, through the strategies employed by the CoC to preserve it. These strategies encompassed sending delegates to Paris, discreetly engaging with state councillors and ministers, disseminating pamphlets and songs, as well as consolidating influence on municipal and regional powers. Freedom of trade in this context was paradoxically intertwined with the local merchants’ monopoly on the lucrative French Levant trade, alongside the prosperity of hinterland manufacturing facilitated by mercantilist policies.

An anarchist take on royalty: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s evolving assessment of post-revolutionary monarchy, 1839–64. Part II

ABSTRACT This second half of a two-part essay examines how Proudhon’s ideas about monarchy changed during his 1858–62 Belgian exile and further evolved upon his return to France around the time of the 1863 legislative elections. If Proudhon justified monarchy’s role in state formation in the French pre-revolutionary past, he did not want the political liberalization of the Second Empire to lead to a return to a regime ressembling the July Monarchy. He attempted in the final years of his life to develop a theory of constitutional evolution which could explain France’s internal political evolution since 1789 and Europe’s geopolitical evolution since the Vienna Settlement. This theory was designed to indicate why the teleological logic at work in both national and international developments since the French Revolution spelled the death knell for Napoleon III’s regime and pre-empted any regression to those political constitutions which came before the February 1848 Revolution in France. While developing these reflections, Proudhon continued to imagine alternative forms of political and social representation anticipating and influencing the way in which later theories of federalism and corporatism were discussed during the French Third Republic in a context of general dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy.

Deleuze and Guattari on the French Revolution: Problems, Universal Minority, and the Bourgeoisie

Abstract: This article explores Deleuze and Guattari's theory of revolution in light of their comments on the French Revolution and intersection with the work of Marx. I argue that Deleuze associates revolution with a reformulation of the "problems" that condition experience, something Deleuze and Guattari then complicate through their insistence that institutional practice remain subject to the unfolding of an "indeterminate" yet collective revolutionary identity. I argue that the most important aspect of their theory for contemporary political thought is its argument for the necessity of uniting disparate forms of political experimentation without introducing institutions grounded in general conceptions of the subject, and conclude by discussing the emphasis they place on overcoming the "cogito of communication," a discursive "subject in general" essential to contemporary capitalist democracies.

Romantic Hope and “Black Despair”: A Brief History

Scholars coordinate the historical emergence of political hope with the French Revolution, Romanticism, and the secularization of inherited theological ideas. This essay argues that the conceptual development of political hope functioned as a technology of racialization. Drawing attention to how hope’s theological opposite, despair, had become synonymous with racial slavery in the late eighteenth-century British political imagination, it unpacks the figural logic of “black despair” and shows how this logic subtends the Romantic conception of political hope as a hereditary right of the white liberal subject.

Restructuring Value Base of Social Sciences in the Age of Neo-Liberalism

Social sciences emerged at the onset of the Enlightenment age. Immanuel Kant proclaimed that henceforth the central theme of discourse in philosophy will be human beings and not God. Since then, the relationship between ‘me’ and ‘the other’ has become a central theme of intellectual endeavour. Now, me and other relationships have three forms: conflict, competition and cooperation or harmony. Three world views developed around these three patterns. The socialist worldview had conflict as a base, with equality as a cherished value. Competition is the base of liberalism, with freedom (to compete) as a cherished value. Harmony is at the base of humanism, with fraternity as a basic value. Today, liberalism and neo-liberalism have become almost unipolar world views. Liberalism claims to be following the three great values of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. In recent times, neo-liberalism has developed a system that makes all three values truncated. Liberty, or freedom, has been reduced to the level of my choice as a consumer. Equality has been taken as reducing and abolishing old ascription-based inequality. The rising new and achievement-based inequality is not only not opposed but also eulogised in the name of creativity and achieving society. In place of fraternity and harmony, we have cutthroat competition. A competitive society is considered good. The market is more important now. We have achieved growth. But the basic harmony between human beings and between human beings and other elements of the environment has vanished. So, environmental issues, rising achievement-based inequalities, violation of human rights, rising poverty, failure of market institutions and unnatural lifestyles giving rise to many lifestyle diseases have made many thinkers and social scientists to change the value base of social sciences to restructure social sciences. The new value base could be ethics, equity (social equity, to be specific) and ecological harmony. Keeping these three values as the base, we will have to restructure social sciences to have a better and more humane world order.

Revolution and Nation: Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Late Philosophy of Religion

Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of religion combines revolutionary pathos with Christian convictions and transcendental philosophical insights. The result is a bourgeois philosophy of religion that preaches freedom, equality and brotherhood, expects the national upswing of a still-longed-for Germany based on the example of revolutionary France, and praises all this as a continuation of Kant’s philosophy.

Thucydides and the British reaction to the French Revolution

ABSTRACT The ancient Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of the civil and interstate wars of classical Greece proved particularly illuminating for British commentators writing at the time of the French Revolution (1789–99). However, despite a growing scholarly interest in Thucydides’ Nachleben in historical and political thought, little has been said on this period of his reception. This paper aims to address that gap. It suggests that, while Thucydides remained something of a minority interest, a curious mix of historians, journalists and political commentators turned to his History to explore the possibility that it might illuminate contemporary events. They were particularly interested in Thucydides’ account of the stasis on Corcyra (modern Corfu), and its role in spreading instability, civil strife and war throughout Greece. These commentators used Thucydides to think through the similarities and differences between ancient and modern iterations of political violence and sometimes appropriated his language to existing political vocabularies and categories of thought. This resulted in innovative interpretations of Thucydides’ text that emphasized the affinities between stasis in Antiquity with the idea of civil war, sedition, political instability and decline and fall in the contemporary world. It also led to the emergence of nuanced ideas of the lessons and warnings that could be drawn from Greek history as presented by Thucydides and how they could be applied to the turbulent politics of the 1790s.

Conjectures on Kant and the Haitian Revolution

AbstractIn this article, I put forward, as a suspicion only, that Kant never thought Black lives had dignity but only price. I follow Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's argument that the Haitian Revolution is unthinkable for Enlightenment philosophers to examine what Kant could have, would have, or should have said about this world‐historical event. By making conjectures about Kant's silence on the Haitian Revolution, I also draw from Kant's writings on the American and French Revolutions. If my suspicion is right, then Kantianism cannot accommodate an antiracist program. This ought to change how we talk about racism, slavery, and colonialism in Kant scholarship and in the history of philosophy.

Jay Bergman. The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture.

Jay Bergman. <i>The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture</i>.

Desecration, Secularization, Restoration: Cologne’s Churches during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792–1815

Abstract The Napoleonic era was transformative for Cologne’s churches. The wars that characterized this period brought destruction and upheaval. The invading French army that occupied the city in 1794 was an agent of the new Republic, a polity then at war with Catholicism. Most spectacularly, this resulted in the desacralization of Cologne’s churches, some of which were turned into storage depots for the army or made into temples for the new republican cult. However, once Napoleon seized control of the Republic in 1799, a new French policy was enforced in the city and surrounding region. It restored many aspects of the old familiar religious order, but at the same time created new institutions of church management and preservation that survived the end of French rule in 1814.

Disability history in France: past, present and future

Abstract What is disability? How might a focus on disability as a category of human experience change the way we think and write about the French past? In this roundtable seven historians discuss the emergence of disability studies in France, assessing the continued relevance of classics in the field as well as new directions in research. Scholarly attention to disability, the contributors argue, has the potential to transform modern French historiography, not only by challenging our understanding of major ‘turning points’ such as the French Revolution or the world wars, but offering fresh insights into race, class and gender identities, as well as citizenship, inclusion and belonging in French society.