Napoleonic Invasion Research Articles

The Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question in Spanish America.

The idea that Spanish American countries experienced colonialism was well accepted for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The independence movements in the early nineteenth century were viewed as the result of struggles by oppressed nations against the metropole's tyranny. Recent historiography views the collapse of the monarchy as the result of the political and legal crisis brought about by the Napoleonic invasion and the illegal abdications in Bayonne in March 1808. Colonial and post-colonial theories and categories have been brought under scrutiny. The following pages sketch the historiographical and theoretical grounds and consequences of this paradigm shift.

Cádiz a debate: Actualidad, contexto y legado

In many ways this is the most sophisticated and useful book to date on the Cortes, or parliament, that met in the port city of Cádiz from 1810 to 1814 and produced the first written constitution of the Spanish monarchy in 1812, and the impact of the revolutionary change in political thought that swept the Hispanic world. The volume is a collection of 20 essays first delivered at a 2012 conference in Mexico City marking the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of 1812, and, notably for such a collection, all the essays adhere to the subject closely. Roughly a third of the offerings relate to peninsular Spain—the origins, meaning, and legacy of the Cádiz experience—while two-thirds relate to Spanish America—the reception, implementation, and impact of the constitution.The volume's editor, Roberto Breña, introduces the collection with an essay on historiographical changes since about 1990. José María Portillo Valdés explains that Bourbon imperialization of the Spanish monarchy prior to 1812 laid the foundations for the outbreak of liberal constitutionalism during the crisis of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, from 1808 to 1814. In perhaps the most arresting essay, on Cádiz and the fables of Western historiography, Gabriel Paquette argues that the political philosophy of Spanish American independence was more radical by far than that of the American Revolution, criticizes Anglo and French bias in writing the history of European liberalism, and insists that putting Cádiz at the center shows that the “era of revolutions” is a fable and that the United States is not exceptional (p. 59).In his discussion of “the empire that wanted to be a nation,” Tomás Pérez Vejo discusses who was a citizen under the constitution and shows that since citizenship was based on ethnicity, the Spanish nation was not created as Cádiz imagined it. Federica Morelli considers spatial elasticity in the definition of sovereignty, pointing out that often citizenship was inclusive and ambiguous at the same time. On whether the Cádiz Constitution was a mere copy of the radical French constitutions, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera insists that it was not and that the constitution's dependence on historicism meant that there was no clear demarcation between the new (in the constitution) and the old (in existing Spanish laws and political structures).Discussion of the impact and meaning of the Constitution of 1812 follows, focusing on the creation of elected provincial deputations and city councils, elements that were both old and new, as were the heightened disputes between cities and provincial deputations as they sought preeminence in the new system. There is consideration of the relation between Mexican federalism and the Spanish constitutional tradition, disputes over sovereignty, the role of Cádiz in Central America, and the whole theme of the variable degree of implementation of the constitution in different American territories. It was barely implemented, if even noticed, in Río de la Plata, Chile, and New Granada, because full-fledged wars of independence were underway or had already occurred. Yet it had lasting impact in Mexico.The largest group of essays concerns the permutations of the Constitution of 1812 in New Spain and its influence during the wars of independence, during the first independent regime (1821–1824), and on the Mexican Constitution of 1824. For example, Marco Antonio Landavazo points out that most Mexican insurgents had complaints against Cádiz but also accepted many of its ideas and its language. For the insurgency it was politically impossible to accept the Cádiz Constitution, while it had major influence on the Constitution of Apatzingán. Jaime Olveda emphasizes that Mexican viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas retracted his oath to the constitution. Moisés Guzmán Pérez makes some rather sharp, if not totally clear, criticisms of non-Mexican historians on the subject, while emphasizing that Mexican indigenous communities rarely recognized the constitution, that its implementation was regional only, and that the insurgency must be placed at the center of any consideration.There are even essays on regions of America not often at the center of studies on the influence of Cádiz—particularly Gregorio Alonso's on Vicente Rocafuerte, the president of Ecuador; Andréa Slemian's on the influence of Cádiz on the administration of justice in the Brazilian empire; and Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz's on monarchism and republican militarism in Chile from 1810 to 1823.While there are too many to mention them all here, these essays are all innovative and thoughtful. They indicate the substantial changes in historical views of the meaning of the Cádiz experience while illustrating the central role of political thought in the revolutionary struggles for independence in Spanish America. Even if exaggeration must be avoided in favor of nuance and divergence of opinion, the influence of Cádiz cannot be ignored in the history of this most critical era in Spanish and Spanish American history.

Preface

I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen: The contributions presented in this issue deal with a range of debates and questions in contemporary Arab-Islamic thought, focusing especially on the ideas, and key methodological approaches, of prominent twentieth-century Arabic-speaking thinkers who attempt in various ways, and from various intellectual positions, to revive (iḥyāʾ) and renew (tağdīd) the tradition of Islām against the backdrop of modern thought. Historically speaking, the endeavour toward reviving the cultural and religious legacy of Islām within the context of modernity began in the early nineteenth century in direct response to European invasions of the Muslim lands, starting with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. Indeed, in many ways, contemporary Arab-Islamic thought emerged in response to the shock of Western modernity – that is, the unexpected shock that left Muslims with a feeling of inferiority and backwardness vis-à-vis the Christian West due to the latter’s economic, political and technological advances, and military superiority. In the face of this somehow traumatic event, one question, which would be repeated countless times in ideological writings, historical studies, and even fictional works, became especially urgent: “Why did the Renaissance, which fostered the Age of Enlightenment, emerge out of Western thought, not Arab-Islamic thought?” Thus, when Muslim thinkers began to understand why modernity has arisen in the West, they were conscious of the close correlation between the development of European intellectual culture and its culmination in the (re)birth of the Renaissance culture in all its multifarious aspects. (...)

Caspar David Friedrich, Ancient Rome and the Freiheitskrieg

Abstract This article considers four paintings by Caspar David Friedrich of a national romanticist nature. It examines the role of Rome and Germania’s ancient conflict in these, and briefly considers what may have influenced the artist’s national take on ancient history, including his personal experience of the Napoleonic invasions of his homeland. Friedrich’s transformations of the ancient in his national paintings are an important example of the reception of classical literature in German romanticism.

Pintores de Lisboa: Séculos XVII–XVIII — A Irmandade de S. Lucas by Susana Varela Flor and Pedro Flor

Reviews 125 films untouched? Certainly. But this is not necessarily a fault at all. It is always gratuitously facile to devise a number of unanswered questions and imagine an ideal book instead of the actual one. Important in itself, this volume can be seen as standing at the threshold into a new critical and scholarly engagement with ‘Lusophone’ cinemas and will be required reading for anyone wanting to engage with the cinemas of the Portuguese-speaking countries. Susana Varela Flor and Pedro Flor, Pintores de Lisboa: Séculos XVII–XVIII — A Irmandade de S. Lucas (Lisbon: Scribe, 2015). 208 pages. Print. Reviewed by Jeremy Roe (Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar, Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Archival study of painters’ guilds and confraternities is a keystone of art history and a resource for cultural studies on themes such as patronage, festivals and urban history. Lisbon’s Irmandade de S. Lucas has not been subject to the same scrutiny as similar entities elsewhere, and the authors explain that this has been partly due to restricted access to the brotherhood’s archive, conserved in the Academia Nacional de Belas Artes. The genesis of this book, then, was due to the authors’ gaining access to the archive for a separate project. Their findings prompted the present study, a key motive for which was to update the sparse historiography on this religious-corporate entity, and in particular Garcez Teixeira’s landmark 1931 study, A Irmandade de S. Lucas.... The result is a book of two distinct parts, firstly a succinct history of the brotherhood, then five appendices of documentary material, which together provide a resource for research and teaching on Lisbon’s art and cultural history. The first part consists of twelve concise chapters covering 48 pages, which open by addressing the historiography on the brotherhood. Attention is then turned to the foundation of the Dominican convent of the Annunciation after 1515 and the chapel of the painters’ brotherhood from 1602. The community of nuns included prominent noblewomen, and the authors discuss how their renown,inconjunctionwithpainters’tiestothesamenoblefamilies,contributed to the brotherhood’s choice of location. This book does not undertake a strict chronological survey, in part due to a dearth of documentation for much of the seventeenth century, but instead surveys key episodes and themes: a sermon given on the brotherhood’s feast day in 1644, offering insights into the values it espoused; the patronage of the 3rd Count of Ericeira; the links to Lisbon’s two literary academies, os singulares and os generosos; and Félix da Costa Meesen, a prominent brotherhood member, and his Tratado da Antiguidade da Arte da Pintura. A final chapter offers a brief history of the brotherhood from 1712 until the Napoleonic invasions. The 1755 earthquake marked the start of the brotherhood’s gradual demise, and, although the altarpiece and archive were saved, disagreements between the painters on the role of the Irmandade would lead to its eventual dissolution. Reviews 126 The final four chapters of this section are devoted to the brotherhood’s organization, its finances and how it provided a space for professional collaboration and knowledge exchange. A key issue addressed is how during the seventeenth century the brotherhood fostered painters’ professional identity, founded on the notion of painting as a liberal art. Over the course of the eighteenth century in Europe painting academies had fostered both a distinctive cultural identity for painters and models for professional practice. However, efforts to emulate such precedents in Lisbon failed, as Cyrillo Volkmar Machado, one of the brotherhood’s last members, recorded, and his reflections on the reasons for this conclude this account of the fraternity’s activity. The appendices form the majority of this book, and they provide a valuable research resource. They record the names and roles of all the painters listed in the various archival sources during the brotherhood’s existence. Short biographies are also provided for prominent individuals, further enhancing this documentation. In addition to this the texts of the 1681 and 1706–07 regimentos are provided along with information on the funding of the brotherhood. Given the wealth of material discussed in this second section it would seem that...

Questões metodológicas em Guerra e paz: causação, agência e refiguração

Guerra e Paz, obra magna de Tolstói, transcende o âmbito literário e suscita questões filosóficas e metodológicas. O objetivo aqui é tomá-la como ponto de partida para a discussão de questões como as da causalidade e da agência e de questões contemporâneas como as da linguagem e da escrita, na metodologia das ciências sociais. Numa primeira parte, procura-se mostrar como a discussão sobre as causas da invasão napoleônica elaborada por Tolstói em seu romance histórico traz elementos que prefiguram o debate sobre explicação e compreensão na filosofia analítica a partir de meados do sec. XX. A seguir discute-se, sob influência das práticas composicionais de Tolstói e da ideia de circularidade tempo-narrativa de Ricoeur, o potencial metodológico da refiguração narrativa para interpretar as relações entre arte, sociedade e história.

Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768–1930: A Transatlantic Perspective by Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcellos (eds)

Reviews 110 in the world and the largest Pentecostal, and also the world capital of Spiritism (Kardecism). Here she traces the three main currents of Protestantism in Brazil to early twentieth century, then ‘conversion Protestantism’ which originated in US Protestant Revivalism, and, lastly to Neo-Pentecostalism, which has emerged recently and which is characterized by the ‘Theology of Prosperity’. She makes the important point that there is no separation between before/after Brazil/London; rather they are interconnected transnational religious spaces. Moreover, Brazilian immigrants in the UK do not fit neatly into the dichotomy of ‘local’ and ‘global’. She is interested in how Brazilian immigrants negotiate their religious beliefs and how they create new connections between different practices in different places and, what they ‘do’ with religion. She aptly explains to the reader how religion is ‘practiced, experienced, imagined and embodied by migrants as they create and inhabit spaces that span multiple scales’ (p. 7). Religious remittances is a concept she explores commendably. Sheringham found common patterns of downward mobility among migrants, and that Brazilians are most likely to be irregular in their legal status. She underscored current threads in her research, which include how the church became ‘family’ (the church as a refuge); a search for a sense of belonging (religious community or immigrant); that faith was a way to suppress saudades (a Portuguese word for ‘homesickness’); that returning to Brazil presented a further challenge of re-adaptation; and, lastly, that religious remittances play an important role in the return context as well as in the migration process. She argues that economic reasons should not mask multiple and inter-related decisions to migrate including the role of religion — which she makes convincingly. She concludes that transnational religious spaces are exclusionary as much as they are inclusionary. Sheringham effectively and skilfully reveals the interplay between religion and transnationalism. This is a well-researched book with excellent sources. This book is a must-read for all levels of diaspora and immigrant students and scholars. Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcellos (eds), Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768–1930: A Transatlantic Perspective (Oxford: Legenda, 2014). 294 pages. Print. Reviewed by Orna Levin (Unicamp, Brazil) Although many essays been written about the expansion of the British book market and the corresponding increase in readership during the nineteenth century, British transatlantic exchanges have usually been considered within the framework of the English-speaking world, to the exclusion of Brazil. Recent studies, however, suggest that after the Portuguese court moved to Rio de Janeiro, in 1808, as a result of the Napoleonic invasion of southern Europe, the British traders and European commercial agents who followed did more Reviews 111 than simply settle there, introducing new cultural patterns that affected various aspects of daily life and providing local people with new political references and liberal ideas. This new collection of essays recently published by Legenda, which has the suggestive title of Books and Periodicals in Brazil, 1768–1930: A Transatlantic Perspective, edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani, Lecturer in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London, and Sandra Vasconcelos, Lecturer in English Literature at the University of São Paulo, should help to overcome the lack of familiarity on the part of European readers with topics relating to this aspect of Brazil’s place in international book history. The thirteen essays included in the publication will help readers better understand how the advance in printing techniques and the publishing trade contributed to a larger circulation of books, magazines and musical scores, among other forms of printed production. In particular, they turn our attention to less evident issues behind the editorial enterprises, which were run mainly by British, Portuguese and French dealers. The chapters encourage a deep analysis of the cultural transference that was made possible, to a large extent, by the increasing availability of foreign titles for reading. Foreign periodicals, such as the Edinburgh Review, Monthly Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine, Revue Britannique and Journal de Débats, along with a variety of fictional and non-fictional books, provided readers with a constant source of information. They also provided a literary model for local editors to launch Brazilian periodicals. Furthermore...

La ocupación española del Rosellón en 1815

The subject of this article is the invasion of the French Pyrenees- Orientales department by Spanish troops under the orders of General Castanos in late August 1815, shortly after the Waterloo defeat and the occupation of France by the Seventh Coalition allies. The article also presents the situation before the Waterloo battle in the province of Catalonia, the preparation of the previously mentioned invasion and its consequences, all framed in the foreign policy of the Ferdinand VII government. The sources used in this work are the case files of the National Historical Archive (Madrid) that relate to this episode, and specialized literature. The objective of this study was to relate a lesser-known event, occurred shortly after the end of the War of Independence, to highlight the scarce and indecisive Spanish foreign policy during the Congress of Vienna period. The Napoleonic invasion accentuated the Spanish internal crisis and the international decline of the country. This is reflected in the occupation of the Roussillon and rapid withdrawal ordered by General Castanos.

Viscardo's Global Political Economy and the First Cry for Spanish American Independence, 1767–1798

AbstractRevisionist historians have convincingly argued that Spanish American independence was not the result of simmering grievances that galvanised a national or Creole identity against Spain. Instead, this scholarship insists that Spanish American national identities did not exist at the time and that independence was an unforeseen process that must be understood in the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia. But, if independence was undesirable before 1808 and if national identities arose at a latter period, how do we explain the early independence projects of ‘precursors’ like Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán? By contextually reconstructing the logic behind Viscardo's projects, this article offers a new perspective on the intellectual conditions of possibility for Spanish American independence. It argues that though he certainly identified as a Creole from Peru, Viscardo actually deployed an Enlightenment global science of commerce, not Creole patriotism or nationalism, to legitimate Spanish American independence.

Londra’da Bir Memlûk Beyi: Muhammed Bey Elfî (Ekim-Aralık 1803)

This study aims to explain that after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the decadence of Mamluk Beys the traditional actors in the Egyptian domestic politics, and one of them, Muhammad Bey el-Elfi’s solution seeking in London. Elfi was the last great Mamluk Bey in Egypt. After the invasion of Egypt, his relations with Sublime Porte and England and also other Mamluk factions have not been clarified completely. In addition Elfi’s power was based on his household and economic dignity. For this reason Elfi Bey can be considerd as one of the representatives of the ‘ancien regime’ of Ottoman Egypt. In that case, struggles between Mamluk factions and Egypt become an international issue in the eyes of Britain and France. Elfi Bey, seeking an answer the question of How to survive the Mamluks?, asked for help from Britain. It is very obvious that England supported the Sublime Port against Bonaparte and also mediated between the Sublime Porte and the Mamluks. Even this was the reason for his travel to London. So it will be described his activities in the October-December 1803 in London on behalf of Memluks. The National Archives documents (in Britain), The Ottoman archive and news about Elfi Bey and his activities in London in Brtish press elucidated this issue.

Los comerciantes franceses en la Málaga del siglo XVIII

Este artículo estudia la evolución de los comerciantes franceses instalados en Málagaa lo largo del siglo XVIII. La dinastía borbónica los favoreció pero no lograron su autenticaconsolidación hasta el último tercio del siglo. De mercaderes de vara pasaron a ser miembrosdel “Comercio Marítimo” e impulsores de las iniciativas económicas que se crearon en laciudad en ese periodo. También sufrieron las consecuencias negativas de la Revolución y de lainvasión napoleónica en España.

Spanish Naval Strategy and the United States, 1763–1819

This article examines the naval strategies conceived by the Spanish government to deal with Anglo-American expansion in North America. The political, social and diplomatic aspects of this process have been thoroughly approached by historiography. However, its impact on Spanish naval policy has received little attention. After the Louisiana purchase, the Spanish navy made a plan for a full-scale war against the United States, involving battlefleet action, blockade, amphibious operations and guerre de course. The War of the Third Coalition prevented it from taking place, and the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 practically obliterated the Spanish Navy. After the restoration of the Spanish Monarchy there were renewed tensions with the United States, and in 1816 the project was redrawn, albeit on a more modest scale. This article examines the contents of the war plans in detail, in order to understand the objectives of Spanish grand strategy and the manner in which naval forces were to be employed. Also, it aims at understanding the intellectual origins of the ideas expressed by the authors of these plans. Finally, it aims to underline the consequences that the failure to implement an effective diplomatic, military and naval strategy had for Spain's position in North America.

Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810 by Barbara H. Stein, Stanley J. Stein

Reviewed by: Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810 by Barbara H. Stein, Stanley J. Stein Richard Salvucci Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein. Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 808pp. ISBN: 978-1421414249, $89.95 (cloth). There is a quote, probably apocryphal, in which Lenin remarked there are decades when nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. Nowhere could this be said more accurately than of Spain and Mexico in 1808–1810, the focus of the fourth and climactic volume of Stanley and Barbara Steins’ history of merchants and imperialism in the Spanish Empire. The Steins’ first two volumes described the emergence of Spain as a “rentier state” that literally survived by virtue of the flow of silver from Peru and then New Spain (Mexico). In the third volume, as the established foundations of this “empire” eroded under the assault of interlopers, the “reforming” Spanish Bourbons sought to reestablish control through new merchant clients in Veracruz, Havana and Buenos Aires. However, these proved not quite up to the task set them after the Seven Years’ War, the retention and redirection of colonial silver to the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, rising British and long-established French interests pursued different strategies to thwart the Bourbons’ aims. The British relied on naval power and the efforts of neutral agents, especially in the United States, for greater access. The French, on the other hand, struck directly at the heart of empire, by seizing control of the peninsula and establishing a puppet state under Joseph Bonaparte. With French connivance, coups at the Escorial (1807) and Aranjuez (1808) ejected Charles IV and his favorite, Godoy, from power. Thus opens the final volume, with the botched abdication of Charles and the Prince of Asturias at Bayonne (1808), the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and the detonation of civil war in the peninsula. And so the struggle in Spain and in the colonies began, with the emergence of competing regional councils (juntas) jockeying for power and influence in the face of both collaboration and opposition from senior royal appointees whose careers, and sometimes lives, depended on the choices they made. Although much would ultimately depend on the fortunes of war in Europe and the Atlantic, the true theater of conflict was the Americas. Here the Steins take up the related narratives of Spain, Cuba, and New Spain with an emphasis on the colonial civil servants’ career patterns and experiences, family and bureaucratic relations, and their service in the imperial system that conditioned their responses to events in Europe and the Americas. There were, in essence, two models. Cuba, the rising pearl of the Antilles, was perhaps, one of two colonial possessions the Spaniards could not afford to lose. While its sugar plantations and vast acquisition of slaves had only just begun to make their [End Page 204] presence felt in world markets, the Captaincy General of Cuba was second only in prestige and potential value to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Its chief official, the Marques of Someruelos had begun an assiduous courtship of the island’s merchants and planters, both of whom, ironically, advocated an open economy and a closed polity—such was the distorting effect of African slavery in a plantation economy. He was between a rock and a hard place: he needed to control the island while the Havana merchants hoped to turn it into a Caribbean entrepot linked to both Veracruz and, increasingly, New Orleans. Someruelos was also, quite possibly, slated to become the Viceroy of New Spain. He would not be the first captain general of the island to be so elevated. Mexico had become the crown jewel of the empire. Not only was it the wealthiest colony, but it also financed the defense of the Caribbean basin and the astonishingly costly wars of the Spanish Bourbons. Yet its constitutional status within the empire was highly ambiguous. The argument about whether New Spain was a Kingdom or a colony was far from a semantic one. A colony was the possession of a state, and whatever happened to the Bourbons, the Spanish state maintained its existence, contested though...

Imaginando a Fernando VII, rey católico y felón

The public image of King Ferdinand VII (1784-1833) was built through a process of exaltation and sacralization as a result of the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula that started in the fall of 1807. This article tackles the mechanisms put in place in order to achieve such a target. It also unravels the ways in which wide sectors of the Catholic clergy collaborated in the identification of the King’s image with that of the Spanish nation in danger. The text also sheds light on the American dimensions of the divinization of kingship and their limits in a period of rapid and violent change in the colonies.

Alma sensible, romanticismo exaltado y suicidio. Sobre la novela <em>Voyleano o la exaltación de las pasiones</em> (1827), de Estanislao de Cosca Vayo y Lamarca

The character Voyleano has models in the suicide Werther, by Goethe, and in the death-desiring Tediato in the Lugubrious Nights, by Cadalso. The creation of the figure of Voyleano depends on the new sensibility of the Enlightenment, romantic cosmic grief, and the exaltation of romantic psychology. In the novel by Vayo the Napoleonic invasion of Spain is depicted, and this atmosphere lends itself to libertine seductions, betrayals, great disillusionments, and the loss of faith. Voyleano, like don Quijote, like Julien Sorel, like Emma Bovary, and like several characters from Larra and Mesonero Romanos has sought a model or logos in an earlier character. After don Quijote Voyleano is the first of all of them. Voyleano considers the physical act of suicide lacking in nobility and cowardly, and although he is inspired by Werther, he is attracted to Tediato’s way of committing suicide while avoiding the physical act of suicide.

Императорский дворец в Московском Кремле перед наполеоновским нашествием. Нереализованный замысел архитектора Н. А. Львова

Императорский дворец в Московском Кремле перед наполеоновским нашествием. Нереализованный замысел архитектора Н. А. Львова

Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation by Steven Howe (review)

Steven Howe, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.237 pp.Steven Howe's intricately argued and meticulously documented study is an important contribution to reading Kleist in his historical and intellectual element. Howe situates Kleist's writing in a historical time and place, which he defines not by language controversies or poststructuralist lines of flight of much Kleist scholarship of 1990s and 2000s but as context and heritage of He warns his reader, citing Peter Gay, not to strip Enlightenment of its wealth and then complain of its poverty (6). This wealth is legacy of French philosophes and their relation to classical tradition of rhetoric, especially figure of paradox as a mode of rhetorical performance. For Howe, Kleist straddles fault line separating confidence of Enlightenment from anxiety of revolutionary age. It is certainly difficult, then, to choose a better interlocutor for Kleist than Rousseau, who anticipates and embodies declivity from reflection to revolution and strife between ideals and reality. Howe's procedure throughout this study is to take a tricky question in Rousseau scholarship, offer an answer, and refract this answer through a Kleistian prism. Using Rousseau as a foil, an at times ironic and generally more pragmatic Kleist continues Rousseau's reflection on violence, revolution, reform, and government.Chapter 1 functions as a second introduction, announcing major themes and signposts and setting up an image of Rousseau and the paradoxes of Enlightenment. Taking up classic studies of Rousseau (such as Starob inski's) and more recent work comparing him with Kleist (such as Christian Moser's), Howe brings Rousseau into focus as a critic of modernity who combines ethical imperatives with political thinking and a consideration of nature and presocial being with knowledge that human history only moves forward and that presocial life is a fiction, not a reality to be recovered. The figure of Rousseau as a champion of conceptual tension and paradox provides a nuanced perspective on topic announced in Howe's subtitle, Violence and Identity. Rousseau's evocations of justice and violence are modulated through conceptions of popular power and general will that emerge on arc Kleist draws between French Revolution and Napoleon. Even without longish consideration of definitions of intertextuality with which Howe sets up his demonstration that the connections between two are more complex and manifold than have previously been thought (40), he makes clear that one can read Kleist as testing Rousseau's ideas on self, society, and political power in terms of world he experienced and described in postrevolutionary Paris and in Napoleonic invasion and reordering of German lands. The evolving differences of this period have been an important object of reflection among German playwrights since Kleist, and it is good to see discussion framed here in terms of history and contingency rather than ideological belonging or attribution.Chapter 2, on novella Das Erdbeben in Chili, posits that Kleist's story speaks to caesura of revolution and violence of revolutionary mob as well as aesthetics of revolutionary popular festival. Howe compares horizontal spatiality of such festivals to spontaneity of utopian space outside city in Kleist's tale, pairing contrast of valley and city or cathedral in Kleist with Rousseau's opposition of popular festival, part of quest for forms of republican sociability (75), to theatrical forms of spectatorship and representation that Rousseau condemned. In Kleist, this process ends in theocratic setting of cathedral of Santiago de Chile, an echo of period of Thermidor, Directory, and Napoleon as First Consul, during which Revolution was re-hierarchized and brought under control. …

Telling tales: the construction of nature and Alpine myth in text and image in eighteenth-century Zurich

This article examines the significance of nature for two male societies in Zurich during the eighteenth century. By focussing on Salomon Gessner and Johann Caspar Füssli, the father of Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, it explores the synthesis of classicist and romanticist forms of nature in their works. I show how their constructions of nature help shape early forms of Swiss national identity as part of the campaign of resistance against Napoleonic invasion. By doing so, I demonstrate how nature as sign in both text and image shifts from a male pursuit formed out of opposition to authority, to nature as signifier of Swiss resistance at national level. This resistance is epitomised by the Alpine figure Wilhelm Tell.

SCOTT EASTMAN. Preaching Spanish Nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic, 1759-1823.

Recent scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish America, and to a lesser extent Spain itself, has reinvigorated the study of the Spanish Empire's political history and provided new vistas onto the transition from colonies to republics. Out of these diverse case studies and revisionist arguments a few trends are notable. Among others, scholars have emphasized continuities between the political culture of the late colonial period and the early republics, the ways that local concerns articulated with royal policies or national politics, and how religion intertwined with political practices and representation. Scott Eastman's new book takes some of these insights as jumping-off points but views them with a wide optic, examining the emergence of a proto-nationalist language in the transatlantic Spanish Empire. Using a loosely comparative framework that draws upon material from select locales in Spain and New Spain, Eastman focuses on the development of what he terms a “Hispanic public sphere.” Over six chapters, he traces the evolution of public discourse on popular sovereignty from the era of the Spanish Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century into the first decades of the nineteenth century. The bulk of his sources are concentrated in the period from 1808 to 1823, a tumultuous fifteen years that included the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the long independence struggle in New Spain, and the first experiments with liberal constitutionalism in both places. While Eastman privileges the literate public sphere, his sources are diverse, ranging from songs and plays to published sermons, civil catechisms, and other political tracts. He handles these documents with great skill, providing nuanced readings and stylish translations.

José I, “El Rey Regenerador”. El discurso josefino sobre la regeneración de España

The Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 supposed one of the most turbulent periods in its history. The abdications in the Bourbon family and Joseph Bonaparte’s enthronement exacerbated the minds of Spaniards. Within this context of war, however, Joseph I undertook an ambitious reform plan to regenerate the monarchy. Politics, the economy, and the education were some of the renewed areas. Joseph’s propaganda service, largely controlled by Napoleon, soon spread a legitimizing image of Joseph I as “King regenerator”. Part of the same strategy consisted in criticizing the Bourbon’s management; however, the response of the anti-Bonapartist propaganda and, mainly, the distrust of the people frustrated Joseph’s plans.