Course Guide - French 307: Paris Maymester 2021 -: The 18th Century - Books - A Selection

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. Beyond the Slave Narrative shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the remarkable political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, both demonstrate the increasing cultural autonomy and literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are at last revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors.

The interpretation of the French Revolution has long been the most contentious issue in French history. This is an account of the controversies surrounding the Revolution's 200th anniversary.

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas.

In 1837 Thomas Carlyle published his work "The French Revolution: A History" and overnight became a celebrity.The work was filled with a passionate intensity, hitherto unknown in historical writing. In a politically-charged Europe, filled with fears and hopes of revolution, Carlyle's account of the motivations and urges that inspired the events in France became powerfully relevant. Carlyle's style emphasized this, continually pointing to the urgency of action - often using the present tense. For him, chaotic events demanded 'heroes' to take control over the competing forces erupting within society. In Carlyle's view only dynamic individuals could master events and direct these energies effectively.

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Marechal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action."

"Dans ce livre, nous découvrons la tourmente révolutionnaire comme elle n’a jamais été racontée. Le récit est en effet réalisé directement à partir du témoignage de ceux qui en ont été les principaux acteurs : les Parisiens, qu’ils soient de haute ou de basse extraction, qu’ils se soient réjouis ou qu’ils aient subi ce formidable emballement de l’Histoire. Étudiant tour à tour la chimère des illusions, la prise de la Bastille, la Garde Nationale, l’écroulement du trône, les massacres de septembre ou l’année terrible que fut 1793, G. Lenotre nous présente la Révolution sous un regard neutre qui ne peut que nous faire prendre conscience du drame qui se jouait. Un monde naissait qui, sous des aspects démocratiques et libérateurs, préfigurait l’ère moderne où les anciens sujets, devenus assujettis, n’ont plus disposé que d’un seul droit : celui de subir."

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism. Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.

From the start of the French Revolution, contemporary observers were struck by the overwhelming theatricality of political events. Examples of convergence between theater and politics included the election of dramatic actors to powerful political and military positions and reports that deputies to the National Assembly were taking acting lessons and planting paid "claqueurs" in the audience to applaud their employers on demand. Meanwhile, in a mock national assembly that gathered in an enormous circus pavilion in the center of Paris, spectators paid for the privilege of acting the role of political representatives for a day. Paul Friedland argues that politics and theater became virtually indistinguishable during the Revolutionary period because of a parallel evolution in the theories of theatrical and political representation. (...)

“Qu’on ne s’attende pas à un livre féministe : Certes on y trouve de beaux portraits des premières féministes de l’Histoire de France (Mme de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt), et de quelques autres femmes de cette époque ; mais le 1er chapitre, Aux femmes, aux mères, aux filles et la Conclusion où il s’adresse à nouveau aux femmes, le disent assez clairement : le propos de Michelet n’est pas de vanter l’action des femmes de la Révolution, mais d’engager celles de 1854, à l’entrée de la France dans la guerre de Crimée, à ne pas freiner les élans belliqueux des hommes et à être prêtes à sacrifier leurs enfants. Pour cela il montre quelques belles actions féminines des années 1789 à 95, mais aussi la part des femmes dans l’amollissement de la Révolution et la réaction qui a suivi.”

(...) The Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, as later spread by the armies of Napoleon, dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the people, events, movements, and ideas that defined the revolutions in France and America, as well as in other parts of the world during the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions. Besides numerous entries on various countries of Europe whose histories were affected by the French Revolution, such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Russia, the many entries covering the people, events, groups, and ideologies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France include the following: Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Georges Jacques Danton, The Directory, Guillotine, Josephine, Empress of France, Law of Suspects, The Mountain, Prairial Insurrection, Tennis Court Oath, White Terror. (...) Finally, the encyclopedia offers various entries covering important revolutionary figures and movements that were active in other parts of the world during the period 1760-1815, including the following: Simon Bolivar, Dutch Revolutions, Haitian Revolution, Hispaniola, Latin American Revolutions, Mexican Revolution, Pugachev Rebellion, Toussaint l'Ouverture. Besides over 450 clearly written and highly informative entries, the encyclopedia also includes primary documents, a chronology, an extensive introductory essay, a bibliography, a guide to related topics, and a series of useful maps.

"A Companion to the French Revolution" comprises twenty-nine newly-written essays reassessing the origins, development, and impact of this great turning-point in modern history. Examines the origins, development and impact of the French Revolution Features original contributions from leading historians, including six essays translated from French.Presents a wide-ranging overview of current historical debates on the revolution and future directions in scholarshipGives equally thorough treatment to both causes and outcomes of the French Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for future research directions. (…) This volume covers the structural and political contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of the "origins of revolution"; the different dimensions of personal and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789 itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short-and long-term legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for France, and for global politics.

The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History engages with some of the most recent trends in French revolutionary scholarship by considering the Revolution in its global context. Across seventeen chapters an international team of contributors examine the impact of the Revolution not only on its European neighbours but on Latin America, North America and Africa, assess how far events there impacted on the Revolution in France, and suggest something of the Revolution's enduring legacy in the modern world. (,,,)

Epicentre of the Revolution of 1789, erstwhile bastion of the skilled working-class and centre of radical agitation, along with Pigalle and Montmartre a focus for popular and raffish night-life in the early twentieth century, the Bastille area of Eastern Paris (also known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine) is now an ethnically and socially mixed quartier which still bears the traces of its previous avatars. In a fascinating tour, Keith Reader charts the history and cultural geography of this unique area of Paris, from the fortress and prison that gave the area its name to the building of the largest and costliest opera house in the world.

"Histoire de ce qui s'est passé dans cet Hôpital pendant et après les trois grandes journées, suivie de détails sur le nombre, la gravité des blessures et les circonstances qui les ont rendues fatales"

The dead of Paris, before the French Revolution, were most often consigned to mass graveyards that contemporaries described as terrible and terrifying, emitting "putrid miasmas" that were a threat to both health and dignity. In a book that is at once wonderfully macabre and exceptionally informative, Erin-Marie Legacey explores how a new burial culture emerged in Paris as a result of both revolutionary fervor and public health concerns, resulting in the construction of park-like cemeteries on the outskirts of the city and a vast underground ossuary. Making Space for the Dead describes how revolutionaries placed the dead at the center of their republican project of radical reinvention of French society and envisioned a future where graveyards would do more than safely contain human remains; they would serve to educate and inspire the living. Legacey unearths the unexpectedly lively process by which burial sites were reimagined, built, and used, focusing on three of the most important of these new spaces: the Paris Catacombs, Père Lachaise cemetery, and the short-lived Museum of French Monuments. By situating discussions of death and memory in the nation's broader cultural and political context, as well as highlighting how ordinary Parisians understood and experienced these sites, she shows how the treatment of the dead became central to the reconstruction of Parisian society after the Revolution.