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The École Royale Militaire
This book explores the Paris Ecole Militaire as an institution, arguing for its importance as a school that presented itself as a model for reform during a key moment in the movement towards military professionalism as well as state-run secular education. The school is distinguished for being an Enlightenment project, one of its founders publishing an article on it in the Encyclopédie in 1755. Its curriculum broke completely with the Latin pedagogy of the dominant Jesuit system, while adapting the legacy of seventeenth-century riding academies. Its status touches on the nature of absolutism, as it was conceived to glorify the Bourbon dynasty in a similar way to the girls’ school at Saint Cyr and the Invalides. It was also a dispensary of royal charity calculated to ally the nobility more closely to royal interests through military service. In the army, its proofs of nobility were the model for the much debated 1781 Ségur decree, often described as a notable cause of the French Revolution.
The Bentham Brothers and Russia
The jurist and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, and his lesser-known brother, Samuel, equally talented but as a naval architect, engineer and inventor, had a long love affair with Russia. Jeremy hoped to assist Empress Catherine II with her legislative projects. Samuel went to St Petersburg to seek his fortune in 1780 and came back with the rank of Brigadier-General and the idea, famously publicised by Jeremy, of the Inspection-House or Panopticon. The Bentham Brothers and Russia chronicles the brothers’ later involvement with the Russian Empire, when Jeremy focused his legislative hopes on Catherine’s grandson Emperor Alexander I (ruled 1801-25) and Samuel found a unique opportunity in 1806...
Guibert’s General Essay on Tactics
Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2023 (Reference) “’The God of War’ is near to revealing himself, because we have heard his prophet.” So wrote Jean Colin, naming Napoleon the God of War and Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, as his prophet. Guibert was the foremost philosopher of the Military Enlightenment, dedicating his career to systematizing warfare in a single document. The result was his magnum opus, the General Essay on Tactics, which helped to lay the foundation for the success of French armies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It is presented here in English for the first time since the 1780s, with extensive annotation and contextualization.
The Enterprisers
The Enterprisers traces the emergence of the "modern" school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors, up to the accession of Catherine II. Creation of the new, secular, technically-oriented schools based on the imported Western European blueprints is traditionally presented as the key element in Peter I's transformation of Russia. The tsar, it is assumed, needed schools to train officers and engineers for his new army and the navy, and so he personally designed these new institutions and forced them upon his unwilling subjects. In this sense, school also stands in as a metaphor for modern institutions in Russia in general, which are likewise seen as created from t...
Islandia
Islandia is a masterful, mixed-genre (prose-poetry and verse) literary work, alternating passages that tell of an island race of exiled, conquering, Nordic heroes, who have landed on and settled an island (presumably Iceland) and remained there for generations, self-enthralled by their own identities as sung in their own Sagas; and the sophisticated and complexly ironical, lyrical verses of the author's own persona, herself isolated, self-reflective, and exiled -- in present-day New York City. Themes from the two aspects of the work seem to approach each other without ever quite touching, across a chasm of mutually re-enforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. The work is brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty and is presented here in a bi-lingual edition....an extraordinary cycle of poems written in two very different and contrasting forms-the Nordic, masculine, epic style of the prose poems, and the Mediterranean, feminine, mannered, lyric style, of the others. Anne Twitty's translation of this masterful cycle has itself been carried out with great mastery.-Esther Allen
