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This is the story of how an educated young man decided that the French Revolution was worth the use of state-sponsored violence, chose to become a terrorist to protect the republic, and spent the next five decades defending his actions.
"A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat... the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism... part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." Thus did Émile Faguet describe Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753–1821) in his 1899 history of nineteenth-century thought. This view of the influential thinker as a reactionary has, with little variation, held sway ever since. In The French Idea of History, Carolina Armenteros recovers a very different figure, one with a far more subtle understanding of, and response to, the events of his day. Maistre emerges from this deeply learned book as the crucial bridge between the Enlightenment and the historicized thought of the n...
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period was the defining moment for modern European history. Using primary texts, this volume explains the upheavals, terror, and drama that restructured politics and society on such a large scale.
This volume contains 300 letters presented in full scholarly form, with notes giving information about the texts and their provenance, and also historical and bibliographic information.
A groundbreaking study of the role of Muslims in eighteenth‑century France “This elegant, braided history of Muslims and French citizenship is urgently needed. It will be a ‘must read’ for students of the French Revolution and anyone interested in modern France.”— Carla Hesse, University of California, Berkeley From the beginning, French revolutionaries imagined their transformation as a universal one that must include Muslims, Europe’s most immediate neighbors. They believed in a world in which Muslims could and would be French citizens, but they disagreed violently about how to implement their visions of universalism and accommodate religious and social difference. Muslims, t...
This book examines how slave traders interacted with and resisted the British suppression campaign in the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean. By focusing on the transporters, buyers, sellers, and users of slaves in the region, the book traces the many links between slave trafficking and other types of trade. Drawing upon first-person slave accounts, travelogues, and archival sources, it documents the impact of abolition on Zanzibar politics, Indian merchants, East African coastal urban societies, and the entirety of maritime trade in the region. Ultimately, this ground-breaking work uncovers how western Indian Ocean societies experienced the slave trade suppression campaign as a political intervention, with important implications for Indian Ocean history and the history of the slave trade.
The events of 1989/90 in Europe demonstrated the renewed relevance of the mid-nineteenth century uprisings: both by showing, once again, how a revolutionary initiative could quickly spread through different European countries, but also by calling into question the nature of revolution and the criteria for a revolution's success and failure. To commemorate the 1848 revolution in a spirit of renewed critical inquiry, an international team of prominent historians have come together to produce what must be the most comprehensive work on this topic to date and to offer a synthesis that sums up the current state of scholarly research, emphasizing the many new interpretations that have developed over several decades.
Socio-cultural criticism is the continuous assessment and evaluation of developments within democratic society and hence a vital ingredient of democracy itself. Departing from the French Revolution, this study focuses upon a tradition of European criticism. On the whole, critics accepted that technological advance was irreversible but they opposed the assumption that this implied general progress. Instead, they stressed the negatives: class conflict, erosion of tradition, mechanization of life, fragmentation of society, loss of cultural differentiation. The approach is exclusively text-orientated. The result is a multi-coloured mosaic depicting an image of what has moved, confused or dismayed the European mind over a period of a century and a half. The intensity of concern has shaped our contemporary thought, awareness and outlook.