Synopses & Reviews
In this volume, Keith Baker, arguably the leading expert writing in English on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, collects together a range of his essays on this subject published in journals in recent years. The essays include historiographical studies of the treatment of the topic by French and other historians as well as important case studies on the political vocabularies characteristic of the ancien régime and the revolutionary periods. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies on one of the central themes in modern European history.
Review
"Keith Baker is undoubtedly one of the most creative historians working on the intellectual history of 18th century France...Anyone working in this field should listen carefully to what he has to say." Colin Lucas, Balliol College, Oxford"[Professor Baker's] is an original and brilliant analysis of the central types of political discourse of the waning ancien régime." François Furet, University of Chicago"Overall, these essays are stunning for their insight, clarity, and interpretive power....rich, complex, and challenging." Nathanael Greene, History
Synopsis
How did the French Revolution become thinkable? Keith Michael Baker, a leading authority on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, explores this question in his wide-ranging collection of essays. Analyzing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime during its last decades, Baker revises our historical map of the political space in which the French Revolution took form. Some essays study the ways in which the revolutionaries' break with the past was prepared by competition between agents and critics of absolute monarchy to control the cultural resources and political meanings of French history; by the contending political vocabularies in which the French sought before 1789 to reconstitute their body politic; and by the invention of "public opinion" as a new form of political authority displacing absolute rule. Others trace to the conceptual improvisation of revolutionary notions of "representation," "constitution," "sovereignty" -- and of "the French Revolution" itself -- the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that were to drive the revolutionary dynamic in subsequent years. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies, stimulating renewed reflection on one of the central themes in modern European history.
Synopsis
A wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the question 'How did the French Revolution become thinkable?'.
Synopsis
A unified set of essays on one of the central themes in modern European history--the ideological origins of the French Revolution--includes historiographical studies as well as case studies.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-356).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. On the problem of the ideological origins of the French Revolution; Part I. French History at Issue: 2. Memory and practice: politics and the representation of the past in eighteenth-century France; 3. Controlling French history: the ideological arsenal of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau; 4. A script for a French revolution: the political consciousness of the abbé Mably; Part II. The Language of Politics at the End of the Old Regime: 5. French political thought at the accession of Louis XVI; 6. A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige; 7. Science and politics at the end of the old regime; 8. Public opinion as political invention; Part III. Toward a Revolutionary Lexicon: 9. Inventing the French Revolution; 10. Representation redefined; 11. Fixing the French constitution; Notes; Index.