Inventing the French Revolution : essays on French political culture in the eighteenth century / Keith Michael Baker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baker, Keith Michael.

Series:

Ideas in context

Ideas in context.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political culture--France--History--18th century.

Political culture.

History.

France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799--Causes.

France.

France--Politics and government--18th century.

Politics and government.

France--Intellectual life--18th century.

Intellectual life.

Physical Description:

x, 372 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Summary:

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 o "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.

Contents:

1 On the problem of the ideological origins of the French Revolution 12

Part I. French history at issue

2 Memory and practice: politics and the representation of the past in eighteenth-century France 31

3 Controlling French history: the ideological arsenal of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau 59

4 A script for a French revolution: the political consciousness of the abbe Mably 86

Part II. The language of politics at the end of the Old Regime

5 French political thought at the accession of Louis XVI 109

6 A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige 128

7 Science and politics at the end of the Old Regime 153

8 Public opinion as political invention 167

Part III. Toward a revolutionary lexicon

9 Inventing the French Revolution 203

10 Representation redefined 224

11 Fixing the French constitution 252.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [307]-356).

ISBN:

0521346185

0521385784

OCLC:

20390882