Advertisement
| critical analysis of french revolution: An Analysis of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France Riley Quinn, 2017-07-05 Edmund Burke’s 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as the foundational work of modern conservative political thought, Burke’s Reflections is a sustained argument against the French Revolution. Though Burke is in many ways not interested in rational close analysis of the arguments in favour of the revolution, he points out a crucial flaw in revolutionary thought, upon which he builds his argument. For Burke, that flaw was the sheer threat that revolution poses to life, property and society. Sceptical about the utopian urge to utterly reconstruct society in line with rational principles, Burke argued strongly for conservative progress: a continual slow refinement of government and political theory, which could move forward without completely overturning the old structures of state and society. Old state institutions, he reasoned, might not be perfect, but they work well enough to keep things ticking along. Any change made to improve them, therefore, should be slow, not revolutionary. While `Burke’s arguments are deliberately not reasoned in the ‘rational’ style of those who supported the revolution, they show persuasive reasoning at its very best. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The French Revolution George F. E. Rudé, 1991 Tells of the causes, the history, and the legacy of the French Revolution from a two-hundred year perspective. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution Alfred Cobban, 1971 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Becoming a Revolutionary Timothy Tackett, 2014-07-14 Here Timothy Tackett tests some of the diverse explanations of the origins of the French Revolution by examining the psychological itineraries of the individuals who launched it--the deputies of the Estates General and the National Assembly. Based on a wide variety of sources, notably the letters and diaries of over a hundred deputies, the book assesses their collective biographies and their cultural and political experience before and after 1789. In the face of the current revisionist orthodoxy, it argues that members of the Third Estate differed dramatically from the Nobility in wealth, status, and culture. Virtually all deputies were familiar with some elements of the Enlightenment, yet little evidence can be found before the Revolution of a coherent oppositional ideology or discourse. Far from the inexperienced ideologues depicted by the revisionists, the Third Estate deputies emerge as practical men, more attracted to law, history, and science than to abstract philosophy. Insofar as they received advance instruction in the possibility of extensive reform, it came less from reading books than from involvement in municipal and regional politics and from the actions and decrees of the monarchy itself. Before their arrival in Versailles, few deputies envisioned changes that could be construed as Revolutionary. Such new ideas emerged primarily in the process of the Assembly itself and continued to develop, in many cases, throughout the first year of the Revolution. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: An Analysis of Georges Lefebvre's The Coming of the French Revolution Tom Stammers, 2017-07-05 Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century – and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains arguably one of history's most contentious and significant events in history was to deploy the critical thinking skill of evaluation to reveal weaknesses in existing arguments about the causes of the Revolution, and analytical skills to expose hidden assumptions in them. Rather than seeing events as driven by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie – which then lost power to the urban workers – as was usual at the time, Lefebvre deployed years of research in regional archives to argue that the Revolution had had a fourth pillar: the peasantry. Painting the upheaval as complex and multi-layered – while still privileging a predominantly economic interpretation – Lefebvre provides a compelling new narrative to explain why the French monarchy collapsed so suddenly in 1789: one that stressed the significance of a ‘popular revolution’ in the rural countryside. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Coming of the French Revolution Georges Lefebvre, 2019-12-31 The classic book that restored the voices of ordinary people to our understanding of the French Revolution The Coming of the French Revolution remains essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this great turning point in the formation of the modern world. First published in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War and suppressed by the Vichy government, this classic work explains what happened in France in 1789, the first year of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre wrote history “from below”—a Marxist approach—and in this book he places the peasantry at the center of his analysis, emphasizing the class struggles in France and the significant role they played in the coming of the revolution. Eloquently translated by the historian R. R. Palmer and featuring an introduction by Timothy Tackett that provides a concise intellectual biography of Lefebvre and a critical appraisal of the book, this Princeton Classics edition offers perennial insights into democracy, dictatorship, and insurrection. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft, 1794 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Interpreting the French Revolution François Furet, 1981-09-24 The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Modern France Vanessa R. Schwartz, 2011-10-10 The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution David Andress, 2015-01-22 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. Placing core dimensions of the history of the French Revolution in their transnational and global contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class, gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security, and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and reflection. This Handbook 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. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction William Doyle, 2001-08-23 Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, this work looks at how the ancien régime became ancien as well as examining cases in which achievement failed to match ambition. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Festivals and the French Revolution Mona Ozouf, 1991 Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Mourning Glory Marie-Hélène Huet, 2015-07-27 Mourning Glory sheds light on troubled times as it shows how passion and prejudice, grief and denial all contributed to the continuing creation of a revolutionary legacy that still affects our understanding of the nature of language and history. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The French Revolution Thomas Carlyle, 1982 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville, 1856 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The French Revolution: From its origins to 1793 Georges Lefebvre, 1962 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, 2005-03-28 In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest Henri Gregoire has often been remembered as a man ahead of his time. An icon of antiracism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Gregoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of the idels of universalism and human rights. A remarkable man with global interests, Gregoire favored many forms of liberation - of peasants from feudalism, Jews from religious discrimination, blacks from slavery. In this biography, based on newly discovered and previously overlooked material, we gain access for the first time to the full complexity of Gregoire's intellectual and political universe as well as the compelling nature of his persona. His life offers an extraordinary vantage point from which to view large issues in European and world history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides insights into many of the prevailing tensions, ideals, and paradoxes of the twenty-first century. In addition to illuminating Gregoire's life and times, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall offers an original analysis of the French Revolution and its legacy.--BOOK JACKET. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution François Furet, Mona Ozouf, 1989 The French Revolution--that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy--continues to provoke a reevaluation of essential questions. This volume presents the research of a wide range of international scholars into those questions. 58 color illustrations, 10 halftones. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Oxford History of the French Revolution William Doyle, 2002-11-28 This new edition of the most authoritative, comprehensive history of the French Revolution of 1789 draws on a generation of extensive research and scholarly debate to reappraise the most famous of all revolutions. Updates for this second edition include a generous chronology of events, plus an extended bibliographical essay providing an examination of the historiography of the Revolution. Opening with the accession of Louis XVI in 1774, the book traces the history of France through revolution, terror, and counter-revolution, to the triumph of Napoleon in 1802, and analyses the impact of events both in France itself and the rest of Europe. William Doyle shows how a movement which began with optimism and general enthusiasm soon became a tragedy, not only for the ruling orders, but for the millions of ordinary people all over Europe whose lives were disrupted by religious upheaval, and civil and international war. It was they who paid the price for the destruction of the old political order and the struggle to establish a new one, based on the ideals of liberty and revolution, in the face of widespread indifference and hostility. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Long Affair Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1996 As controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, this examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution, offers a provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture and challenges the traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy. 15 illustrations. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Revolutionary Acts Susan Maslan, 2005-08-26 Publisher Description |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution Joan B. Landes, 1988 Should become part of the increasingly varied repertoire available to everyone interested in the formation of the discourse of modern politics as well as specifically feminist issues. -- Eighteenth-Century Studies In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view. Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of universal rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue. In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as the People when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Hunchback of Notre Dame Victor Hugo, 2014-08-01 Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre Dame, faces insults and ridicule for his disturbing appearance. His adoptive father, Archdeacon Claude Frollo, is obsessed with the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda and orders Quasimodo to kidnap her. But when Quasimodo is caught and punished, Esmeralda takes pity on him. From that moment on, Quasimodo finds himself caught between love for the kind beauty and loyalty to man who raised him. A novel that challenges the value of appearances and social classes, this gothic romance by Victor Hugo was published in France in 1831. This is an unabridged version taken from the Isabel F. Hapgood translation of 1888. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Sans-Culottes Albert Soboul, 2024-05-14 A riveting portrait of the radical and militant partisans who changed the course of the French Revolution A phenomenon of the preindustrial age, the sans-culottes—master craftsmen, shopkeepers, small merchants, domestic servants—were as hostile to the ideas of capitalist bourgeoisie as they were to those of the ancien régime that was overthrown in the first years of the French Revolution. For half a decade, their movement exerted a powerful control over the central wards of Paris and other large commercial centers, changing the course of the revolution. Here is a detailed portrait of who these people were and a sympathetic account of their moment in history. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Boundaries of the Republic Mary Dewhurst Lewis, 2007 In this first comprehensive history of immigrant inequality in France, Mary D. Lewis chronicles the conflicts arising from mass immigration between the First and Second World Wars, the uneven rights arrangements that emerged during this time, and their legacy for contemporary France. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Black Book of Communism Stéphane Courtois, 1999 This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Echoes of the Marseillaise Eric Hobsbawm, 2018-11-12 What was the French Revolution? Was it the triumph of Enlightenment humanist principles, or a violent reign of terror? Did it empower the common man, or just the bourgeoisie? And was it a turning point in world history, or a mere anomaly? E.J. Hobsbawm’s classic historiographic study—written at the very moment when a new set of revolutions swept through the Eastern Bloc and brought down the Iron Curtain—explores how the French Revolution was perceived over the following two centuries. He traces how the French Revolution became integral to nineteenth-century political discourse, when everyone from bourgeois liberals to radical socialists cited these historical events, even as they disagreed on what their meaning. And he considers why references to the French Revolution continued to inflame passions into the twentieth century, as a rhetorical touchstone for communist revolutionaries and as a boogeyman for social conservatives. Echoes of the Marseillaise is a stimulating examination of how the same events have been reimagined by different generations and factions to serve various political agendas. It will give readers a new appreciation for how the French Revolution not only made history, but also shaped our fundamental notions about history itself. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Reinterpreting the French Revolution Bailey Stone, 2002-10-21 Publisher Description |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Origins of Political Order Francis Fukuyama, 2011-05-12 Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The French Revolution Hippolyte Taine, 1885 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Rousseau and the French Revolution 1762-1791 Joan McDonald, 2014-01-02 From 1789 onwards there sprang up a fervent revolutionary cult of Rousseau, and at each stage in the subsequent unfolding of the drama of the Revolution historians have seen Rousseau's influence at work. Mrs McDonald seeks in this study to trace the development of the cult and to define the nature of the influence by means of a detailed survey of the appeals made to the authority of Rousseau in books, pamphlets and accounts of speeches put forth by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary writers between 1762 and 1791, and she reaches conclusions more complex than those which have been commonly accepted. She is able to show that most of the writers on the revolutionary side who invoked Rousseau's name did so in order to put forward their own views and used arguments that were often in direct contradiction with those which he had formulated; the Social Contract was not widely read in these years, and those revolutionaries who did actually study it were often critical of what they found there. By contrast, the most careful analysis of Rousseau's political theory is to be found in the pamphlets written by aristocratic critics of the Revolution in protest against the misuse to which his name had been put. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke, 1821 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: 1789: The French Revolution Begins Robert H. Blackman, 2020-08-06 The French Revolution marks the beginning of modern politics. Using a diverse range of sources, Robert H. Blackman reconstructs key constitutional debates, from the initial convocation of the Estates General in Versailles in May 1789, to the National Assembly placing the wealth of the Catholic Church at the disposal of the nation that November, revealing their nuances through close readings of participant and witness accounts. This comprehensive and accessible study analyses the most important debates and events through which the French National Assembly became a sovereign body, and explores the process by which the massive political transformation of the French Revolution took place. Blackman's narrative-driven approach creates a new path through the complex politics of the early French Revolution, mapping the changes that took place and revealing how a new political order was created during the chaotic first months of the Revolution. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787-1802 T. C. W. Blanning, 1996 The military and political progress of the [French] revolutionary armies is narrated and analysed in this ... study, with special attention paid to the legacy of the old regime, the remarkable resilience displayed by the old regime powers, the reasons for the revolutionaries' success on land -- and the reasons for their failure at sea. The revolutionary wars brought France hegemony in Europe but at a terrible cost. Inside the country, the war brought the end of pluralism, the destruction of the monarchy, civil war and the terror, paving the way for military dictatorship and burdening the country with an enduring legacy of political instability. This interaction between events at the front and at home is discussed in full. Special attention is also paid to the devastation inflicted by the revolutionary armies as they rampaged across the continent, together with the nationalist resistance movements they provoked--Page 4 of cover. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Blood Sisters Marilyn Yalom, 1995 The voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution are finally restored to history. Yalom focuses on the most unforgettable chronicles: the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister, Charlotte; and others bound together by a common nightmare. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Twelve who Ruled Robert Roswell Palmer, 1958 Palmer studies the twelve leaders who seized power at the beginning of France's revolutionary decade. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: Citizens Simon Schama, 1990-03-27 Instead of the dying Old Regime, Schama presents an ebullient country, vital and inventive, infatuated with novelty and technology -- a strikingly fresh view of Louis XVI's France. A New York Times bestseller in hardcover. 200 illustrations. |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The New Regime Isser Woloch, 1995 Confident that they had broken with a discredited past, French revolutionaries after 1789 referred to pre-revolutionary times as the ancien regime (old regime). The National Assembly proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, grasping the reins of power and asserting the supremacy of law over all other interests. Even as the liberalism of 1789 collapsed into the Terror and then into the Napoleonic dictatorship, a new regime emerged at the juncture of state and civil society. The cycles of recrimination, hatred, and endemic local conflict unleashed by the Terror did not obliterate this new civic order. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study of three turbulent decades in French history, the eminent historian Isser Woloch examines some large questions: How did the French civic order change after 1789? What civic values animated the new regime; what policies did it adopt? What institutions did it establish, and how did they fare when carried into practice? Drawing on a variety of archival sources, Professor Woloch explains shifts in lawmaking and local authority, state intervention in village life, the creation of public primary schools, experiments in public assistance, a cycle of changes in the mechanisms of civil justice, the introduction of felony trials, and above all the imposition of military conscription. Unlike most accounts of the period, The New Regime moves outside Paris in search of the new civic order. Professor Woloch writes: Imagine approaching a typical French town in 1798 or 1808 - the capital of one of the eighty-odd departments that the National Assembly created by redividing the nation's territory. The spires of a cathedral or the largest parish churches would stillcommand the horizon. But as one moved about the town, one could readily identify its civic institutions: the departmental administration (later the prefecture); the town hall or mairie; the local schools; several new courts or tribunals; the institutions of poor relief such as a |
| critical analysis of french revolution: The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature Tobias Smollett, 1798 |
| critical analysis of french revolution: French Revolution François Furet, Denis Richet, 1970 |
CRITICAL Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of CRITICAL is inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably. How to use critical in a sentence. Synonym Discussion of Critical.
CRITICAL | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
CRITICAL definition: 1. saying that someone or something is bad or wrong: 2. giving or relating to opinions or…. Learn more.
Critical Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary
CRITICAL meaning: 1 : expressing criticism or disapproval; 2 : of or relating to the judgments of critics about books, movies, art, etc.
CRITICAL definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
To be critical of someone or something means to criticize them. ...a few dozen intellectuals who've been critical of the regime. He has apologised for critical remarks he made about the referee. A critical approach to something involves examining and judging it carefully. We need to become …
critical - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jun 8, 2025 · The critical component of the photosynthetic system is the “water-oxidizing complex”, made up of manganese atoms and a calcium atom. 2018 , VOA Learning English > China's Melting Glacier Brings Visitors, Adds to Climate Concerns [1] :
CRITICAL Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of CRITICAL is inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably. How to use critical in a sentence. …
CRITICAL | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
CRITICAL definition: 1. saying that someone or something is bad or wrong: 2. giving or relating to …
Critical Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary
CRITICAL meaning: 1 : expressing criticism or disapproval; 2 : of or relating to the judgments of critics …
CRITICAL definition and meaning | Collins English Dict…
To be critical of someone or something means to criticize them. ...a few dozen intellectuals who've been critical of …
critical - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jun 8, 2025 · The critical component of the photosynthetic system is the “water-oxidizing complex”, made up …
