This book provides students and general readers with an introduction to revolutionary France whilst also presenting a clear argument to explain the events of the period. Provides students and general readers with an introduction to revolutionary France . Also presents a clear argument to explain the events of the period. Argues that the French Revolution encountered resistance from the poor as well as the privileged. Includes substantial discussion of society and government under Napoleon. Contextualizing material in each chapter aids students new to the topic.

In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire. The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms-at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing-were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues. Contributors: Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University; Ian Coller, La Trobe University; Denise Davidson, Georgia State University; Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Andrew Jainchill, Queen's University; Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University; William Max Nelson, University of Toronto; Pierre Serna, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. The South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for these outcasts of the new French citizenry, and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups.

A major new account of one of the leading philosopher-statesmen of the eighteenth century Edmund Burke (1730–97) lived during one of the most extraordinary periods of world history. He grappled with the significance of the British Empire in India, fought for reconciliation with the American colonies, and was a vocal critic of national policy during three European wars. He also advocated reform in Britain and became a central protagonist in the great debate on the French Revolution. Drawing on the complete range of printed and manuscript sources, Empire and Revolution offers a vivid reconstruction of the major concerns of this outstanding statesman, orator, and philosopher. In restoring Burke to his original political and intellectual context, this book overturns the conventional picture of a partisan of tradition against progress and presents a multifaceted portrait of one of the most captivating figures in eighteenth-century life and thought. A boldly ambitious work of scholarship, this book challenges us to rethink the legacy of Burke and the turbulent era in which he played so pivotal a role.

The effects of the French Revolution reached far beyond the confines of France itself. The Ottoman Empire, ancient ally and major trading partner of France, was not immune from the repercussions of the 'Age of Revolutions', especially since it was home to permanent French communities with a certain legal autonomy. French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire examines, for the first time, the political and cultural impact of the French Revolution on Franco-Ottoman relations, as well as on the French communities of the Ottoman Empire. The modern interpretation of revolutionary ideological expansionism is strongly influenced by the famous propaganda decree of 19 November 1792 which promised 'fraternity and help to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty', as well as the well-studied efforts to export the Revolution into the territories conquered by the revolutionary armies and to the various Sister Republics. Against all expectations, however, French revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire exhibited neither a 'crusading mentality' nor a heightened readiness to use force in order to achieve ideological goals. Instead, as this volume shows, in matters of diplomacy as well as in the administration of French expatriate communities, revolutionary policies were applied in an extremely circumspect fashion. The focus on the effects of the French regime change outside of France offers valuable new insights into the revolutionary process itself, which will revise common assumptions about French revolutionary diplomacy. In addition, Pascal Firges takes a close look at the establishment of the new political culture of the French Revolution within the transcultural context of the French expatriate communities of the Ottoman Empire, which serves as a thought-provoking point of comparison for the emergence and development of French revolutionary political culture.