Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century: 16 (Ideas in Context, Series Number 16) - Softcover

Baker, Keith Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521385784 ISBN 13: 9780521385787

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Synopsis

A wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the question 'How did the French Revolution become thinkable?'.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0521385784
• ISBN 13: 9780521385787
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 382