Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xfwgj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-25T02:35:59.352Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

22 - Political languages of the French Revolution

from Part VI - The Enlightenment and revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Mark Goldie  and
Robert Wokler
By
Keith Baker
Mark Goldie
Affiliation:
Churchill College, Cambridge
Robert Wokler
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Get access

Summary

Although they were preceded by several decades of political contestation, the debates of the French Revolution can reasonably be said to have begun on 5 July 1788, when Louis XVI agreed to summon the Estates General after a lapse of almost two centuries. Declaring the royal archives inadequate to determine how that body had once been convened, the king invited his subjects to investigate the precedents for calling an assembly that would be ‘truly national, both in its composition and in its results’ (Baker 1987b, pp. 143–5). This was a remarkable pronouncement in what was still thought to be an absolute monarchy, since it invited public enquiry not only into the entire history of the realm but also the ultimate definition of the ‘truly national’. No earlier constitutional crisis in France had unleashed a response comparable in force and magnitude to the torrent of political argument that was now to sweep the country.

Competing discourses of the Old Regime

Participants in this debate could draw upon a variety of discourses forged in the course of several decades of political contestation. A discourse of justice drew on the conceptual resources of a French constitutional tradition dramatically revived and reworked by defenders of the parlementsin opposition to the royal ‘despotism’ which was increasingly their target after 1750. Juxtaposing the lawful (justice) with the arbitrary (will), it upheld the principles of a society comprised of orders and Estates, governed according to regular legal forms, secured by magistrates exercising their functions of judicial review and registration of laws in the parlements.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought , pp. 626 - 659
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baecque, A.Schmale, W., and Vovelle, M., eds. (1988). L’An 1 des droits de l’homme (Paris).Google Scholar
Baker, K. M. (1978b). ‘State, Society and Subsistence in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of Modern History, 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, K. M. (1990). Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, K. M., ed. (1994b). The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, IV, The Terror (Oxford).Google Scholar
Caldwell, R. (1985). The Era of the French Revolution: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (New York).Google Scholar
Condorcet, , Antoine, Jean, marquis, (1847–9). Oeuvres, ed. Condorcet-O’Connor, A. and Arago, M. F., 12 vols. (Paris). Repr. 1968.Google Scholar
Condorcet, , Antoine, Jean, marquis, (1976). Selected Writings, ed. Baker, K. M. (Indianapolis: Hackett).Google Scholar
Doyle, W. (1988). The French Revolution: A Bibliography of Works in English (London).Google Scholar
Doyle, W. (1989). The Oxford History of the French Revolution (New York and Oxford).Google Scholar
Doyle, W. (1999). Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd edn (Oxford). 1st publ. 1980.Google Scholar
Forsyth, M. (1987). Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester).Google Scholar
Furet, F. (1981). Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Forster, E. (Cambridge). 1st publ. in French in 1978 (Paris).Google Scholar
Furet, F. (1992). Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Nevill, A. (Oxford).Google Scholar
Furet, F., and Ozouf, M., eds. (1989b). A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Goldhammer, A. (Cambridge, MA).Google Scholar
Gauchet, M. (1989). La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauchet, M. (1995). La Révolution des pouvoirs: la souveraineté, le peuple et la représentation, 1789–1799 (Paris).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guéniffey, P. (2000). La Politique de la Terreur: essai sur la violence révolutionnaire (Paris).Google Scholar
Higonnet, P. (1998). Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge MA).Google Scholar
Hont, I. (1994a). ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: “Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State” in Historical Perspective’, Political Studies, 42. Repr. in Hont, 2005.Google Scholar
Hunt, L. A. (1984). Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley).Google Scholar
Hunt, L. A. (1992). The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley).Google Scholar
Jaume, L. (1989). Le discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris).Google Scholar
Jones, C., ed. (1988). The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London).Google Scholar
Ozouf, M. (1988). Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Sheridan, A. (Cambridge, MA). 1st publ. in French in 1976.Google Scholar
Palmer, R. R. (1941). Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton).Google Scholar
Rials, S. (1988). La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Paris).Google Scholar
Schama, S. (1989) Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London).Google Scholar
Scott, S. F., and Rothaus, B., eds. (1985). Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789–1799, 2 vols. (Westport, CT).Google Scholar
Sewell, W. H. (1994). A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and ‘What is the Third Estate?’ (Durham, NC).Google Scholar
Singer, B. C. J. (1986). Society, Theory and the French Revolution (New York).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soboul, A. (1989). Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution francaise (Paris).Google Scholar
Sonenscher, M. (1997). ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789’, History of Political Thought, 18.Google Scholar
Sonenscher, M. (2003). ‘Introduction’ to Sieyès, Political Writings (Indianapolis).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×