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• The invisible hands: merchants and bankers in Paris and London at the end of the eighteenth century
• The politicisation of finance: the English financial world in the midst of the Revolutionary Wars, 1796-1800
• A history of unchallenged distrust: French public opinion and bankers, 1798-1799
• Between risk and collaboration: financial and political elites during revolution and war 1792-1805
• Investing in a new market during the age of Revolution: European bankers and the New World, 1783-1803
• Extending networks in war and peace: credit and trust in uncertain times, 1801-1813
• Interlocking interests: bankers and politicians in England, 1789-1810
• Constraint and autonomy: finance and politics from the Napoleonic Empire to the Congress of Vienna, 1800-1815

"This book uncovers the complex interconnections between politics and finance in the midst of the French Revolution. Charting the trajectories of members of the financial elite between London, Paris and Amsterdam, this study reveals the ever-shifting relationship between market actors and the political world. The French Revolution paved the way for bankers, especially those working in international finance, to occupy a new position within not only the economic framework of the time but also on the political stage. The profession of banker went through a series of transitions in its relationship with the political authorities. These changes affecting the social, economic and political status of bankers led to increasingly active interactions between politics and finance that have become a feature of our modern societies. Using a transnational and interdisciplinary approach, this book highlights how during the Age of Revolution there emerged a dynamic which is still present today: the financial world and the sphere of politics became strongly intermixed while actors from both sides made efforts to overpower their counterparts. In this way, it provides an ideal perspective for bridging the gap that has long separated economic from cultural history in the study of the French Revolution."-- Page 4 of cover

• Introduction: les Lumières après les Lumières? Pourquoi une histoire des notions Lumières, d'Enlightenment et d'Aufklärung entre 1800 et 1980 / Nicholas Cronk and Élisabeth Décultot
• Victor Cousin et la philosophie des Lumières / Christian Helmreich
• Alexis de Tocqueville et Hermann Hettner, 1856; deux historiens face au dix-huitième siècle / Élisabeth Décultot
• Unveiling or inventing the Enlightenment? Bruno Bauer, the political theology of radical critique and the construction of Enlightenment in the Vormärz epoch / Daniel Weidner
• Understanding, radicalising and illuminating the Enlightenment: Hegel's use of Lumières and Aufklärung for an enlightened philosophy / Francesca Iannelli
• Les Lumières à l'épreuve des concours: le cas du prix d'éloquence à l'Académie française (1831-1904) / Stéphane Zékian
• After Carlyle: 'Enlightenment' in Vicctorian Britain / Brian W. Young
• Germanising the Enlightenment: Wilhelm Dithey's Aufklärung / Avi Lifschitz
• Lumières in France: the contribution of Gustave Lanson and his pupils / Nicholas Cronk
• The theme of Enlightenment in Russian historiography, 1860-1900 / Andrew Kahn
• The dilemma of Enlightenment German, Jewish and antisemitic constructions of Aufklärung in the nineteenth century / Mike Rottmann
• Nihilism, Enlightenment and the 'new failure of nerve': arguments about Enlightenment in New York and Los Angeles, 1941-1947 / James Schmidt
• Ideas in action: Franco Venturi's Settecento / Ruggero Sciuto
• The question of Peter Gay's Enlightenment: between 'heavenly city' and the 'brute facts of political life' (1948-1956) / Gregory S. Brown
• 'Die Zeit der Aufklärung ist weider da': activist appropriations of the Enlightenment in the Hegelian Left an in eighteenth-century studies in the GDR / Daniel Fulda.

Enlightenment values, including an emphasis on human rights and belief in rationalism and progress, aspire to be universals, yet at the same time they are concepts grounded in the eighteenth century. Since the French Revolution we have grappled with the concepts of Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung, in an attempt to understand how these eighteenth-century concepts continue to shape and influence modern notions of liberal culture. This collection of essays approaches these important questions in a resolutely European and multi-lingual perspective.

Letters of Innocente-Catherine de Rougé Du Plessis-Bellière, duchesse d'Elbeuf (1709-1794) in the original French with prefatory material and summaries in English.

• Introduction: The Interconnected Atlantic World
• Interception, Corruption, and Revolution: The Emergence and Expansion of the British and French Caribbean Postal System
• Mail Couriers in the Revolutionary Caribbean
• The Founding, Staffing, and Operation of Early Modern Caribbean Print Shops
• Apply to the Printer: Colonial Printers as Nexuses of Information
• New World Newspapers: The Emergence and Proliferation of the British and French Colonial Papers in the 18th and Early 19th-Centuries
• Restricting the Flow of News: Censorship and Early Newspaper Reports of the Haitian Revolution (1791)
• The Colonial Almanac: Instruments of Information in the Caribbean
• Iconography in Early Modern Caribbean Print Culture
• Reading Salons, Enlightenment, and Rum: The World of the Early Caribbean Book Trade and its Booksellers
• Conclusion: Communication Networks Across the Caribbean and Wider Atlantic World

"'Messengers of Empire: Print and Revolution in the Atlantic World' examines how news and information moved across the Atlantic world during the Age of Sail. It provides a ground-breaking look at how the French Revolutionary Wars impacted the development of communication channels, such as the creation of regular postal services in the Caribbean and increased reliance on local printers to produce print matter faster and more effectively. With the onset of war between the British Empire and French overseas empire, improved communications became a critical factor for military success, prompting developments on both sides. This included the surge in Caribbean printing operations, as well as the copper plating of packet boats to decrease the time it took for mail to cross the Atlantic Ocean in either direction. This book provides a unique inter-imperial comparison, revealing key differences and similarities between Britain and France in terms of how information circulation was crucial to the operation of empire. It consults a range of archival sources that have rarely, if ever, been used before, including correspondence dispatches, newspapers, almanacs, public notices, and even documents detailing secret society meetings. In doing so, this book reveals how imperial communication networks functioned at the ground level, as well as who were the gatekeepers of information in areas far removed from the metropoles."-- Provided by vendor

"Alors que l'on sort à peine de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes en Europe, la curiosité antiquaire se mondialise. De Paris à Pékin, de Delhi à Mexico en passant par Copenhague ou Philadelphie, cet engouement pour les discussions et les pratiques antiquaires s'affirme au dix-huitième siècle et déconstruit les contours rassurants du modèle gréco-latin. Ce livre essaie de rendre compte de ce changement d'échelle en suivant une perspective originale et nouvelle en faveur d'une histoire connectée de la connaissance antiquaire au dix-huitième siècle. Loin des traditions nationales ou seulement comparatistes qui avaient mis en évidence les relations que les différentes sociétés humaines avaient entretenues, au cours de l'histoire, avec les vestiges du passé, ce livre envisage les cultures et les savoirs antiquaires dans leur matérialité non seulement dans les métropoles européennes, mais aussi dans les capitales américaines et asiatiques. A distance d'une Antiquité figée, ce livre entend montrer comment la mobilité des savants et des artistes a commencé à pluraliser l'Antiquité dès le dix-huitième siècle, à la dépayser dans un contexte global et impérial. = Just as the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns was coming to an end in Europe, antiquarian curiosity became global. From Paris to Peking, from Delhi to Mexico City, via Copenhagen and Philadelphia, this craze for antiquarian discussions and practices took hold in the eighteenth century and deconstructed the reassuring contours of the Greco-Latin model. This book attempts to account for this change of scale by following an original and new perspective in favour of a connected history of antiquarian knowledge in the eighteenth century. Far from the national or only comparative traditions that had highlighted the relations that the different human societies had maintained, in the course of history, with the remains of the past, this book considers the cultures and the antiquarian knowledge in their materiality not only in the European metropolises, but also in the American and Asian capitals. This book aims to show how the mobility of scholars and artists began to pluralize antiquity from the eighteenth century onwards, to make it more diverse in a global and imperial context."--Pages v-vi

• How to see nothing : A visitor from the living [1997] / Jared Stark
• Revolt as a study in precision : Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. [2001] / Judith Kasper
• "I was a report" : The Karski Report [2010] / Alexander García Düttmann
• Testimony beyond justice : The last of the unjust [2013] / Sara Guyer
• Four sisters [2018] and Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust Film Project / Stuart Liebman
• Israeli soldiers in the eyes of the beholder : Tsahal [1994] / Brad Prager
• "Yes, this is the place" : Lanzmann between Napalm [2017] and Shoah / Michael G. Levine
• Time and the hare : Lanzmann's autobiography / Françoise Meltzer
• Self-portrait at ninety : an interview with Franck Nouchi and Juliette Simont / Claude Lanzmann

The 141st volume of Yale French Studies examines the life and work of Claude Lanzmann following his masterpiece, Shoah This volume of Yale French Studies charts the different paths the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018) took after the release of Shoah in 1985. These paths are explored through a consideration of his late films-Tsahal (1994), A Visitor from the Living (1997), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), Light and Shadows (2008), The Karski Report (2010), The Last of the Unjust (2013), Napalm (2017), and Four Sisters (2018)-and of his memoir, The Patagonian Hare. The volume also includes an English translation of his last major interview, "Self-Portrait at Ninety." The original essays collected here show that Lanzmann's late films and writing stand as something more than mere footnotes to his 1985 masterpiece. Continuing to wrestle with questions of cinematic transmission and the relationship among film, history, and testimony, they confront anew and in a variety of approaches the challenge of representing the Holocaust, and of living in its aftermath.
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• List of Musical Examples
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Clementi and the Enlightenment Chapter 2: Mozart's Insult and the Irritations of Virtuosity Chapter 3: Keyboard Performance and Gender in Late Eighteenth-Century London Chapter 4: Clementi's "Black Joke" Chapter 5: Male Theoria and Female Praxis Chapter 6: Clementi in the Marketplace and the Conservatoire
• Conclusion: Clementi's Coin Appendix: Ideological differences regarding keyboard practicing/music education in 36 conduct books and treatises, 1741-1838
• Bibliography.
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This book takes as its historical point of departure the radical appearance in 1779 of technically difficult keyboard music in a set of six sonatas (Op. 2) by Muzio Clementi. The difficult passages contained in this opus are unique amongst keyboard music published for a market that was understood at the time to consist almost entirely of female amateur keyboardists. Previously actively discouraged from practicing or improving their skills due to the restrictive ideologies in place, Clementi's music increasingly affords female pianists a new kind of musical expression. Clementi and the woman at the piano: Virtuosity and the market for music in eighteenth-century London maps the social, musical, and gendered implications of technically difficult music and helps to underline important changes in Enlightenment culture and keyboard practice. Clementi's activities initiated the now familiar and modern concepts of repetitive musical practice, the work-concept, virtuosity itself, and the division between amateur and professional. Additionally, Clementi promotes a radical new mode of expression for female pianists that is at first highly controversial but slowly gains acceptance due to a widespread promotion of his music, instruments, and methods. Clementi's career is in many respects a perfect case study for the tensions between Enlightenment thinking and new Romantic ideologies.
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This is the first comprehensive analysis of the royal and princely courts of Europe as important places of Enlightenment. The households of European rulers remained central to politics and culture throughout the eighteenth century, and few writers, artists, musicians, or scholars could succeed without establishing connections to ruling houses, noble families, or powerful courtiers.Covering case studies from Spain and France to Russia, and from Scandinavia and Britain to the Holy Roman Empire, the contributions of this volume examine how Enlightenment figures were integrated into the princely courts of the Ancien Régime, and what kinds of relationships they had with courtiers. Dangers and opportunities presented by proximity to court are discussed as well as the question of what rulers and courtiers gained from their interactions with Enlightenment men and women of letters. The book focusses on four areas: firstly, the impact of courtly patronage on Enlightenment discourses and the work as well as careers of Enlightenment writers; secondly, the court as an audience to be catered for by Enlightenment writers; thirdly, the function of Enlightenment narratives and discourses for the image-making of rulers and courtiers; and fourthly, the role the interaction of courtiers and Enlightenment writers played for the formulation of reform policies

• Introduction: finding meaning in the Enlightenment
• Part 1: Theory and method
• Chapter 1: Conceiving a public: ideas and society in eighteenth-century Europe
• Chapter 2: A new intellectual history? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment
• Chapter 3: Doing Fichte: reflections of a sobered (but unrepentant) contextual biographer Part 2: Gender
• Chapter 4: Women, gender, and the Enlightenment: a historical turn
• Chapter 5: Thinking about marriage: Kant's liberalism and the peculiar morality of conjugal union
• Chapter 6: The fragility of polite character: the friendship between James Boswell and William Johnson Temple
• Part 3: Language, philosophy, and the imagination
• Chapter 7: Herder's Publikum: language, print, and sociability in eighteenth-century Germany
• Chapter 8: The philosopher and the Schwärmer: on the career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant
• Chapter 9: History, Philosophy, and the imagination in Enlightenment studies
• Chapter 10: Specialization run amok? Contextualizing Denis Diderot
• Bibliography
• Index

"Over the last three decades Anthony La Vopa has extended his reach as an Enlightenment historian from Germany to England, Scotland, and France. Enlightenment Past and Present: Essays in a Social History of Ideas provides insights into all four contexts, with a view to understanding the Enlightenment's contours in spaces that were distinct but nonetheless shared in a European-wide engagement with a cluster of political, social, and cultural issues. The volume explores a wide variety of themes in the formation of modernity, including the construction of a public, the emergence of modern feminism, the problematic legitimacy of sexuality and marriage, the ideal and practice of friendship, patron-client relations, the conversational sociability of politeness, and the evolution of the essay as a genre. La Vopa aims to demonstrate in practice the new interest in restoring the social to intellectual history without falling back into reductionism. He throws a spotlight on a number of key texts in eighteenth-century philosophy. In several essays, La Vopa employs the resources of meaning in rhetorical cultures with thick social contexts to present Enlightenment texts not simply as print records, but as rhetorical performances with specific audiences. He also often intertwines contexts by focusing on biographical experience, using 'private' life traces such as diaries and other forms of correspondence, to enhance our understanding of published discourse. While drawing on the history of philosophy, the volume takes a decidedly more historical path through the canon. It includes essay reviews which take stock of developments in Enlightenment studies via critical appraisals of major recent contributions to the field."-- Provided by publisher

• Introduction Qing Modernity : The Court The Universal Garden-Palace : Yuanming Yuan Beijing : The Capital of Religious Tolerance The Public Images of the Yuanming Yuan Conclusion : a Modern City Transcriptions Bibliography.
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This book reinterprets architecture in Beijing during the reigns of the Kangxi (1661-1722), Yongzheng (1723-1735) and Qianlong (1736-1795) emperors in the eighteenth century. More specifically, it views the building processes of the four churches and the Western palaces in the Yuanming Yuan garden as an example of cultural dialogue in the context of the Enlightenment. The study is based firstly on archival sources from different institutions from around the globe, using Big Data to manage them. Secondly, it places increased emphasis on architectural remains, preserved both in international collections as well as at archaeological sites. To take advantage of these remains, some were recorded using close-range photogrammetry. Digital sunlight analyses of the buildings' interiors were also carried out. From these emerging technologies, as well as written sources, it becomes possible first to reinterpret Beijing as an imperial capital where religious tolerance and cosmopolitanism were increasing, and second to re-evaluate the entire Yuanming Yuan Garden complex as a miniature version of Beijing. This approach makes for easier subsequent comparisons with other imperial capitals of the time, such as London, Paris and Istanbul. As such, this study reveals a largely neglected chapter in the global history of architecture, while simultaneously offering a crucial re-examination of the existing architectural remains.
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• A Note on Translation Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Authors of Catastrophe
• Chapter 1. Bringing Catastrophe: barbare (br)others, in and around the Encyclopedie
• Chapter 2. Suffering Catastrophe: legitimate and illegitimate lines in Baculard d'Arnaud's medievalist works
• Chapter 3. Prophesying Catastrophe, Predicting Utopia: the time travellers of Mercier's prose tableaux
• Chapter 4. Witnessing Catastrophe as Revelation: doing time with Latude and Sade, modern martyrs Conclusion Works Cited.
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How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how communities claim a position within history. It explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly 'modern' national history was being elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment. Further, examining the tension between a desire to place the imagined community definitively beyond catastrophic times, and a fascination with catastrophe in its revelatory or regenerative aspect, it offers an important historical perspective on the presence of this same tension in the stories of catastrophe that we tell in our own multiple, tumultuous present.
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• Introduction générale / Johanna Lenne-Cornuez et Ceéline Spector
• Mémoire autobiographique et identité personnelle / Steéphane Chauvier
• 'The chief, if not only spur to human industry and action': Rousseau et l'uneasiness de Locke / Christophe Litwin
• De la famille naturelle à la famille sociale: l'usage d'arguments naturalistes chez Locke et Rousseau / Anne Morvan
• La défiance à l'égard de la médecine: enjeux philosophiques de Locke à Rousseau / Claire Crignon
• Locke et la métaphysique du vicaire savoyard / Philippe Hamou
• A l'épreuve des notions morales: l'approfondissement de l'empirisme / Louis Guerpillon
• De Locke à Rousseau: une révolution pédagogique? / Christophe Martin
• Signification et utilité des sanctions chez Locke et Rousseau / Gabrielle Radica
• L'inaliénabilité de la liberté / Céline Spector
• Pouvoir instituant et résistance / Jean Terrel
• Du consentement à la représentation politique: Rousseau critique de Locke? / Ludmilla Lorrain
• Emile, citoyen lockien / Johanna Lenne-Cornuez

"Surmontant une opposition souvent outrée entre les deux auteurs, ce volume réévalue l'héritage de la pensée de Locke chez Rousseau, dans tous les domaines de sa philosophie (identité personnelle, épistémologie, médecine, morale, pédagogie, économie, politique). Au-delà de l'histoire intellectuelle, l'ouvrage met en lumière le dialogue critique fécond que Rousseau entretient avec Locke, quitte à identifier les distorsions que le Citoyen de Genève fait subir à son prédécesseur. Tout en établissant la dette de l'auteur d'Émile à l'égard du 'sage Locke', le volume discerne la pertinence des objections que Rousseau lui adresse en opérant un retour à la lettre de la philosophie de Locke. En quel sens Rousseau a-t-il établi sa philosophie sur des 'principes communs' à ceux de Locke? Quelle subversion fait-il subir à l'Essai concernant l'entendement humain ou aux Pensées sur l'éducation? Quels sont les points aveugles de la philosophie de Locke que la critique rousseauiste permet de mettre en lumière et, à l'inverse, les limites de la critique rousseauiste de Locke? Tels sont les axes de cet ouvrage qui réunit des spécialistes, en philosophie et en littérature, de Rousseau et de Locke."--Page 4 of cover

In Enlightenment Europe, a new form of pantomime ballet emerged, through the dual channels of theorization in print and experimentation onstage. Emphasizing eighteenth-century ballet's construction through print culture, Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopedie follows two parallel paths-standalone treatises on ballet and dance and encyclopedias-to examine the shifting definition of ballet over the second half of the eighteenth century. Bringing together the Encyclopedie and its Supplement, the Encyclopedie methodique, and the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon with the works of Jean-Georges Noverre, Louis de Cahusac, and Charles Compan, it traces how the recycling and recombining of discourses about dance, theatre, and movement arts directly affected the process of defining ballet. At the same time, it emphasizes the role of textual borrowing and compilation in disseminating knowledge during the Enlightenment, examining the differences between placing borrowed texts into encyclopedias of various types as well as into journal format, arguing that context has the potential to play a role equally important to content in shaping a reader's understanding, and that the Encyclopedie methodique presented ballet in a way that diverged radically from both the Encyclopedie and Noverre's Lettres sur la danse.
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• Acknowledgements Table of Contents List of Illustrations Catriona Seth. Preface.
• Siofra Pierse. Introduction: Turmoil, Instability, Adaptation, Elasticity in the Eighteenth-Century Francophone Text SECTION I - Intimations of Insecurity Ioana Galleron and Chiara Mainardi. Troubles, desordres, crises: une approche numerique des expressions de la tourmente au XVIIIe siecle Kate E. Tunstall. The Knife and the Pen: The Attentat of 1757 James Hanrahan. Political Turmoil in Voltaire's Vision and Revision of the Fronde SECTION II - Filtering Natural Disasters Jenny Mander. The Antilles, the Natural History of Hurricanes and Earthquakes, the Seven Years' War and Global Commerce through the Lens of Abbe Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes
• Laurence Mace. (Re)inventer le Vesuve, modeliser la catastrophe, vivre la tourmente: Dupaty en Italie meridionale a la veille de la Revolution Siofra Pierse. Voltaire and the Lisbon Disaster: From Aftershocks to Ataraxy SECTION III - Instability and Memory Cyril Frances. Poetique de l'emotion populaire dans les Tableaux historiques de la Revolution francaise de Nicolas Chamfort
• Adam Schoene. Turmoil and Corruption in Josephine de Monbart's Lettres tahitiennes Erin-Marie Legacey. Disorder and the Dead in Revolutionary Paris SECTION IV - Sade and Female Marginalisation Edward T. O'Sullivan. Fictional Turmoil: The Bloodlust of Women in Sadean Libertine Narratives Shasha Ma. L'Insecurite du sexe feminin: de l'infanticide au feminicide chez Sade SECTION V - Resilience post Turmoil Simon Davies. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: le solitaire engage Gabriel-Robert Thibault. La Resistance spirituelle dans la France des philosophes Emma M. Dunne. 'A moi! A un proscrit! A un malheureux fugitif!': Isabelle de Charriere's Emigre-e-s amid the Turmoil of Exile John Leigh. Revolutionary Upheaval and Domestic Turmoil in Beaumarchais's unsung play La Mere coupable Notes on Contributors Bibliography of Works Cited Index.
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What is turmoil? How may it be captured? What were its manifestations in the eighteenth century? Why does it feel so familiar, even urgent, nowadays? This volume proposes a completely new ontology of turmoil through study of its incidence and impact in the eighteenth-century francophone context. The interdisciplinary essays in this bilingual volume provide multiple illustrations of eighteenth-century instability and insecurity, as well as subsequent adjustments to a post-turmoil new normal. Each instance illuminates human resilience and the mechanisms of post-turmoil elasticity and adaptation in Enlightenment, revolutionary and post-revolutionary writing by female authors Charriere and Monbart, in publications by male authors Beaumarchais, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chamfort, Dupaty, Raynal, Sade and Voltaire, and also in writing by relatively unknown authors, journalists and critics, who capture the turmoil of the global francophone eighteenth-century world. The topics explored emerge as universal ones, familiar to a modern readership: textual and visual revisionism, symbolism within natural disasters, realignment of beliefs, instability of memory, repositioning of historical narratives, female insecurity, attacks on public figures, post-revolutionary resilience and the impact of exile. Through its unique identification of three key generative indicators for turmoil -phenomenon, paradigm shift, elasticity of adaptation- this volume's contributors deliver a distinctive, rich and new ontology of turmoil.
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Although posterity has generally known Bernardin de Saint-Pierre for his bestselling Paul et Virginie, his output was encyclopaedic. Using new sources, this monograph explores the many facets of a celebrity writer in the Ancien Regime, the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. Bernardin attracted a readership to whom, irrespective of age, gender or social situation, he became a guide to living. He was nominated by Louis XVI to manage the Jardin des plantes, by Revolutionary bodies to teach at the Ecole normale and to membership of the Institut. He deplored unquestioning adherence to Newtonian ideas, materialistic atheism and human misdeeds in what could be considered proto-ecological terms. He bemoaned analytical, reductionist approaches: his philosophy placed human beings at the centre of the universe and stressed the interconnectedness of cosmic harmony. Bernardin learned enormously from travel to Eastern Europe and the Indian Ocean. He attacked slavery, championed a national education system and advocated justice for authors. Fresh information and interpretation show that he belonged to neither the philosophe or anti-philosophe camp. A reformist, he envisioned a regenerated France as a nation of liberty offering asylum for refugees. This study demonstrates the range of thought and expression of an incontournable polymath in an age of transformation.
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Colonialism and Slavery in Performance brings together original archival research with recent critical perspectives to argue for the importance of theatrical culture to the understanding of the French Caribbean sugar colonies in the eighteenth century. Fifteen English-language essays from both established and emerging scholars apply insights and methodologies from performance studies and theatre history in order to propose a new understanding of Old Regime culture and identity as a trans-Atlantic continuum that includes the Antillean possessions whose slave labour provided enormous wealth to the metropole. Carefully documented studies of performances in Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous French colony, illustrate how the crucible of a brutally racialized colonial space gave rise to a new French identity by adapting many of the cherished theatrical traditions that colonists imported directly from the mainland, resulting in a Creole performance culture that reflected the strong influence of African practices brought to the islands by plantation slaves. Other essays focus on how European theatregoers reconciled the contradiction inherent in the eighteenth century's progressive embrace of human rights, with an increasing dependence on the economic spoils of slavery, thus illustrating how the stage served as a means to negotiate new tensions within "French" identity, in the metropole as well as in the colonies. In the final section of the volume, essays explore the place of performance in representations of the Old Regime Antilles, from the Haitian literary diaspora to contemporary performing artists from Martinique and Guadeloupe, as the stage remains central to understanding history and identity in France's former Atlantic slave colonies. Featuring contributions from Sean Anderson, Karine Benac-Giroux, Bernard Camier, Nadia Chonville, Laurent Dubois, Logan J. Connors, Beatrice Ferrier, Kaiama L. Glover, Jeffrey M. Leichman, Laurence Marie, Pascale Pellerin, Julia Prest, Catherine Ramond, Emily Sahakian, Pierre Saint-Amand, and Fredrik Thomasson.
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A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans - some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins - translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.
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Examining the birth and development of early modern atheism from Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) to d'Holbach's Systeme de la nature (1770), this study considers Spinoza, Hobbes, Cudworth, Bayle, Meslier, Boulainviller, Du Marsais, Freret, Toland, Collins, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, and d'Holbach and positions them in a general interpretive scheme, based on the idea that early modern atheism is itself an unwanted fruit of early modern metaphysics and theology. Breaking with a long-standing tradition, Descartes claimed that it was possible to have a "clear and distinct" idea of God, indeed that the idea of God was the "clearest and most distinct" of all ideas accessible to the human mind. Humans could thus obtain a scientific knowledge of God's nature and attributes. But as soon as God became an object of science, He also became the object of a thoroughgoing scientific analysis and criticism. The effortlessness with which early modern atheists managed to turn round their adversaries' arguments to their own favour is a sign that the new doctrines of God which emerged in the seventeenth-century, each based in its own way on principles and dogmas related to the new science of nature, were plunging headfirst towards the precipice under their own steam.
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Genealogy and Social Status in the Enlightenment is at the crossroads of the history of science and the social history of cultural practices, and suggests the need for a new approach on the significance of genealogies in the Age of Enlightenment. While their importance has been fully recognised and extensively studied in early modern Britain and in the Victorian period, the long eighteenth century has been too often presented as a black hole regarding genealogy. Enlightened values and urban sociability have been presented as inimical to the praise of ancestry and birth. In contrast, however, various studies on the continental or in the American colonies, have shed light on the many uses of genealogies, even beyond the landed elite. Whether it be in the publishing industry, in the urban corporations, in the scientific discourses, genealogy was used, not only as a resilient social practice, but also as a form of reasoning, a language and a tool to include newcomers, organise scientific and historical knowledge or to express various emotions. This volume aims to reconsider the flexibility of genealogical practices and their perpetual reconfiguration to meet renewed expectations in the period. Far from slowly vanishing under the blows of rationalism that would have delegitimized an ancient world based on various forms of hereditary determinism, the different contributions to this collective work demonstrate that genealogy is a pervasive tool to make sense of a fast-changing society.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Riche de ses éditeurs scolaires et de ses collections enfantines, le dix-neuvième siècle a-t-il inventé le marché du livre pour enfants? Dans la France du dix-huitième siècle, de nombreux acteurs s'efforcent déjà de séparer, au sein de la librairie, les lectures adaptées aux enfants et aux jeunes gens. Les rituels pédagogiques des collèges et des petites écoles, les stratégies commerciales des libraires, les préoccupations des Églises, les projets et les politiques de réforme scolaire, tous poussés par la fièvre éducative de la noblesse et de la bourgeoisie, produisent alors d'innombrables bibliothèques enfantines, plurielles et plastiques, avec ou sans murs. Cet ouvrage montre comment, à un ordre des livres dominé par les logiques des institutions scolaires et des métiers du livre, se surimpose à partir des années 1760 une nouvelle catégorie, celle du « livre d'éducation », qui ne s'identifie plus à un lieu, mais à un projet de lecture, et s'accompagne de l'émergence de nouvelles figures d'auteurs. Alors que les études sur la littérature de jeunesse poursuivent partout leur développement et leur structuration, ce livre dialogue avec les dernières recherches européennes sur la question. À l'inverse des travaux littéraires, il part, non des auteurs et des textes, mais des objets et de leurs manipulations. Son originalité est d'apporter un regard historien sur ces questions, en articulant histoire du livre et de la librairie, histoire de l'éducation, histoire des milieux littéraires et de la condition d'auteur"--Back cover