HI 3840 French Revolution and Political Thought 1789-1848

HI 31272

The French Revolution and Political Thought

Course Handbook 2009-10

Tutor: ProfessorStuart Jones

Contents

Basic Information about the Course

Aims and Learning Outcomes

Assessment

Office Hours

Workload

Resources

General Reading

Syllabus

1.The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (5Feb)

2.What kind of Revolution? Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (12 Feb, 19 Feb)

3.Rights of Man (26 Feb)

4.The Limits of Citizenship (5 March)

5.Constitutional Debates (12 March)

6.Jacobinism and the Origins of the Terror (19 March)

7.Conservatism and Counterrevolution (26 March, 23 April)

8.Postrevolutionary Liberalism: Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël (30 April, 7 May)

Basic Information about the Course

Level 3 course unit, 20 credits, semester 2.

Tutor: ProfessorStuart Jones (Samuel Alexander Building, S 2.23). I may be contacted during office hours (see Blackboard or office door for details), or by e-mail: 

Timetable: Weekly seminar, Friday 9-11in Samuel Alexander A202.

Aims and Learning Outcomes

The course unit aims to examine the reorientation of social and political thought in the era of the French Revolution through a close reading of key texts by major French thinkers of the period and some attention to broader European debates.

On completion of the course, you should be able to demonstrate a broad understanding of the main issues in French Revolutionary political thought and its legacy; a close knowledge of selected major texts; and an ability to place these texts in their historical and intellectual contexts.

Assessment

One essay (2000 words) is to be submitted for formative assessment, week 5

One essay (3000 words) is to be submitted for summative assessment, week 11 (50% of the course assessment). Deadline: Wednesday 5th May.

A two-hour examination paper (50% of the course assessment). This will consist of two parts. Section A will consist of three questions, one each on Sieyes, Constant, and Maistre; Section B will consist of about six broader questions. You must answer one question from each section.

Essay 1 will be closely based on one or more of the texts studied up to that point in the course. Questions will be designed to be capable of being answered on the basis of close reading of the texts with relatively limited secondary reading. Essay 2, by contrast, will require more research and wider reading on your part: questions will typically require you to go beyond the scope of the seminar topics. The documentary analysis is designed to give you practice in advance of the gobbet question in the exam. In the exam the essay questions will be framed so as to enable you to think comparatively (i.e. see links between different thinkers, or between different topics).

Essay questions will be published on Blackboard.

Formatively assessed work (Essay 1) should be submitted through Blackboard (tbc).

Summatively assessed work (Essay 2) should be submitted in hard copy (2 copies) to the School Undergraduate Office.

Office Hours

I am normally available to see students without appointment at the following times:

Thursdays 2-3
Fridays 11-12

Appointments at other times can be easily arranged by email.

Workload

This is a 20-credit course unit, which should therefore represent 200 hours’ work, along these lines:

Seminar attendance and participation: 22 hours
Seminar preparation: 81 hours (roughly a full day’s work per seminar)
Essay 1: 25 hours
Essay 2: 35 hours
Revision: 35 hours
Exam: 2 hours

Resources

It is essential that you should make yourself familiar with the following resources:

1. The Main Library collection ... obviously!

2. Electronic resources available via the library. The great majority of the journal articles that appear on the course bibliography are available electronically, and the library catalogue will take you there straightforwardly. These articles are marked [E] on this list. A small but growing number of books are available electronically via the library’s electronic resources. These are also marked [E]. Usually, the library catalogue links directly to the E-book; but in some cases (e.g. the Cambridge Companions Online) you need to access the book via Electronic Resources/Databases.

3. Blackboard site. This will be used to supply (a) core reading, where possible; (a) course information, including updates; (b) background guidance to aid seminar preparation; (c) digitized texts and links to online materials. Digitized texts available through Blackboard are marked [BB] in this course guide.

General Reading

If you have not previously studied French history in the period of the Revolution and its aftermath, you need to acquire a familiarity with the broad chronological outlines and enough knowledge of the detail to enable to recognize allusions in the texts we shall be studying. There are a vast number of suitable books. Good places to start include:

CROOK, Malcolm (ed).Revolutionary France (2002), chs 1 & 2.

DOYLE, William.The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (2001).

JONES, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (2003) especially chs 5 and 8-11.

For more detail on particular themes and episodes:

DOYLE, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution (1990).

SUTHERLAND, D.M.G..France 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (1985)

For an interpretation which dovetails well with the themes of the course:

FURET, François. Revolutionary France 1770-1880(1992).

The closest thing to a ‘textbook’ for the coure is:

*NEIDLEMAN, Jason Andrew.The General Will is Citizenship. Inquiries into French Political Thought (2001): a stimulating work which covers many of the thinkers and themes to be studied in the course. Worth buying (at the time of writing it can be bought ‘used’ for under £6+pp via Amazon).

The following give broad coverage of French (and other) political ideas in this period:

GOLDSTEIN, Marc A. (ed).Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution: an anthology of original texts (1997).

HAYWARD, Jack.After the French Revolution: six critics of democracy and nationalism (1991), esp chs 1-3, 5.

Note also the following important works of reference. I have not as a rule included them in the weekly bibliographies, but the three of them taken together contain useful material on practically all the topics we shall cover.

FURET, François, and OZOUF, Mona (eds).Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution(1989). Interpretative essays rather than mere dictionary entries on a wealth of topics covering the aftermath of the Revolution as well as the Revolutionary period itself.

KORS, Alan Charles, (ed).Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (4 vols, 2003). This is available both in hard copy and electronically via Oxford Reference Online (access this through Electronic Books on the library website). Includes entries on many of the thinkers and issues covered in the first half of the course.

MILLER, David (ed).The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (1987), which is available electronically through the library, contains useful short introductions to all the major thinkers dealt with in the course.

Syllabus

5th FebruaryIntellectual Origins of the French Revolution
12th FebruarySieyes and What is the Third Estate?
19th FebruarySieyes and What is the Third Estate?
26th FebruaryRights of Man
5th MarchLimits of Citizenship
12th MarchConstitutional Debates
19th MarchJacobinism and the Origins of the Terror
26th MarchConservatism and Counter-Revolution
23rd AprilConservatism and Counter-Revolution
30th AprilPost-Revolutionary Liberalism: Constant and Staël
7th MayPost-Revolutionary Liberalism: Constant and Staël
14th MayRevision

The numbers below refer to the topics, not the week, since we shall spend two weeks each on topics 2, 7 and 8 (i.e. those examined in Section A of the exam paper).

1.The Intellectual Origins of theFrench Revolution (5Feb)

We’ll start with an introduction to the course – what it’s about, how it works.

We’ll then explore the question of the intellectual origins of the Revolution. You are not expected to acquire a detailed knowledge of pre-1789 ideas for this course – but you will need to understand the differences between the main strands of pre-revolutionary political thought so as to be able to identify what happens to them in the revolutionary period.

Preparation for the seminar

Read Rousseau’s Social Contract (substantial extracts); also find out about the political thought of Montesquieu and Voltaire (from encyclopaedia articles) and read Baker and/or Linton. Consider the following questions:

Do you see any/all of these thinkers as revolutionary?
What kind of political ‘programme’, if any, can be derived from their thought?
How did their definitions of freedom differ?

Key reading

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract. Available in many different editions, and online. I assume that many of you will have studied this text previously, e.g. on HIST 20182; if so, refresh your knowledge.

Plus the chapters by Baker and Linton below.

2.What kind of Revolution? Sieyes and What is the Third Estate?(12 Feb, 19 Feb)

The Abbé Sieyes’s What is the Third Estate? was the most famous of the numerous pamphlets published in the political crisis of 1788-9, and the only one that is still read. Indeed it is increasingly viewed as a work of theoretical importance, as well as an important polemical intervention.

Issues for discussion:

What was the text’s polemical importance in the context of the political crisis of 1788-9 – i.e. how did it address the urgent questions of the day? How did Sieyes’s approach differ from other approaches? (e.g. Mounier – see extract in Beik)
Why should be regard it as a work of enduring theoretical importance, rather than simply a tract for its time? How radical was it?
How should we classify Sieyes as a political thinker? Was he a liberal? A nationalist?

When reading the text, pay particular attention to the following:

Sieyes’s opposition to the Anglophiles who wanted France to imitate the English constitution (pp. 127-33 in the Sonenscher edition)
Sieyes’s understanding of the relationship between the nation and the constitution (pp. 133-44). What kind of argument is he trying to refute?
The importance of the concept of representation to Sieyes, and its connection with the division of labour.

How did a national assembly, as Sieyes understood it, differ from the Estates General as traditionally conceived?

Primary Sources

*SIEYES, E-J.Political Writings, ed. M. Sonenscher (2003). This contains What is the Third Estate? and Sieyes’s two other key pamphlets from 1788, Views of the Executive Means available to the Representatives of France in 1789 and An Essay on Privileges. All are worth reading. The library has four copies of the Sonenscher volume. ‘What is the Third Estate’ is available on BB.

SIEYES, E-J.What is the Third Estate?, eds. Blondel and Finer (1963) is the only other edition in English. This does not contain any ancillary texts, but is worth consulting if you want a hard copy of the text and cannot obtain the Sonenscher volume. The library has two copies, and a third is in Special Collections (i.e. Deansgate).

SIEYES, E-J.Essay on Privileges (1791 translation), which is in the Sonenscher edition, is also available electronically as part of the ECCO collection – search via the library catalogue.

BEIK, Paul H. (ed).The French Revolution(1970), pp. 37-44, has an extract from a speech on the Estates-General by the modéré, J-J Mounier. This may usefully be contrasted with Sieyes’s position.

SECONDARY SOURCES

BAKER, Keith Michael.Inventing the French Revolution (1990), ch 10 [also in Baker, ed, The Political Culture of the Old Regime (1987), vol. 1 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture]. On the concept of representation: very important.

DOYLE, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution, (1990), chs 11 & 13, for the political context.

DUNN, John.Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (2005), ch 2, esp. pp. 92-118.

FORSYTH,Murray.Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyes (1987). This is the standard work, making full use of the rediscovered Sieyes archives.

HALÉVI, Ran. ‘The constituent revolution and its ambiguities’, in Jack R Censer (ed), The French Revolution and Intellectual History (1989), pp. 139-51. A fundamental discussion of the ‘ideas of 1789’.[BB]

HAMPSON, Norman. Prelude to Terror: the Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Consensus, 1789-91, ch 2 (for the context of What is the Third Estate?).

JONES, Colin.The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon(2002), ch 9 (an excellent sketch of the context in which Sieyes wrote).

MARGERISON, Kenneth. ‘The movement for the creation of a Union of Orders in the Estates General of 1789’, French History 3 (1989), 48-70. [E]

MARGERISON, Kenneth. ‘Political pamphlets, the Society of Thirty, and the failure to create a discourse of national reform during the French Pre–Revolution, 1788–1789’,History of European Ideas 17 (1993), 215–244. [E]

MARGERISON, Kenneth. ‘The pamphlet debate over the organization of the Estates General’, in Peter Campbell (ed), Origins of the French Revolution (2006), pp. 219-38.

PASQUINO, Pasquale. ‘The constitutional republicanism of Emmanuel Sieyes’, in Biancamaria Fontana (ed), The Invention of the Modern Republic (1994)

SA'DAH, Anne.The Shaping of Liberal Politics in Revolutionary France(1990). Part II is good on the historical context of Sieyes’s writing.

SCURR, Ruth. ‘Pierre-Louis Roederer and the debate on forms of government in Revolutionary France’, Political Studies 52 (2004), 251-68. Casts light on Sieyes’s polemic with Paine in 1791, and on debates about how to establish effective executive power in a republic. [E]

SEWELL, William H., Jr.A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? (1994)

SINGER, Brian C.J..Society, Theory and the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary (1986), ch 8.

STUURMAN, Siep. ‘Productive virtue: the language of citizenship and the idea of industrial civilizaton’, The European Legacy 1 (1996), 329-335. A brief contextualization of Sieyes’s distinction between the productive and the non-productive classes. [E]

THOMPSON, Eric.Popular Sovereignty and the French Constituent Assembly 1789-91.

WHATMORE, Richard. ‘Adam Smith’s role in the French Revolution’, Past and Present no. 175 (May 2002), 65-89. [E]

For background on ‘racial’ arguments, defence of noble rights etc:

BAKER, Keith Michael. ‘French political thought at the accession of Louis XVI’, Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), 279-303. [E]

BRIGGS, Robin. ‘From the German forest to civil society: the Frankish Myth and the Ancient Constitution in France’, in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (eds), Civil Histories. Essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas (2000), pp. 231-249 [BB]

ELLIS, Harold A. Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy(1988).

MARGERISON, Kenneth, ‘History, representative institutions, and political rights in the French Pre-Revolution (1787-1789)’, French Historical Studies 15 (1987), 68-98. [E]

3.Rights of Man(26 Feb)

The focus here is on the origins, character and limitations of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789.

For discussion:

Why did the revolutionaries of 1789 formulate their principles in terms of a declaration of universal rights? Did the Declaration have a practical political purpose?
What did the 1789 Declaration owe to the American model? (What was the American model, and what other models were available?)
What was at issue in the revolutionaries’ debates about what sort of a declaration of rights it should be? (There were many different drafts – how did they differ?) Was the end result a coherent document, or a patchwork composed from several discrete ideological sources?

Primary Sources

HUNT, Lynn (ed).The French Revolution and Human Rights: a brief documentary history (1996). This includes the translated text of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and extracts from a number of other important texts.

*The text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man is also available in translation on various websites, e.g.:

SIEYES, E-J. ‘A preliminary to the constitution’, reprinted in Konrad Engelbert OELSNER, An Account of the Life of Sieyes (1795), pp. 77-108 [available as an e-book in ECCO]

GOLDSTEIN, Marc Allan.Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, 1788-1797, part 1, esp texts 4 (Sieyes), 9 (Sieyes), and 13 (Mounier).

British and other responses:

BENTHAM, Jeremy. ‘Nonsense upon stilts, or Pandora’s Box Opened’, in Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other Writings on the French Revolution, eds. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Cyprian Blamires (2002), 319-75.

PAINE, Thomas.Rights of Man (Penguin 1985, and numerous other editions; also online at OLL).

WALDRON, Jeremy (ed).'Nonsense upon stilts': Bentham, Burke, and Marx on the rights of man(1987).

Secondary Sources

APPLEBY, Joyce. ‘America as a model for the radical French reformers of 1789’, The William and Mary Quarterly 28 (1971), 267-86. [E]

HI 3840 French Revolution and Political Thought 1789-1848

Basic Information about the Course

Aims and Learning Outcomes

Assessment

Office Hours

Workload

Resources

General Reading

Syllabus

1.The Intellectual Origins of theFrench Revolution (5Feb)

Key reading

Further reading

2.What kind of Revolution? Sieyes and What is the Third Estate?(12 Feb, 19 Feb)

Primary Sources

SECONDARY SOURCES

3.Rights of Man(26 Feb)

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources