final examination
printable (.doc)
Course Bibliography
- Sylvia Neely: “The French Revolution began because of a financial crisis.”
- Reinhart Koselleck: “From the 1770s on, ‘crisis’ becomes a structural signature of modernity” whose “very ambiguity... turns the word into a basic concept.”
- Georges Lefebvre: in addressing the perpetual, possibly irresolvable debate over whether it was “a grave economic crisis ... making their lives almost unbearable,” adopted a particularistic and negative reading of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
- Georg Forster by contrast (Carhart p.273) universalized it, calling the French Revolution “the greatest, most important, and most astonishing revolution of moral education and development of the entire human race.”
- Daniel Mornet: “a revolution took place in men’s minds ... before the Revolution of 1789 actually broke out.”
- Edmund Burke blamed it on a literary cabal.
- Roger Chartier: the sheer quantity of books, plus the multiple meanings that could be drawn out of them, taught people to think critically. There was no inherent meaning in the great works of the Enlightenment, but rather the canon of Enlightenment was articulated after the fact, during the Revolution.
- Jonathan Israel: there were clear and specific meanings in the partisans of Enlightenment, but these meanings and their terminology were contested along sharply defined lines.
- Dale Van Kley: it was the contents of minor, occasional writings (libelles, judicial memoires), not the “classics” of what Israel calls moderate mainstream Enlightenment, that was damaging to the sacral authority of the monarchy. Religious conflict, never permanently resolved, came prior to Enlightenment.
- Alexis de Tocqueville: There was no revolution. There was a lot of damage, but France basically ended up where it started, with a bureaucratic monarchy.
The Question
So which was it? Did the French Revolution ignite spontaneously, or do its causes lie deeper in the eighteenth or even seventeenth century? Can the eighteenth century be characterized adequately as the age of Enlightenment, and was Enlightenment responsible for the French Revolution? Compose an historiographical essay in which you address the interpretations as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the texts we have read in this course.
No research beyond the texts discussed in this course is necessary.
You are not compelled to address all the texts, but bring into conversation
as many as you can. Draw on your fellow students’ lectures as you
are able to also.
Length: not to exceed 7 pages.
No Bibliography necessary
Parenthetical citations are probably most efficient for this assignment
Due: Tuesday, June 28 either in print (my mailbox, BAL
8th Floor) or via email
(.doc, .docx, .rtf, .pdf, .txt, .wpd only - not Microsoft Works)