Alchemy was an art, a scientific and technological project that foreshadowed modern chemistry. Alchemy, with its cryptic language and fantastic symbolism, evokes many aspects of the culture of the Middle Ages. In alchemical manuscripts, drawings of alembics, funnels and furnaces vividly represent this long lost art. Alchemy’s goal of transmuting base metal into gold fuels[…]
A comparison of the concept of the “general will” in revolutionary France. Introduction The concept of the General Will – as expressed by the French term volonté générale -was developed in the seventeenth century by writers such as Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Fenélon, Bayle, and Leibniz in a theological context to mean the “general will of[…]
Enlightenment debates about colonialism had very little to do with what actually happened on the ground. While the period between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution marked an ebb tide for the fortunes of French imperialism, colonial issues loomed large in the political and philosophical discourse of the age. Statesmen such as the[…]
About 3000 resisters, many under the age of 25, were tried in German military courts in France and executed. World War II in Europe was the cause of innumerable atrocities against civilians: for instance, the Shoah, Allied and Axis carpet bombing, the destruction of Warsaw, and the cruelties of enforced starvation. Another example is less[…]
Rasse des Noeux was a considerable bibliophile and man of letters. Why do we often sign and date our books when we acquire them? It is not surely for fear that we will lose them and thus to ensure their safe return. Rather, it is to mark their place in our life’s trajectory: an individual[…]
The story behind the unusual form of a French chandelier made in the early 1800s. Introduction One of the most popular objects in the Getty Museum’s collection of decorative arts is a chandelier made in Paris during the early 1800s by Gérard Jean Galle, an artist who produced luxury items out of gilt bronze. The[…]
After capturing Constantinople in 1204, the Fourth Crusaders established several states in former Byzantine territory. Starting from the captured imperial center, westerners moved into Thrace, Greece, the Aegean islands, and even Asia Minor. These campaigns of conquest had varied success, with the greatest and longest lasting in southern Greece.[1][2] The Fourth Crusaders had struck out[…]
Versailles was the location of two seismic shifts in political culture. Ten million tourists flock to Versailles annually to imagine courtly life in such sumptuous surroundings. Versailles was about awesome royal power, intense rivalries, brilliant craftsmanship and engineering, and – for those who did the manual labour – drudgery and deference. Above all, Versailles embodied[…]
Jewish would-be artists began arriving in Paris in the decade before the First World War. Jews were new neither to Paris nor to the artistic avant-garde in the 1920s. What was new were both their numbers and visibility. One French study estimates that over five hundred Jewish artists were working in Paris in the interwar[…]
It was an era and a culture that was both misogynist and racist, in which Jews from Léon Blum on down were castigated as effete “coffeehouse Jews.” On a clear, beautiful day in the center of the city of Paris I performed the first act in front of the entire world. Scholom Schwartzbard, letter from[…]
Basville’s private correspondence reveals aspects of his character that deepen our understanding of the intendancy in the old regime. On 11 November 1703, the intendant of Languedoc, Nicolas de Lamoignon de Basville, wrote in private to his brother in Paris on the subject of the maréchal then commanding royal forces in the Cévennes, Nicolas de[…]
Dealing in false coinage was said to undermine the king’s prerogative to issue currency, illegally reproduce his image, and threaten the economic viability of the state. Introduction In a monarchy that was theoretically absolute, an attack on the king was the most heinous of crimes, and was accordingly punished with the most final of sentences. Lèse-majesté was[…]
The concept of absolutism – the divine right to rule – dominated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and elsewhere. Louis XIV’s famous “L’État, c’est moi” of 1661 summarizes candidly the concept of absolutism, the political theory that appeared to dominate the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The concept of its divine underpinnings was an[…]
Exploring how topography was deployed as an instrument of French state formation in Louis Garneray’s Vues des Côtes de France. While the phrase ‘topographical images’ often calls to mind lush green landscapes, this article addresses a less familiar but very pertinent site of the topographic: ports. Specifically, Louis Garneray’s depiction of the ports of France in[…]
The law’s “brooding presence” was very real to political actors in early modern France. Old Regime France, David Bell has observed, was a “judicial society” where “the experiences of the law courts were central to the way in which political action was conceptualized.”[1] Theorists distinguished the king’s “absolute power” from the rule of a tyrant by[…]
In the nineteenth century, domesticity and maternity became the primary cultural expectation for French women. In the nineteenth century, domesticity and maternity became the primary cultural expectation for French women. The new ideals, most of which could trace their roots back to Rousseauian rhetoric, supported the gendering of education and family life and consigned women[…]
Calling the French liars, atheists, and libertines, undoubtedly evoked a general sense of immorality and disrepute. In 1684, an anti-French propaganda pamphlet featured a conversation between a German and an Englishman, who were both curious to hear the latest news from a French acquaintance. Their conversation began with a parody of French politeness and refined[…]
The extensive response in the British press was unprecedented. Abstract Although Europe had celebrated the end of the Napoleonic Wars with the defeat of the French armies and the abdication of the emperor on 11 April 1814, Napoleon escaped and again rallied his troops against the British and Prussian armies. His defeat at Waterloo on[…]
The Napoleonic wars illustrate how warfare, seemingly the most conventional object of history, defies history’s most conventional questions. Abstract Trying to locate the Napoleonic Wars as an event, or a constellation of events in time and space, only reveals the historical dislocations produced by war on a global scale. Like many of the wars of[…]
Here are five things to know about this groundbreaking, tragic figure. You probably haven’t heard of Émilie du Châtelet. But without her contributions, the French Enlightenment of the 1700s would have looked much different. Here are five things to know about this groundbreaking, tragic figure. She was a polymath who ignored the gender norms of her[…]
Criticism of the monarchy in the press was suppressed during this period. By Jennifer Hight Introduction The Age of Reason, also known as the Enlightenment, emerged from the Protestant Reformation and emphasized reason and individualism, which was a new thought process.[6] This Enlightenment caused many new writers, philosophers, and artists to question the traditional authority.[…]