The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the rise of nationalist narratives in France between the late seventeenth century and the 1830 revolution. It does so by adopting the enthnosymbolist approach and focusing on the role of historians in reshaping memories, symbols, and values of social groups in their claim of ‘representing’ the nation. Starting from a study of the royalist cult and its national narrative, it shows how historians identified the history of France with the king’s immortal body. Out of the royalist cult, and in opposition to it, stemmed discursive groups contesting the king’s identification with the nation. The thesis focuses on two of such groups. Considering these to be what Anthony D. Smith calls ‘ethnies’, it shows how historian reshaped their past on the claim that it presented the true history of France. The thesis also highlights, through the debates surrounding ‘race’, ‘national character’ and ‘class’, how these, rather than being abstract political concepts, where actually discourses about ‘identities’, laden with emotional meaning. Relating, in debates of the time, major and lesser known authors, the thesis analyses the ideas of three major historians of the period, Boulainvilliers, Montesquieu and Augustin Thierry, all of whom had a fundamental role in shaping ‘race’, ‘national character’ and ‘class’ and, moreover, had a fundamental role in the debate on the origins of the French nation.

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This thesis examines the constitutive role of printed media in the formation of political identities during the French Revolution, placing particular emphasis on those areas of print production which have been conventionally and pejoratively marginalised as 'ephemeral', but which I argue are in fact central to the development of distinct and conflictual revolutionary positions. These objects demand a re-examination of the role of spectatorship during this period, and require an engagement with the role of reproduction and authenticity in the formation of individual subjectivities and modern nation states. The first chapter of my thesis addresses the role of assignats or revolutionary paper money, based on the value of confiscated church land, whose material facture became increasingly complicated in response to counterfeiting, part-sponsored by the British Government. The desire for increased transparency (literally, in terms of technological devices such as watermarking) paralleled Republican political morality, but was, I suggest, formulated in response to a range of counter-revolutionary actions. My second chapter examines printed representations of revolutionary festivals, and the problematics of memory, permanence and visuality associated with the representation of an ephemeral event. Chapter three analyses the representative role of the passport in the 1790s. Pre-photographic passports listed the physical characteristics of the bearer, to be compared to the subject at each checkpoint, a textual portrait which opened up a variety of narratives, both of an individual voyage, and, in the case of the politically disenfranchised, a narrative of exclusion centred on a spectatorial encounter. These are read against other spheres of representation, including 'honorific' certificates, portraiture and caricature. My final chapter looks at revolutionary games and other ludic material, and their multiple roles as signifiers of pedagogical truth or, in the case of trompe l'oeil of other prints, deception - all of which were dependent upon the attraction and direction of the gaze.

For contemporaries of the French Revolution, the figure of Philippe, due d'Orleans, made a significant impact and for good or ill his image was deep rooted in the origins of the 1789 revolution. However, over the past two centuries, a mixture of truths, rumours, propaganda and falsehoods have blended together to form a distorted image of Philippe and his place in the history of reform and revolution. Although the caricature of Philippe Egalite is well known to historians, the existence of multiple and often contradictory images of Philippe has made it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction, leading George Kelly to brand him an enigma. This uncertainty surrounding Philippe has made him a sidelined figure in recent histories of the Revolution. The purpose of this PhD has been to peel away the layers of propaganda, rumour and myth that have surrounded Philippe, and to provide a new study that traces both the evolution of Philippe's private politics and the continual development of his public image.

This thesis is the product of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award, the result of which was the production of a catalogue of the Tableaux de la Révolution. Made up of some 500 prints, presented in four nineteenth century bound volumes, the Tableaux de la Révolution is part of the Rothschild Collection held at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. One of the key goals of the project was to create an online resource that is now publicly accessible by internet. The initial cataloguing was split between Claire Trévien, also a recipient of and AHRC CDA, which she held in the French Department at the University of Warwick and myself. We ‘tombstone catalogued’ some 250 prints each, analysing the following: date, the identification of printing method and style, identification of subject and theme, a description of the image, translation and description of the text, as well as the construction of a theme-based search engine. My own contribution was the first and fourth of the large volumes in which the prints are kept (accession numbers: 4232.1 and 4222). Additional background research has also been conducted for each print, extended upon in the final in-depth analyses of circa 30 prints on my part. The items which received this treatment under my individual care were acc. nos: 4222.7.4, 4222.9.8, 4222.10.11, 4222.13.16, 4222.14.17, 4222.21.27, 4222.35.44, 4222.47.61, 4232.1.13.27, 4232.1.19.40, 4232.1.23.46, 4232.1.42.83, 4232.1.43.85, 4232.1.43.86, 4232.1.46.92, 4232.1.48.96, 4232.1.52.104, 4232.1.52.107, 4232.1.57.113, 4232.1.69.142, 4232.1.70.144, 4232.1.80.164, 4232.1.83.170, 4232.1.84.171, 4232.2.24.38, 4232.2.31.50, 4232.2.31.51, 4232.2.35.61 and 4232.2.47.80 (http://www.waddesdon.org.uk/collection/special-projects/tableaux-paul). The work done at Waddesdon Manor also proved invaluable vis-à-vis my thesis. The study of the prints laid the groundwork for me to broaden my knowledge of prints as a visual medium. In addition to this, an exhibition of the Tableaux de la Révolution was held at Waddesdon Manor in summer 2011. Part of the impact of the final catalogue also included a public lecture and ‘hands-on’ session, which I co-hosted with Claire Trévien. The catalogue of the Tableaux de la Révolution may be consulted on the Waddesdon website at: http://waddesdon.org.uk/collection/special-projects/tableau.

The four decades that span the collapse of British imperial authority in the American colonies in 1774, to the disintegration of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815 witnessed unfathomable social and political change. There emerged a transformation from one ‘type’ of time to another: a change in the nature of change itself. Following the onset of the American and French Revolutions, time became more than a constitutive element in the lived experience of history – it also became the chief assassin of political legitimacy. Widespread considerations and perceptions of time in both American and French revolutionary contexts complicated and deranged the efficacy of power. Drawing upon contemporary temporal theories to explain how legitimate political authority eroded (before revolution), remained unstable (during revolution), and was finally reassembled (after revolution), this thesis presents two empirical case-studies for assessing the validity of German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis, and other’s, regarding temporality and historicity. Although Koselleck’s viewpoint is largely dependent upon anecdote and abstraction to support theoretical observations, this thesis explores the application of time conceptions to five sites of political contestation: (1) the peculiar historicity of the ancien regime, which contributed to its own collapse by producing a time temperament that desensitised it to political urgency; (2) deliberative processes of the early Revolutions and the way in which time was transformed from an absolute or constant conceptual presence into an historical actor in its own right; (3) experimentations with time and history that were both a response to, and an attempt to rectify, the instability of political power during the mid-1780s in America and the early-1790s in France; (4) manipulations of revolutionary historical experience as a strategy for justifying the quasi-legal enterprises of the Constitutional Convention, 1787, and the coup of Brumaire, 1799; and (5) a comparative analysis of the interaction between power politics and temporality under the administration of George Washington and the Napoleonic Empire.

Throughout the age of sail, with the exception of finance, there was no aspect of naval warfare that exhibited as much difficulty and anguish as manning the fleet. Finding the necessary skilled seamen to man warships was the alpha and omega of problems for the Royal Navy, as in wartime it was the first to appear with mobilisation and the last to be overcome. Manning the Royal Navy was an increasing problem throughout the eighteenth century as the Navy and British sea trade continuously expanded. This resulted in a desperate struggle for the scarce resource of skilled manpower, made most evident during the initial mobilisation from peacetime to wartime footing. There is no doubt that the Royal Navy depended on able seamen as if they were the very lifeblood of the ships on which they served. In manning its fleets the Royal Navy had to also consider the merchant marine, which depended upon skilled mariners and supplied the British Isles with food, stores, and the economic income generated by sea trade. The task of manning the fleets proved extremely difficult and was only accomplished under great stress as both the Royal Navy and the merchant marine struggled to obtain the services of vitally important skilled mariners. Therefore the fruits of the Royal Navy’s avid search for seamen during the French Revolutionary Wars must be viewed in light of its success in dominating the oceans of the world. This research proves that the Admiralty of the British Royal Navy was as concerned and as cautious in manning warships as they were in fighting them. It also shows that much of what history has said about naval manning has been based on conjecture rather than fact. This research utilizes statistics to reanalyze naval manning and provide a basis for future research.

Sade has had many titles over the centuries. He was ‘Marquis’, a noblesse d’épée, sitting in his château atop Lacoste; ‘Wolf-man’, on the run from the authorities, a cause célèbre for his notorious sexual adventures; ‘Citizen’, a turncoat royalist, a functionary within the bureaucracy of the new French Assembly, eulogizer of the revolutionary heroes, Marat and Le Pelletier; and ‘Divine’, a patron saint of Romantic poets like Flaubert and Baudelaire, and later, the same for the Surrealists. Sade has yet to be given the name: ‘Scientist’. In my dissertation I lay out the ground work for defending this choice of designation by situating Sade and a sampling of his works within a defining period in the history of the object of scientific inquiry: from the eve of the 1789 French Revolution until its dénouement following the death of Robespierre. The three works of focus are Les 120 Journées (1785), Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique (1795) and La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (1795); and each one is strategically selected to bring to light singular events, marking important changes in humankind’s relationship with the natural world. This intense focus on Sade magnifies many times over the position Foucault had already assigned him in Les Mots et les chose (1966) when, in offering his own version of the evolution of the object of scientific inquiry from the Classical to the Modern Age, he isolates Sade as a heuristic bridge linking the two eras of his focus, using Sade’s erotic novels Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797) to support his argument. However overly pithy Foucault’s application of Sade may have been, it is felt that he lays a sufficient groundwork, one that I take up in my dissertation and push to even further depths. More than simply conforming to Foucault’s employment of Sade as the “midwife” to Modern science, I do two things of notable difference: 1) I take up the challenge Foucault set in the “Foreword to the English Edition” of Les Mots et les chose when he professes “embarrassment” over not being able to account for how “[…] instruments, techniques, institutions…” (p. xiii) of empirical sciences came to match in complexity those individuals and societies that would come to use them. On the one side, Foucault expresses a clear limitation; on the other, he offers up what he believes is half of what it takes to get at this limitation: “I left the problem of cause to one side. I chose instead to confine myself to describing the transformation themselves, thinking that this would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of scientific change and epistemological causality was to be constructed” (p. xiv). This dissertation offers up a heuristic framework to account for the relationship between both these sides Foucault can only adumbrate: the side of an emergent scientific knowledge and the ontological status of the producers of this knowledge. 2) I position Sade as a representative of an older scientific tradition, one overshadowed in Foucault’s emphasis on Sade and Modern science. Since Iwan Bloch compared Les 120 Journées to Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 manual of sexology, dedicated to documenting qualitatively all possible sexual deviancies in human behavior, most readings of Sade in the History of Science have taken him to be on the modern most end of the timeline of the History of Science (Foucault, 1966; Harari and Pellegrin, 1973; Morris, 1990; Vila, 1998; Polat, 2000; Quinlan, 2006; Quinlan, 2013). Some writers in recent years, however, have had the acuity to highlight older scientific influences on Sade’s oeuvre. Armelle St-Martin is one such example, who has written extensively on the influence of Italian science on Sade. Such a focus is a departure from a trend that sees English empiricism defining the scientific mindset in France that, it is believed, would have influenced Sade’s ideas. This would have included the “spirit of exactitude and method” (p. 91) D’Alembert (1751) speaks of in his panegyrics of Bacon, Locke and Newton in Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot or Voltaire’s popularization (1763) of all things English in Dictionnaire philosophique. The legacies of both these perspectives have weighed heavily on Caroline Warman’s reading of Sade, who sees him (2002) through a more “positive” prism of “sensationist materialism” in Sade: from materialism to pornography. St- Martin sees Sade’s scientific orientation directed rather towards much older and ulterior forms of scientific “objects”, ones much less “positive”. Casamaggi and St-Martin see pneumatological themes like miasmas and corruptions in Histoire de Juliette, arriving from Sade’s own explorations in such places as amongst the swamps and famously licentious denizen of Venice, the namesake for that special contagion: “maladies vénériennes”. Both these departures from Foucault’s conceptualization imply the need to articulate what I call a “negative” trajectory within the History of Science. This term plays an important part in how I engage with Sade and his contemporaries and its explication constitutes a significant aim throughout the course of my dissertation. Sade’s own inquiry into the object of scientific inquiry came at a time of great upheaval and he relied on one approach hitherto capable of articulating such “negativity”: metaphysics. The very notion of metaphysics was anathema for many, such as D’Alembert who even labeled it a despicable science in the relevant entry in L’encyclopédie de Diderot. This dissertation will situate Sade within this battle over the future of science in what was that all crucial period of history when the die was cast in favor of Modern science and its penchant for “positivity”; the period of the French Revolution.

Les révolutionnaires de l’époque 1789 – 1799 ont supprimé les corps intermédiaires entre l’Etat et le Peuple. Selon la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, nul corps, nul individu ne devait s’insérer entre le pouvoir et la plèbe. Ainsi, les lois Chapelier (entre autres) ont supprimé les corps de métier et les gouvernements successifs ont tenté d’éradiquer les contre-pouvoirs des régions et des « féodalités » locales. Or, lorsque Napoléon Bonaparte prend la tête de l’Etat en novembre 1799, le pays est en quête de nouveaux repères. Le chef du nouveau gouvernement instauré en février 1800 entend mettre en place des « masses de granit », c’est-à-dire des institutions stables.La création de la Banque de France, des Préfets, des Lycées, du Baccalauréat, de la Légion d’Honneur, sont des exemples connus parmi tant d’autres. En revanche, le sujet de cette thèse est moins connu, excepté peut-être des étudiants et enseignants juristes. Car au cœur du nouveau Code Civil des Français se trouve « l’esprit de fraternité » exprimé dans le texte de la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, et dans la Constitution du 5 fructidor. L’Eglise catholique n’étant plus – depuis le Concordat – la religion officielle de l’Etat, mais la religion majoritaire, l’Etat remplace le devoir de charité par une fraternité civile. Le Premier Consul (bientôt Empereur) ajoute une clause du Code Civil stipulant que les parents doivent pourvoir aux besoins de leurs enfants majeurs, lorsque ces derniers en sont incapables (et inversement).A travers l’époque du Consulat et du Premier Empire, cette thèse vise à démontrer le développement des structures de solidarité sociale, notamment dans la législation mais aussi en ce qui concerne les institutions et les politiques de l’Etat pendant cette période. Nous étudierons (entre autres) le Code Civil en son contexte, les Maisons d’Education de la Légion d’Honneur, la législation du travail (dont notamment celui des enfants), les sociétés de secours mutuels (prédécesseurs de nos mutuelles et syndicats d’aujourd’hui) et les administrations de bienfaisance. Nous jetterons également un regard – en conclusion – sur les projets inachevés développés sous des régimes postérieurs. Cela afin de mieux placer cette époque dans son contexte par rapport au XXIe siècle.La période du Consulat et de l’Empire a été une grande période de création de caisses de retraite, et l’Empereur Napoléon en a même précisé les principes qui devaient régir ce « droit » qu’il voulait étendre à tous les métiers. Notre thèse suit donc les traces de la création de ces institutions et de l’encadrement de la vie quotidienne selon les principes napoléoniens, synthèse de l’Ancien Régime et des idéaux de 1789. / The revolutionaries of the period spanning 1789 – 1799 abolished the corps intermédiaires between the State and the People. According to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, no organisation or individual must step between the power and the plebeians. Thus, the Le Chapelier laws (among others) abolished the guilds, and successive governments attempted to eradicate the opposing forces of the regions and local « feudalisms ». However, when Napoleon Bonaparte took charge of the ship of State in November 1799, the country was in search of new references. The chief of the new government installed in February 1800 aimed to lay « masses of granite », that is to say stable institutions, on the soil of France.The creation of the Bank of France, of the Prefects, of the Lycées, Baccalaureate and Legion of Honour are well-known examples among many others. But the subject of this thesis is less famous, except perhaps for students and teachers of law. For in the heart of the new Civil Code of the French, there is the « spirit of fraternity » expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and in the Constitution of the 5th of Fructidor. The Catholic Church no longer being – since the Concordat – the official State religion, but the religion of the majority of Frenchmen, the State replaced the duty of charity with civil fraternity. The First Consul (who was soon to be Emperor) added a clause to the Civil Code stipulating that parents must provide for their children, even as adults, if the latter are unable to do so (and vice versa).Throughout the era of the Consulate and First Empire, this thesis aims to show the development of structures of social solidarity, particularly via legislation, but also in relation to the institutions and policies of the State during this period. We will study (among others) the Civil Code in its context, the Maisons d’Education de la Légion d’Honneur, legislation on labour (particularly in relation to child labour), mutual aid societies (predecessors of the mutual insurance companies and trades unions of our times) and the welfare administrations. We will also cast an eye, in conclusion, over the unfinished projects developed under later regimes. In order to better situate this era in its context in relation to the 21st Century.The period of the Consulate and Empire was a great period for the creation of retirement pension funds, and the Emperor Napoleon even set down the principles which were to regulate this « right » that he wanted to extend to all trades. Our thesis therefore follows in the trail of the creation of these institutions and of the framework of daily life according to Napoleonic principles, a synthesis of the Old Regime and the ideals of 1789.