published_or_final_version / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

Jeanne Bécu, an illegitimate child from the Vaucouleurs area in France, ascended the ranks of the Ancien régime to become the Countess du Barry and take her place as Royal Mistress of Louis XV. During her tenure as Royal Mistress, Jeanne amassed a jewel collection that rivaled all private collections. During the course of the French Revolution, more specifically the Reign of Terror, Jeanne was forced to hatch a plot to secure the remainder of her wealth as she lost a significant portion of her revenue on the night of 4 August 1789. To protect her wealth, Jeanne enlisted Nathaniel Parker Forth, a British spy, to help her plan a fake jewel theft at Louveciennes so that she could remove her economic capital from France while also reducing her total wealth and capital with the intent of reducing her tax payments. As a result of the theft, her jewelry was transported to London, where she would travel four times during the French Revolution on the pretext of recovering her jewelry. This thesis examines her actions while abroad during the Revolution and her culpability in the plot. While traveling to and from London, Jeanne was able to move information, money, and people out of France. Jeanne was arrested and charged with aiding the counter-revolution, for which the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced her to death. Madame du Barry represented the extravagance and waste of Versailles and of Bourbon absolutism, and this symbolic representation of waste was what eventually inhibited Jeanne’s success.

Democracy was no more than a marginal force during the eighteenth century, unanimously denounced as a chimerical form of government unfit for passionate human beings living in commercial societies. Placed in this context this thesis studies the concept of ‘representative democracy' during the French Revolution, particularly under the Directory (1795–1799). At the time the term was an oxymoron. It was a neologism strategically coined by the democrats at a time when ‘representative government' and ‘democracy' were understood to be diametrically opposed to each other. In this thesis the democrats' political thought is simultaneously placed in several contexts. One is the rapidly changing political, economic and international circumstances of the French First Republic at war. Another is the anxiety about democratic decline emanating from the long-established intellectual traditions that regarded the history of Greece and Rome as proof that democracy and popular government inevitably led to anarchy, despotism and military government. Due to this anxiety the ruling republicans' answer during the Directory to the predicament—how to avoid the return of the Terror, win the war, and stabilize the Republic without inviting military government—was crystalized in the notion of ‘representative government', which defined a modern republic based on a firm rejection of ‘democratic' politics. Condorcet is important at this juncture because he directly challenged the given notions of his own period (such as that democracy inevitably fosters military government). Building on this context of debate, the arguments for democracy put forth by Antonelle, Chaussard, Français de Nantes and others are analysed. These democrats devised plans to steer France and Europe to what they regarded as the correct way of genuinely ending the Revolution: the democratic republic. The findings of this thesis elucidate the elements of continuity and those of rupture between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Orientador: Maria Stella Martins Bresciani / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T19:23:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Schreiner_Michelle_D.pdf: 1713841 bytes, checksum: d554cdb1778ebeedc85a64bd55e30c36 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: Para Jules Michelet, alguns literatos, como Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue e George Sand, caracterizam o ¿povo¿ de forma degradante, diferindo de uma literatura anterior, de fins do século XVIII e início do XIX, que devia se afirmar como veículo de instrução moral ou de ¿pedagogia¿ do cidadão. Nesse sentido, busco recuperar o propósito do historiador ao publicar Le Peuple, em 1846, e Histoire de la Révolution française, de 1847 a 1853, como contraponto à literatura do período que, segundo ele, oferecia uma falsa imagem da nação francesa ao enfatizar sobretudo os defeitos e torpezas de seu povo. A propósito da questão da emergência do ¿povo¿ no cenário historiográfico francês da primeira metade do século XIX, levanto a hipótese de que a criação das obras de Michelet em contraposição à literatura em voga no seu tempo, insere-se num contexto maior de extensão da função ¿pedagógica¿ de formação do povo, atribuída até então à Literatura, para o âmbito da História / Abstract: For Jules Michelet, some literary writers, just as Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue and George Sand, characterize ¿the people¿ in a degraded way, unlike a previous literature (at the turn of the 18th and in early 19th century) that was understood as an instrument of education of the people. In such case, I search to recover the purpose of the historian when he publishes Le Peuple, in 1846, and Histoire de la Révolution française, from 1847 to 1853, to oppose the literature of the period that, according to him, used to offer a false image of the French nation when it emphasizes all of faults and bad habits of its people. About the emergency of ¿people¿ in the French historical scenery in the first half of the nineteenth century, I defend that the Michelet¿s works creation, in opposition to the literary writers of the period, is inserted in a larger context of extension of the ¿pedagogic¿ function of people's formation, attributed until then to the Literature for the ambit of the History / Doutorado / Politica, Memoria e Cidade / Doutor em História

Twentieth-century scholars have extensively studied how Rousseau's domestic discourse impacted the patriarchal ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contributed to women's exclusion from the public sphere. Joan Landes, Lynn Hunt, and many others, argued that the French Revolution excluded women from the public sphere and confined them to the domestic realm. Joan Landes also argued that the patriarchal discourse was a mere reflection of social reality. In The Other Enlightenment, Carla Hesse argues for the women's presence in the public sphere. One of the goals of this dissertation is to contribute to the debate by analyzing the content of the counter-discourse of selected women authors during the revolutionary era and examine how they challenged and subverted the patriarchal discourse. In the second chapter, I reconstruct the patriarchal discourse. I first examine the official (or legal) discourse in crucial works which remain absent from major modern sources: Jean Domat's Loix civiles dans leur order naturel and Louis de Héricourt's Loix eccleésiastiques de France dans leur order naturel. Then I look at how scientists like Monroe, Roussel, Lignac, Venel, and Robert used discoveries regarding woman's physiology to create a medical discourse that justifies woman's inferiority so as to confine them into the domestic/private sphere. I examine how intellectuals such as Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Coyer and Laclos, reinforced women's domesticity. In chapter 3, I examine women's participation in the early stage of the Revolution and the overt attempt by some women to claim their place in the public sphere and to challenge and subvert the oppressive patriarchal discourse through their writings. Chapter 4 focuses on Olympe de Gouges's theater and a specific example of subversion of the patriarchal discourse: I compare the father figure in Diderot's La Religieuse and de Gouges's play Le Couvent, ou les Voeux forcés. Finally chapter 5 examines women's involvement in the French Revolution after 1794 and Constance de Salm's attack on patriarchy.

After conquering Belgium and the Rhineland in 1794, the French Army of the Sambre and Meuse faced severe logistical, disciplinary, and morale problems that signaled the erosion of its capabilities. The army’s degeneration resulted from a revolution in French foreign policy designed to conquer the natural frontiers, a policy often falsely portrayed as a diplomatic tradition of the French monarchy. In fact, the natural frontiers policy – expansion to the Rhine, the Pyrenees, and the Alps – emerged only after the start of the War of the First Coalition in 1792. Moreover, the pursuit of natural frontiers caused more controversy than previously understood. No less a figure than Lazare Carnot – the Organizer of Victory – viewed French expansion to the Rhine as impractical and likely to perpetuate war. While the war of conquest provided the French state with the resources to survive, it entailed numerous unforeseen consequences. Most notably, the Revolutionary armies became isolated from the nation and displayed more loyalty to their commanders than to the civilian authorities. In 1797, the Sambre and Meuse Army became a political tool of General Lazare Hoche, who sought control over the Rhineland by supporting the creation of a Cisrhenan Republic. Ultimately, troops from Hoche’s army removed Carnot from the French Directory in the coup d’état of 18 fructidor, a crucial benchmark in the militarization of French politics two years before Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power. Accordingly, the conquest of the Rhine frontier contributed to the erosion of democratic governance in Revolutionary France.