Politics Culture And Class In The French Revolution

When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.

"In this interpretation of the French Revolution, Professor Hunt argues that it gave birth to many essential characteristics of modern politics -- in particular, it marks the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. The author emphasizes the dynamic interaction between the socio-cultural and political, between the unconscious structures of symbolic forms and the collective actions of committed politicians."--back cover.

This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event. It was not simply a series of events with worldwide repercussions, but also represented the foundation of the middle-class domination of social, cultural and political space, which survives today and is the site of major crises of public culture. One such site is the body. In spite of its prominence in consumer culture as an object of adornment and beautification, the human body retains none of its historic dignity and authority. The argument of this book is that the French Revolution played a crucial part in this diminution of the body. It traces revolutionary models of behaviour around the body and public life, and explains how such myths as the division between public and private, male and female worlds, and such masculine values as ‘objectivity’ were an integral part of the new public world created by the revolutionary middle class.

The second of four volumes of papers from a set of major international international symposia commemorating the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. A discussion of the political culture of the Revolution itself, from the declaration of the principle of national sovereignty by the National Assembly until the creation of the Consulate.

Hardbound. The first of four volumes of papers from a major international symposia commemorating the Bicentenary of the French Revolution which address the central dimensions of the Revolution as a political event. This volume investigates the nature of French political culture under the Old Regime and the processes by which revolutionary principles and practices were invented within the context of absolute monarchy.