The French Revolution And Religion In Global Perspective

This volume examines the French Revolution’s relationship with and impact on religious communities and religion in a transnational perspective. It challenges the traditional secular narrative of the French Revolution, exploring religious experience and representation during the Revolution, as well as the religious legacies that spanned from the eighteenth century to the present. Contributors explore the myriad ways that individuals, communities, and nation-states reshaped religion in France, Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, and around the world.

Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire. The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms-at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing-were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues. Contributors: Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University; Ian Coller, La Trobe University; Denise Davidson, Georgia State University; Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Andrew Jainchill, Queen's University; Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University; William Max Nelson, University of Toronto; Pierre Serna, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University

Publisher Description

The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future.

The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms—at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing—were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues. Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire.

Stone draws on the latest scholarship on diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France to attribute the outbreak of the French Revolution and later developments to pressures of international and domestic politics on those national leaders attempting to govern France and to modernize its institutions.

This authoritative collection offers a detailed overview of religious ideas, structures, and institutions in the making of Europe. Written by leading scholars in the field, it demonstrates the enduring presence of lived and institutionalised religion in the social networks of identity, policy, and power over two millennia of European history.

A history of the Church during the French Revolution and its impact on the course of world history. The understanding of what happened to the Church during this period is seen as a distinct aid to one's understanding of the Revolution itself.