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Freedom in French Enlightenment Thought examines how five eighteenth-century French theorists - Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet - kindled the flame of freedom in America and France. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually inspire the language in constitutions around the world. They held that citizens have certain inalienable rights that are dictated by natural law and endowed to all by our Creator; that these rights include equality before the law, justice, safety and security of persons and property, and freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion. Montesquieu recommended three separate branches of government that function independently of each other. Diderot held that there is no true sovereign, except the nation; that there is no true legislator, except the people. Rousseau advised that the individual will must be subordinate to the general will and private interest to that of the community: he warned against legislators who act from their own financial interests and enact laws to aggrandize themselves. Voltaire believed that selfishness, greed, and the desire for luxury are not only part of human nature, but that they compel people to achieve, trade with others, search, explore, and invent: the passions are the engine that makes capitalism run and that stimulate all human endeavor. Condorcet, a champion of civil rights, boldly proclaimed equality for women, blacks, and the poor. The philosophes held that free and universal public education will permit more citizens to participate in the progress of the arts and sciences and will improve the standard of living among all strata of society. An unrestrained press permits citizens to make informed decisions. Their polemics have indeed changed the face of the world.
How did composers and performers use the lost art of pantomime to explore and promote the Enlightenment ideals of free expression?
A comparison of French and American approaches to freedom of expression, with reference to the historical, social and philosophical contexts.
What view of man did the French Revolutionaries hold? Anyone who purports to be interested in the "Rights of Man" could be expected to see this question as crucial and yet, surprisingly, it is rarely raised. Through his work as a legal historian, Xavier Martin came to realize that there is no unified view of man and that, alongside the "official" revolutionary discourse, very divergent views can be traced in a variety of sources from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code. Michelet's phrases, "Know men in order to act upon them" sums up the problem that Martin's study constantly seeks to elucidate and illustrate: it reveals the prevailing tendency to see men as passive, giving legislators and medical people alike free rein to manipulate them at will. His analysis impels the reader to revaluate the Enlightenment concept of humanism. By drawing on a variety of sources, the author shows how the anthropology of Enlightenment and revolutionary France often conflicts with concurrent discourses.
Originally published in 1959. This book examines the French Enlightenment by analyzing critical thought in eighteenth-centruy France. It examines the philosophes' views on evil, free will and determinism, and human nature. This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods.
What the two great modern revolutions can teach us about democracy today. In 1790, the American diplomat and politician Gouverneur Morris compared the French and American Revolutions, saying that the French "have taken Genius instead of Reason for their guide, adopted Experiment instead of Experience, and wander in the Dark because they prefer Lightning to Light." Although both revolutions professed similar Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice, there were dramatic differences. The Americans were content to preserve many aspects of their English heritage; the French sought a complete break with a thousand years of history. The Americans accepted nonviolent political conflict; the French valued unity above all. The Americans emphasized individual rights, while the French stressed public order and cohesion. Why did the two revolutions follow such different trajectories? What influence have the two different visions of democracy had on modern history? And what lessons do they offer us about democracy today? In a lucid narrative style, with particular emphasis on lively portraits of the major actors, Susan Dunn traces the legacies of the two great revolutions through modern history and up to the revolutionary movements of our own time. Her combination of history and political analysis will appeal to all who take an interest in the way democratic nations are governed.
This panoramic volume tells the story of French art, culture and life from the 1770s to the 1820s: the first French voyages of discovery to Australia, the stormy period of social change with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the rise to power of the young Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine.
In the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French revolutionaries proclaimed the freedom of speech, religion, and opinion. Censorship was abolished, and France appeared to be on a path towards tolerance, pluralism, and civil liberties. A mere four years later, the country descended into a period of political terror, as thousands were arrested, tried, and executed for crimes of expression and opinion. In Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution, Charles Walton traces the origins of this reversal back to the Old Regime. He shows that while early advocates of press freedom sought to abolish pre-publication censorship, the majority still firmly believed injurious speech--or calumny--constituted a crime, even treason if it undermined the honor of sovereign authority or sacred collective values, such as religion and civic spirit. With the collapse of institutions responsible for regulating honor and morality in 1789, calumny proliferated, as did obsessions with it. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, from National Assembly debates to local police archives, Walton shows how struggles to set legal and moral limits on free speech led to the radicalization of politics, and eventually to the brutal liquidation of "calumniators" and fanatical efforts to rebuild society's moral foundation during the Terror of 1793-1794. With its emphasis on how revolutionaries drew upon cultural and political legacies of the Old Regime, this study sheds new light on the origins of the Terror and the French Revolution, as well as the history of free expression.
Though Emile is still considered the central pedagogical text of the French Enlightenment, a myriad of lesser-known thinkers paved the way for Rousseau's masterpiece. Natasha Gill traces the arc of these thinkers as they sought to reveal the correlation between early childhood experiences and the success or failure of social and political relations, and set the terms for the modern debate about the influence of nature and nurture in individual growth and collective life. Gill offers a comprehensive analysis of the rich cross-fertilization between educational and philosophical thought in the French Enlightenment. She begins by showing how in Some Thoughts Concerning Education John Locke set the stage for the French debate by transposing key themes from his philosophy into an educational context. Her treatment of the abbé Claude Fleury, the rector of the University of Paris Charles Rollin, and Swiss educator Jean-Pierre de Crousaz illustrates the extent to which early Enlightenment theorists reevaluated childhood and learning methods on the basis of sensationist psychology. Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, usually studied as a marginal thinker in the history of utopian thought, is here revealed as the most important precursor to Rousseau, and the first theorist to claim education as the vehicle through which individual liberation, social harmony and political unity could be achieved. Gill concludes with an analysis of the educational-philosophical dispute between Helvétius and Rousseau, and traces the influence of pedagogical theory on the political debate surrounding the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762.