The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 - Updated EditionFor the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is R. R. Palmer's magisterial account of this incendiary age. Palmer argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions—and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere—were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. Palmer traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality. |
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... France in the extended and now obsolete sense of the word. “Democrat” was rarely used in France, despite its currency in Belgium in 1790 and 1791. It was probably coined, in France as in Holland or Belgium, in contradis- tinction to ...
... France, however, was common enough to be the accepted symbol of prestige. Not to be noble, or nearly noble, might be almost as embarrassing in France as not to be considered of the gentlefolk in England. Many bourgeois re- spelled their ...
... France, and even in a way in England. In France, indeed, in an important sense, the first French revolution, one in which the people had little part, now occurred. On the other hand, there also began to be an agitation against existing ...
... France. They forced a definition and justification of sovereign power. They brought such key words as “citizen,” “nation,” “country,” and “natural and imprescriptible rights” into the vocabulary of official debate. Increasingly they ...
... France and Italy at this time has perhaps never been properly understood in the English- speaking world. Jansenists ... France; they were hence Jansenist in a popular or sloganizing sense. They were certainly anti-Jesuit, and in 1762 had ...
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The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and ... R. R. Palmer Limited preview - 2014 |