Monthly Archives: April 2015

Journées doctorales, Réseaux politiques et culturels européens sous la Révolution et l’Empire, 30-31st March 2015

At the end of March we travelled to Clermont-Ferrand to attend an excellent doctoral event, hosted by Philippe Bourdin and Cyril Triolaire (CHEC, Université Blaise Pascal) before two days working on the Therepsicore project on French theatre in the provinces 1791-1813. In attendance were British students from Warwick, KCL and St Andrews, led by Kate Astbury and Katherine Hambridge, the Clermentois doctoral students from the Centre d’Histoire Espaces et Cultures (CHEC), and those from the Institut Histoire de la Révolution française (IHRF), Paris-I Sorbonne, with Pierre Serna and Jean-Luc Chappey.

The event was launched by two presentations on the CHEC’s databases. The first by Andoni Artola, who showed us his impressive database tracking the networks of the Spanish Revolutionaries. The second by Cyril Triolaire and a presentation of the Philador gateway which combines multiple research projects and databases, enabling researchers to track provincial artists during the Revolution and Empire. After the first of many wonderful lunches Kate Astbury also presented the Waddeston collection of Revolutionary prints, Warwick’s Marandet Collection, and the 100 Days virtual exhibition (www.100days.eu). The afternoon saw a start to the doctoral presentations, with Matthieu Ferradou (IHRF) who is working on human and intellectual networks between Ireland, France and the United States during the French Revolution.  Then came the turn of Bruno Petit (CHEC) who is researching illegal printing of counterrevolutionary pamphlets in Switzerland and identifying their provenance. The day ended with Jeanne-Laure Le Quang (IHRF) and the presentation of her doctoral project on the police during the First Empire.

 

After the intellectual stimulation of Monday, Tuesday quickly followed suit. François Avisseau (IHRF) commenced the day by presenting his research on the postal system during the Revolution and the Empire in modern day northern Italy. Guillaume Colot (CHEC) then followed with an account of his project on Catholic newspapers and journalists during the Revolution, before Côme Simien (CHEC) finished the morning with a paper on ‘maîtres d’école’ and ‘instituteurs’ from the end of the ancien régime up until 1802. After yet another delicious lunch, Clare Siviter (Warwick) spoke on tragedy and the classical tradition during the Napoleonic era and the final presentation was given by Christie Margrave (St Andrews) on women and nature in the works of French female novelists 1789-1815.

 

This was an incredibly enriching event and thoroughly enjoyed by all. It was a great opportunity to meet French doctoral students working on similar subjects, learn about new research, discuss our Revolutionary research with excellent scholars, and as per usual we all had lots to talk about!

 

The Warwick team then had a presentation on database entry for the Therepsicore project which aims to create a database of provincial French theatre from 1791 to 1813. After this we spent Wednesday and Thursday morning going through archive photos: Kate and Katherine focused on Lille whilst Clare concentrated on the Vendée. We are hoping to work remotely tracing theatre personnel, performances and theatrical works to enter into the database during our next session in Clermont-Ferrand, hopefully in the Autumn with other contributors to the project. ​

Clare Siviter

 

Revolutionary researchers: the transnational

The theme of this second reading group, led by Clare Siviter, was ‘France and the Transnational’, leaving the definition of ‘transnational’ intentionally broad to encourage the discussion of ideas and themes which might reach beyond the obvious issue of sovereign boundaries. The reading—extracts from David Bell’s Inventing Nationalism; John Isbell’s The Birth of European Romanticism; Rahul Markovits’ Civiliser l’Europe: Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle; and the collaborative effort by Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, Edmond Dziembowski, and Sophie Audidière, Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century—was intended to draw out these sorts of interpretations.

We began our discussion by focussing on this very issue. Jonathan opened up by asking the group to consider how we might best define the communities under scrutiny: is the nation a useful framework for us to work within when we as researchers are predominantly concerned with shared ideas within a community of cultural elites working across national boundaries? In other words- is transnationalism an intrinsic aspect of ‘cultural transfer’ anyway? It was agreed that the process of cultural transfer within these communities is perhaps more interesting than the functionalities of national politics; but that the construct of the nation is an integral part of how we map this process.

This naturally provoked a discussion on the idea of ‘cultural transfer’ as a concept (dealt with in Cultural Transfers), which we concluded by agreeing that ‘cultural transfer’ between sovereign states is at least as interesting for the means by which cultural ‘objects’ are transferred as for the end result itself.

We also discussed the notion that sovereign states were keen to encourage culture transfer as a means of achieving a ‘cultural monopoly’, or acquiring ‘cultural capital’. One particular example that stood out in the discussion was Napoleon’s contest with Great Britain for Egyptian cultural artefacts at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Sarah suggested that we pursue this further- what function does ‘cultural capital’ play within a transnational framework? Notions of ‘heritage’ dominated the discussion- Oskar argued that we might perceive heritage as a foundation on which cultural acquisitions might be ‘spent’ to construct something entirely new.

Turning towards the cultural ‘objects’ themselves, it was pointed out by Fabio that the framework is as much an issue of romanticism as of transnationalism. Indeed, where we consider Staël’s De l’Allemagne (the focus of Isbell’s The Birth of European Romanticism), the two are perhaps even inseparable. The romanticists were keen on pushing back to the past, with German romantics in particular frequently recycling classicism through re-reading of ancient Greeks etc. Might we—as Clare suggested—perceive this as a form of ‘temporal transnationalism’, where cultural transfers crossed both national and temporal boundaries?

But what do we mean by romanticism? This proves to be a problematic term within disciplines, let alone across disciplinary lines. Can we really discuss romanticism within a methodological framework of ‘temporal transnationalism’? Sarah suggested a helpful metaphor- romanticism as an umbrella, where ideas ‘hang together’ wherever they are but which (as Michael posited) take on slightly different meanings depending on the location of their performance (thus back to the importance of national identity in the process of cultural transfer).

Some form of transnational mediation of meaning is possible, however, if we consider the cultural hegemony of what some scholars have termed l’Europe française during the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. It is a problematic mediation, however, given there was also a very dynamic and reciprocal practice of import and export in France, particularly of Italian and German cultural objects. Therefore, from a cultural perspective, it is difficult to limit oneself to writing purely national histories, given that the practice of dialogue between them was so well entrenched.

Nevertheless—and in conclusion of our discussion—we agreed that alongside any meaningful discussion about issues pertaining to culture and transnationalism, we need to consider the importance of nationalism within the same context.

Jonathan Huff

Revolutionary researchers reading group

The first Revolutionary Researchers event of 2015 was a reading group on the theme of ‘Continuity and Rupture’ in the period 1789-1830 on 26th February at Warwick before a fascinating seminar with Munro Price on 1812-1814 and the fall of Napoleon.
Jonathan has been the driving impetus behind this first reading group and the reading we discussed was as follows:
·      Roger Chartier ‘Do Books Make Revolutions?’ in Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trad. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 67-91
·      François Furet, ‘The French Revolution is Over’ in The French Revolution in Social and Political Perspective, ed. by Peter Jones (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 30-54
·      James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 97-163
·      James Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France, 1750-1799: A Study in the History of Ideas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 70-129
 Two main themes dominated the discussion, namely those of ‘compartmentalisation’ and ‘construction’.
We found that revolutionary scholarship has tended to ‘compartmentalise’ events. In music, the decade 1789-1799 has tended to be seen as 1789-1793, 1793-1795, 1795-1799. Theatre is marked likewise by the changes of 1789, 1791, 1793, 1799, 1806 and 1807. We then discussed how much these external political events shaped the repertoire being performed. On the one hand, certainly some cultural elements were removed with these ruptures, but we found that through popular demand, institutional choice, and political allusion the repertoires actually contained many more elements of continuity that this compartmentalised vision has allowed for. When rupture does occur there are also numerous external factors such as the actors themselves or the physical conditions of the buildings which are not uniquely political. After this there was the difficult question of how to measure change and how this altered between the arts and between genres. From this, using Chartier and Furet, we thought about the notion of ‘construction’, both the extent to which the Revolution fashioned the ‘Enlightenment’ and how the ‘Revolution’ has been, and continues to be, shaped since the events of 1789.
The theme of ‘Continuity and Rupture’ was then suitably extended by a seminar with Munro Price where he explained why 1812-1814 were the years of Napoleon’s downfall rather than 1815. By 1815, Price considers that Napoleon could not remain leader of France even if he had won at Waterloo. From a variety of unexploited archives from high profile figures such as Metternich, Price demonstrated Napoleon’s continued refusal of peace and his psychological inability to retreat in time or accept rather than dictate a truce. This seriously questions the true extent of Napoleon’s military genius and the dominant narratives surrounding the final years of the First French Empire.
Clare Siviter