18th-Century France

"Malheur aux faibles!". Condamnations de l'oppression des animaux

by Mannucci Erica

Published in "Dix-Huitième Siècle", 28, 1996

Une élite administrative transatlantique ? Les intendants de France et de Nouvelle-France au 18e siècle.

by Marie-Eve Ouellet

Publié dans : Thierry Nootens et Jean-René Thuot, dir. Les figures du pouvoir à travers le temps. Formes, pratiques et intérêts des groupes élitaires au Québec xviie-xive siècles. Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2012. Coll. «Les cahiers du CIEQ».

“Domesticating the ‘Queen of Beans’: How Old Regime France Learned to Love Coffee”

by Julia Landweber

Published in The World History Bulletin, 26 (1) Spring 2010: 10-12.

"Unraveling the Curtain: Subversive Folds, Cleland's Memoirs, and the Sublime in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Le Verrou," Rutgers Art Review 25 (2010): 1-20.

by Danielle Lenhard

This is a pre-publication version. Issue 25 should be out in print soon.

Parrainage princier, loges de cour (Hoflogen) et réseaux huguenots : Essor et succès de la Franc-maçonnerie à Berlin sous Frédéric II

by Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire

projet Frédéric II

‘Lightning in Vast Shadows’: Sparta and the Reign of Terror

by Varad Mehta

Presented to the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 2010

This paper offers a tentative reappraisal of the claim that the Terror is best explained as the result of a fatal... more This paper offers a tentative reappraisal of the claim that the Terror is best explained as the result of a fatal infatuation with ancient Sparta. It argues that the Terror was suffused with the ethos of Sparta, but that this ethos manifested not in specific personalities or policies, but in the institutions of the Terror itself and the laws which established them. Sparta’s shadow looms over the Law of Suspects, which resurrected the surveillance apparatus of the ancient republic. It looms over the levée en masse, by which the French people were enlisted to wage war on their enemies and themselves. Most of all it looms over the revolutionary government Robespierre demanded to preserve France and the Revolution. Revolutionary government would wield terror to rescue virtue, destroy its enemies, and complete the regeneration of humanity. Terror was innate in revolutionary government because virtue was; in Robespierre’s imagination they became inconceivable apart. And if these were innate, so too was Sparta. For terror is virtue applied with what Saint-Just hailed as Lycurgus’ “merciless inflexibility.” Terror is the principle of a society imperiled by an existential threat which has neither beginning nor end, and will persist as long as it does. Such was Sparta, such was the Republic during the Terror. Thus it was the specter of Sparta that Sieyès saw menacing civilization when he denounced the Jacobins for resurrecting in France, for the first time since antiquity, his dreaded ré-totale. Both Sparta and the Terror were attempts to create totalized societies. This, I argue, is where the affinity between them is to be found. It was embedded at the most abstract, most fundamental level. They shared the same spirit. Ancient Sparta was a society eternally at war with itself for the sake of its self-preservation. And so, during l’An II, the fatal second year of the Republic, was France.

The History of Masturbation: An Essay Review

by Patrick Singy

Essay review of Thomas Laqueur’s Solitary Sex. Laqueur gives a central importance to the anonymous Onania (1716), a... more Essay review of Thomas Laqueur’s Solitary Sex. Laqueur gives a central importance to the anonymous Onania (1716), a book which according to him marks the beginning of the secular approach to masturbation. In my review I argue against this interpretation of Onania by focusing on the specific but crucial problem of the imagination.