Search results

The years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquest of Europe revealed an undeniable conjunction between international war and internal revolution, a combination which both repelled and attracted contemporary and successive generations. Represented in this volume, originally published with a new introduction in 1972, are excerpts from five eminent Europeans who lived, wrote and worked in the shadow of that awesome reality. Though their attitudes toward war and revolution differ sharply, the observations of Saint-Simon, Gentz Hugo, Mazzini and Considerant reflect the responses of a wide range of committed and thoughtful Europeans.

Despite the liberalized reconfiguration of civil society and political practice in nineteenth-century Europe, the right to make foreign policy, devise alliances, wage war and negotiate peace remained essentially an executive prerogative. Citizen challenges to the exercise of this power grew slowly. Drawn from the educated middle classes, peace activists maintained that Europe was a single culture despite national animosities; that Europe needed rational inter-state relationships to avoid catastrophe; and that internationalism was the logical outgrowth of the nation-state, not its subversion. I

Peace movements became a part of the national landscapes of British, American, and European politics in the nineteenth century, reaching their peak during the European arms race of 1889-1914. This study examines the history of European peace movements from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the beginning of the First World War, analysing their methods and influence, and examining their ideological underpinnings and internal conflicts.

This article presents an overview of pre‐1914 efforts to avoid what was expected to be a huge conflagration that would destroy Europe, with particular focus on the development of differing gender approaches to preventing Armageddon.

This article addresses two main issues. First, in what ways did the development of a pacifist platform among French women working against the patriarchal assumptions of their world shape a different discourse than the dominant male‐managed peace societies—then the largest on the European continent before World War I. Secondly, how did the progressive members of the French feminist–pacifist community distance themselves from the presumably unchallenged, national enthusiasm for war in 1914, and what impact did that war have on postwar women's movements.