Suchergebnisse

Between 1789 and 1815, thousands of French counter-revolutionaries chose exile rather than abide by the new political systems brought on by the Revolution, and later by Napoléon. A large number came to the British Isles. Contemporary documents demonstrate the French exiled community cohabited peacefully alongside a rather welcoming British society. Yet, self-narratives written after the Bourbon Restoration of 1815 described a different situation, in which French and British communities often clashed over behavioural and political distinctions. These discourses appeared to have further diverged from the event as time went by. This article does not mean to assess how traumatised the French émigré populations had been when driven to exile, but how the initial trauma, i.e the forced and lengthy separation from their motherland, was modified in later narratives and scholarship first to be utilised in the creation of national memories, and later in the formation of transnational ones. Focusing on the French memorial side of this transnational phenomenon, it aims to understand the political, social, and editorial agendas driving such modifications.

"This volume presents a fresh picture of the historical development of "conservatism" from the late 17th to the early 20th century. The book explores the broader geographies and transnational dimensions of conservatism and counterrevolution. The contributions show how counterrevolutionary concepts did not emerge in isolation, but resulted from the interplay between ideas, media, networks, and institutions. Like 19th-century liberalism and socialism, conservatism was the product of traveling ideas and people. This study describes how exile, mobility, and international sociability shaped counterrevolutionary identities. The volume presents case studies on the intersection of political philosophy, scholarly practices, international politics, and governmental bureaucracies. Furthermore, Cosmopolitan Conservatisms offers new approaches to the study of conservatism, including the prisms of ecology, gender, and digital history. Contributors are: Alicia Montoya, Carolina Armenteros, Simon Burrows,Wyger Velema, Michiel van Dam, Glauco Schettini, Nigel Aston, Brian Vick, Lien Verpoest, Beatrice de Graaf, Jean-Philippe Luis, Joep Leerssen, Amerigo Caruso, Joris van Eijnatten, Emily Jones, Aymeric Xu, and Axel Schneider"--

This chapter argues that tsar Alexander's Holy Alliance of 1815 was far less conservative and far more revolutionary than it was later understood to be. To make this point, the chapter reconstructs how this "secret plan" came to be understood as "conservative" and how this reading of the Holy Alliance Treaty was influenced by latter-day interpretations and machinations far more than by its concrete substance at the time. Subsequently, the origins and constitutive elements of the plan are delineated in order to demonstrate that it was a revolutionary amalgam of Christian pietism, semi-scientific Enlightenment theories, and a dose of modern, bureaucratic state centralism. Based on new archival evidence, it will transpire how both Prussian security experts and French semi-scientist scholars contributed to the design of the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance contained conservative ingredients, but the liberal and provocative elements stood out—these were however suppressed within a few years by political appropriations by other statesmen.