Contenu du sommaire : Varia

This article analyses the reception of the work of Jacques Necker in Spain during the period of the Enlightenment. It studies in detail the different translations of his writings and the ways in which the Spanish of this period used the ideas of Necker in the different fields of political economy (chiefly public finances), grain trade, and territorial administration. This article demonstrates how translation and influence are closely tied, and how the importance of the circulation of these ideas in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century was largely determined by their political use.

By combining contemporary approaches to translation, cultural history and the history of ideas, this article seeks to understand the political meanings and the rhetorical issues involved in the translation of republican texts of the first English Revolution in the French Revolution of 1789. The aim is to go beyond an analysis of the influence of a tradition to concentrate on the transmission and reception of the texts – that is, on the political agenda and their translation. How were these texts incorporated in the intellectual context and in the argumentative conventions of the revolutionary moment ? To what degree were these translations the tools of political innovation ? The particular interpretation of a translator does much to clarify the context that inspired his translations and illuminates the process of the transfer and reception of ideas and vocabulary. In the political climate of 1789, the success of these translations depended less on the faithfulness to the original text than on the way in which the spirit of the text and its illocutionary force to translate ideas into acts were executed.

The reputation of the Brigands by Schiller quickly crosses the borders, and the French educated audience gets interested in the play the very year of its creation (1782). It is soon translated or played in German in Strasbourg. But its success in France is mainly due to the transcription by La Martelière under the title of Robert, head of brigands. It is a purified and impoverished version from the original. However in 1792, it adds some of the expected elements of the patriotic theater, in a context of war and economic claims favorable to a liberating and fraternal message embodied by the emulator of Robin Hood. The success, proved by the revivals of the provincial and amateurs theaters, is such that continuations are proposed, which do not entail the same fervor. Nevertheless the term “brigand” is undergoing rapid semantic changes and is now considered as a political insult, successively addressed to the royalist opponent and then to the Jacobin. The theatre carries traces of this evolution, often to the detriment of the plot. Then, with political and judicial repression, notably under the Empire, the character of the brigand is no longer popular.

On the eve of the Revolution, Anjou, a peaceful province, became interested in the discussions agitating the Kingdom. The creation of a provincial assembly in 1787 generated reflections on the institutional representation of the Third Estate, and on the need for a legal and political entity for the province. The intermediate commission of this assembly, under the influence of part of the angevine nobility, addressed these questions beginning in October 1788. Political writings were to fuel the debates on the “reestablishment” of the individual Estates. The “enlightened” bourgeoisie and the municipal bodies of the principal towns of the province called upon the Third Estate to react – not without success. Because of this debate, the campaign of the Estates General took form. The analysis of the different questions about this project sheds fresh light on the pre-Revolution in Anjou, and more generally, on the provincial origins of the French Revolution.

Because of a large pamphlet production and numerous municipal ordonnances, Normandy succeeded in weakening the voice of royal authority at the end of the Old Regime. Political concepts like public opinion, or more, the nation, were used judicially for often well organized subversive aims. The consequence was the establishment of a significant provincial counterweight to the Monarchical State. The question of privileges and institutional pluralism constituted a political arm of resistance. The Parliament of Rouen was an efficient ally of this protest movement.

In 1799, when Bonaparte seized power, the shortcomings, indeed failures of the educational system produced during the revolutionary tumult were patent. Yet the consular régime inherited a more uniform and centralized model than it had been in 1789. Profiting from this advantage, Napoleon, always aware of his power over people, reorganized the educational system to make it into one of the foundations of his authority, then of his cult beginning in 1806. This article examines the university's monopoly on education in the department of the Puy-du-Dome by demonstrating the fragility of this project confronted by ecclesiastical opposition. This article also shows how the institutional stabilization brought about by Bonaparte permitted different local personages to develop new structures advantageous to young men, and to a lesser degree, to young women of the department.

A political catechism is an elementary work summarizing a political doctrine. It is generally written in the form of a succession of questions and answers. Following this definition, I constituted a corpus of 815 French political catechisms (for 391 titles) published from 1789 to 1914. To study this genre of political literature, I concentrated on one work in particular, the Catéchisme républicain, philosophique et moral, by Auguste Etienne Xavier Poisson de La Chabeaussière, a work that was spawned eighty editions from the year II to 1893. Beyond the fact that this was the most significant publishing success of my corpus, this case study reveals the reasons for the development of a political catechism in the nineteenth century. To place the Catéchisme républicain, philosophique et moral in its editorial context, I begin by examining how this catechism became political, then consider the specific reasons for its editorial success, and conclude with an analysis of the different incarnations of the text and their reception.