Armed with the insights of the scientific revolution, the men of the Enlightenment set out to free mankind from its age-old cocoon of pessimism and superstition and establish a more reasonable world of experiment and progress. Yet by the 1760s, this optimism about man and society had almost evaporated. In the works of Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, there was discernible a new inner voice, and an awareness of individual uniqueness which had eluded their more self-confident predecessors. The stage was set for the revolutionary crisis and the rise of Romanticism. In this book, Norman Hampson follows through certain dominant themes in the Enlightenment, and describes the contemporary social and political climate, in which ideas could travel from the salons of Paris to the court of Catherine the Great - but less easily from a master to his servant. On such vexed issues as the role of ideas in the "rise of the middle class" he provides a new and realistic approach linking intellectual and social history.
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (French pronunciation: {7f200b}[s̃{7f0292}yst]; 25 August 1767? 28 July 1794), usually known as Saint-Just, was a military and political leader during the French Revolution. The youngest of the deputies elected to the National Convention in 1792, Saint-Just rose quickly in their ranks and became a major leader of the government of the French First Republic. He spearheaded the movement to execute King Louis XVI and later drafted the radical French Constitution of 1793. He became the closest confidant of Maximilien Robespierre, and served with him as one of the commissioners of the powerful Committee of Public Safety. Dispatched as a commissar to the army during its rocky start in the French Revolutionary Wars, Saint-Just imposed severe discipline, and he was credited by many for the army's subsequent revival at the front. Back in Paris, he supervised the consolidation of Robespierre's power through a ruthless and bloody program of intimidation. In his relatively brief time on the historical stage, he became the enduring public face of the Reign of Terror, full of dark zeal and energy. Dubbed the "Angel of Death", Saint-Just organized the arrests and prosecutions of many of the most famous figures of the Revolution. Ultimately Saint-Just himself was arrested in the violent episode of 9 Thermidor and executed the next day with Robespierre and their allies. In histories of the Revolution, their deaths at the guillotine mark the end of the Reign of Terror."--Wikipedia.
Dedicated to the ship's company of La Moqueuse, this book is not so much an account of naval operations as a kind of social history. With the help of recollections, diaries and letters home, the author recreates the reactions of an undergraduate to his various reincarnations as an ordinary seaman in a corvette, the most junior officer on board a destroyer and the British naval liaison officer in a Free French sloop. It has a good deal to say about the peculiar and eccentric character of life on board a Free French ship. Roughly half of the book deals with the very special atmosphere in the Free French forces and the complex situation in southern France immediately after its liberation in August, 1944. The volume as a whole provides a vivid impression - occasionally reminiscent of Catch 22 - of what it actually felt like to be involved in the day-to-day experience of helping to make a warship work.
Hampson describes how the French Revolution, which seemed to promise an era of Franco-British partnership, led to an even more bitter estrangement between the two nations. Both the British and French peoples saw the revolution of 1789 as offering the prospect of a new Franco-British partnership. These hopes soon foundered on old suspicions and new ideological divergences. The result was to confirm the traditional perception of each nation's own identity, centred on the state in France and the people in Great Britain.
Contents Include:PrefaceI. The Intellectual ClimateII. The Political and Social EnvironmentIII. The French Revolution and the European ReactionIV. The Indian Summer of Enlightened DespotismV. The Victory of Reaction
The last foreign policy review was conducted in 1995 and there has been no thoroughgoing, decisive, public reconsideration of the significance of the terrorist attacks against the United States, the violent response in U.S. policy and action, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tests and failures of the United Nations Security Council, and the transformed quality of relations along the Canada-U.S. border. Still less has there been any open, extensive, government-led reassessment of the obligations of continental defence or the new and future accommodations required to realign Canada's relations with the United States and the rest of the world. Policy initiatives have instead looked temporizing and partial.
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