After the fall of Robespierre and the dismantling of the Terror, the National Convention drafted yet another republican constitution. The new constitution was also approved in a referendum and put into effect 26 October 1795. It remained until…
Among the African rituals and customs described by Moreau de Saint–Méry, none terrified white planters more than the practice of voodoo. His description of the rituals associated with voodoo and the hold it had on the minds of the slaves demonstrates…
Village priests served as community leaders in a variety of respects, including keeping a register of births, marriages, and deaths. One such curate, the abbé Lefeuvre, also included in his register impressions of life during the severe winter of…
Camille Desmoulins, an influential populist writer, here attacks the distinction between "active" and "passive" citizenry based on personal wealth, by pointing out that Christ himself would have been relegated to "passive" citizenry. Desmoulins holds…
Adapting the established strategy of staging public pageantry to win support for a political cause, Robespierre organized a "Festival of the Supreme Being" in the summer of 1794. Having recently eliminated his adversaries Hébert and Danton,…
The article "Woman" was written by four contributors who considered the question from four angles: medicine and the history of opinions about women’s nature; writings about women’s place in the state and marriage; the social differences between men…
Rousseau was the most controversial and paradoxical of the writers of the Enlightenment. Born in Switzerland, he published important works on politics, music, and in Emile, education. He also wrote one of the most widely read novels of the century,…
Madame de Beaumer (d. 1766) was the first of three women editors of the Journal des Dames, a newspaper founded in Paris in 1759 to encourage women to write seriously. Little is known about her, perhaps because she was a Calvinist and Calvinists in…
One of Napoleon’s first priorities was to reestablish good relations with the papacy, which had fought the revolutionary church settlement tooth and nail. Napoleon gained everything he desired in the Concordat: he appointed the bishops and…
Klemens von Metternich, head of the Austrian government and therefore a sharp critic of Napoleon, reported that Napoleon viewed Catholicism in largely utilitarian, even cynical terms.
