Browse Items (172 total)

1889

In this passage, Bonaparte’s secretary describes the importance and effect of Bonaparte’s propaganda in the form of the military bulletin from an army in the field. Glory and military virtue were emphasized; generals vied to be included.

1880

Marx’s lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels (1820–95), devoted himself to popularizing the ideas he had developed with Marx. In 1880 he published this pamphlet in French in order to explain the main principles of communism. In this excerpt Engels…

1878

Literary critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) was lionized by late–nineteenth–century republican France. He emphasized rationalism and mathematical simplicity, being a bitter critic of the ideological abstractions that had occupied…

1874

Victor Hugo (1802–85) was an ardent republican and defender of the revolutionary legacy who went into exile during the Second Empire (1852–70). He lived long enough to become an icon of the Third Republic. He portrayed the democratic aspects of the…

1859

Charles Dickens’s (1812–70) novels generally appeared in serial form in popular newspapers. Usually he took his subjects and characters from contemporary English society, but in this novel he created one of the most enduring and pessimistic…

February 27, 1858

The nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) was a historian, social critic, and politician who wrote a vastly influential work entitled The Old Régime and the French Revolution (1856). Tocqueville worried that although the revolutionary legacy was…

1852

The German philosopher and founder of international communism, Karl Marx (1818–83), wrote on many occasions about the French Revolution, which he considered the first stage in an eventual worldwide proletarian revolution. In this relatively early…

1830

In his poem “To the Column,” the great French poet Victor Hugo celebrates the memory of Napoleon.

1830

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a famous philosophy professor in Berlin whose lectures attracted many students, even though the lectures were extraordinarily abstract. The Philosophy of History was a compilation of his lectures given in…

1829

Novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a giant of nineteenth–century European literature. In his multivolume The Human Comedy, he investigated the general desire for social advancement in the post–revolutionary world. Although generally supportive…
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