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Summary CHAPTER 12 SAYRE DISCOVERING THE HUMANITIES
- Instelling
- Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
- Boek
- The Humanities
Summary of Chapter 12, Sayre Discovering the Humanities. Arts Culture & Media, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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Chapter 12 Sayre, The Age of RevolutionWhat do the French and American revolutions have in common? How do they differ?
What is Neoclassicism?
What is Romanticism?
What is the difference between Classical and Romantic music?
By the last half of the eighteenth century, the demand for freedom had become a rallying cry in
America and throughout Europe. Immanuel Kant argued that the very precondition of the
Enlightenment was freedom: Dare to know! “Have the courage to use your own understanding”—
that is the motto of Enlightenment. Peter Gay sums up the driving forces of the era as “freedom from
arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one’s talents, freedom of
aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his way in the world.” The Revolution
War was about to begin after the Boston Tea Party 1773, where Native Americans emptied three
British ships of thousands of pounds of tea, dumping it into the harbor. In Paris on July 14 th 1798,
there was a mob who stormed the Bastille, a prison, to free a few prisoners. The social changes
produced by these two revolutions strongly influenced world history, and would spur the nineteenth-
century revolutions in South America, again in France, and, in 1848, at the end of the Age of
Revolution, all across Europe. The founders of the newly created United States of America modeled
their new republic on classical precedents. Theirs would be a Neoclassical society—a stable,
balanced, and rational culture that might imitate their admittedly idealized view of Rome and
Athens. The French felt the same way. When their revolution appeared to be descending into chaos,
they appealed to the Neoclassical values of a young commander of their army, Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769–1821), to rescue them. As a style of art reflecting these values, Neoclassicism would hold sway
in Europe well into the middle of the nineteenth century, but even in the last years of the eighteenth
century, a new style was beginning to arise that seemed to many the very opposite of the
Neoclassical. This style, which we have come to call Romanticism, is anticipated in the emotional
turbulence that underlies many otherwise Neoclassical works. It values the personal and the
individual—with all its psychological complexity—over the social and orderly. It praises the
individual’s relationship to the myriad forms of nature— from the beautiful to the most wild—over
the individual’s relation to the state. It distrusts the “checks and balances” that the authors of the
American constitution believed would control government, and worries that its institutions would
not so much free humankind as imprison it. Above all, where Neoclassicists considered human
passion a threat to the stability and health of society, the Romantics developed what might best be
described as a cult of feeling. To dive into the depths of the emotional world and discover whatever
one might was the Romantics’ goal. And much of what was found was beyond the bounds of reason,
including passions like love, hatred, and the wellsprings of creativity itself.
The American Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, and the French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizen on August 26, 1789. The two documents are monuments of
Enlightenment thinking, both looking to the writings of John Locke for inspiration, and the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was influenced as well by the American Declaration of
Independence. The American Declaration of Independence is one of the Enlightenment’s boldest
assertions of freedom. It is based on John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689), where he
asserted that humans are “by nature free, equal, and independent.” It was further stimulated by
Rousseau’s Social Contract (1763) and its principal point: “No man has a natural authority over his
fellow,” wrote Rousseau, “and force creates no right”. While Locke’s writings supported a
government for the people, he did not reject the idea of a monarchy per se. Jefferson, the man who
prepared the document for the American Declaration of Independence, rejected the idea of a
monarchy altogether and argued that the people were themselves sovereign, that theirs was a
government not for the people but of and by the people. Jefferson’s rights are aimed at achieving
human fulfillment, a fulfillment possible only if the people control their own destiny. A year after the
, colonists signed the Declaration of Independence, they
adopted the Articles of Confederation, combining the
13 colonies into a loose confederation of sovereign
states. The war itself continued into the 1780s and
developed an international scope. France, Spain, and
the Netherlands supported the revolutionaries with
money and naval forces in order to dilute British
power. This alliance was critical in helping the
Americans defeat the British at Yorktown, Virginia, in
1781. This victory convinced the British that the war
was lost and paved the way for the Treaty of Paris,
signed on September 3, 1783. The war was over.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was
the national debt that abruptly brought about the events leading to revolution, the overthrow of the
royal government, and the country becoming a republic. The cost of maintaining Louis XVI’s court
was enormous, so the desperate king attempted to levy a uniform tax on all landed property. Riots,
led by aristocrat and bourgeois alike, forced the king to bring the issue before an Estates General.
The Estates General convened on May 5, 1789, at Versailles. It was composed of the three traditional
French estates. The First Estate was the clergy, (0.5% of the population, controlled 15% of French
lands). The Second Estate was the nobility, (2% of the population, controlled 30% of the lands). The
Third Estate was the rest of the population, composed of the bourgeoisie who controlled about 20
percent of the land, and the peasants, who controlled the rest of the land, although many owned no
land at all. Traditionally, each estate deliberated separately and each was entitled to a single vote,
but in 1789, the Third Estate withdrew from the Estates General, declared itself a National Assembly,
and invited the other two estates to join them. They swore an oath (The Tennis Court Oath) never to
disband until they had given France a constitution. On August 26, 1789, the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen had passed. Due process of law was guaranteed, freedom of religion was
affirmed, and taxation based on the capacity to pay was announced. . A radical minority of the
National Assembly, the Jacobins, had been lobbying for the elimination of the monarchy and the
institution of egalitarian democracy for months. Louis’s actions (trying to flee France) strengthened
their position. When the Constitutional Convention convened, it immediately declared France a
republic, the only question being just what kind. . Moderates favored executive and legislative
branches independent of one another and laws that would be submitted to the people for approval.
But Jacobin extremists, led by Maximilien Robespierre, argued for what he called a “Republic of
Virtue,” a dictatorship led by a 12-person Committee for Public Safety, of which he was one of the
members. A second Committee for General Security sought out enemies of the republic and turned
them over to the new Revolutionary Tribunal. The Constitutional Convention instituted many other
reforms as well. The delegates banned slavery in all the French colonies. They de-Christianized the
country, requiring that all churches become “Temples of Reason.” The calendar was no longer to be
based on the year of the birth of Christ, but on the first day of the Republic. The Reign of Terror
ended suddenly in the summer of 1794. Robespierre pushed through a law speeding up the work of
the Tribunal, with the result that in six weeks some 1,300 people were sent to death. He was
executed. The last act of the convention was to pass a constitution in 1795. It established France’s
first bicameral legislature, led by a five-person executive Directory. Over the next four years, the
Directory improved the lot of French citizens, but its relative instability worried moderates. So, in
1799, the successful young commander of the army, Napoleon Bonaparte conspired with two of the
five directors in the coup d’état that ended the Directory’s experiment with republican government.
This coup would put Napoleon in position to assume control of the country.
The rise of the Neoclassical in France, with its regularity, balance, and proportion, can be attributed
to the same ideals that would lead to the overthrow of the aristocracy in the French Revolution. The
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