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Astérion, n°24/2021

Échos de La Marseillaise : l'héritage des Lumières et de la Révolution française dans les constructions nationales aux XIXe et XXe siècles

Edited by Stéphanie Roza, Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq

Astérion. Philosophie, histoire des idées, pensée politique



Echoes of the Marseillaise: The Enlightenment and the French Revolution Legacy in National Constructions in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Over the past fifty years, historians questioned the exceptionalism of the French Revolution and reframed it within the broader cycle of the "democratic revolutions" (R. Palmer). Despite this, many historians nonetheless continue to underline that its radicalism, its popular dimension, and its incarnation into the most powerful State of Europe made it unprecedented. The French Revolution imposed a new vision of the world and of society upon everyone, generating many more admirers and detractors than any other contemporary revolutionary event. This volume does not seek to pursue these historiographical debates. Rather, it examines the philosophical and political influence the French Enlightenment exerted on neighbouring peoples and on the subsequent revolutions through the prism of their theorisation by the actors themselves. If we cannot take a comprehensive approach to such questions at least we can focus on several specific examples to assess what the modern idea of nation, as it emerged in Germany and Russia in the 19th century, and in China at the turn of the 20th century, owe to the French Enlightenment and the Revolution. In a perspective that combines intellectual history and the history of cultural and political transfers, our aim is to distinguish what pertains to the French Enlightenment and what pertains to the Revolution itself.