Title: History, Representative Institutions, and Political Rights in the French Pre-Revolution (1787-1789)
Abstract: By the late eighteenth century, history as an intellectual discipline had a well-deserved reputation for being unsupportive of the absolutist policies of the French monarchy. As Orest Ranum has demonstrated, Richelieu and especially Colbert made a concerted effort in the seventeenth century to create a favorable image of their monarchs through the work of the pensioned royal historiographers.1 Nevertheless, some nominally royalist historians, as Phyllis Leffler has proven, used their writings as a means of challenging the absolutist policies of Louis XIV by emphasizing the historical development of French customs and institutions.2 This anti-absolutist tradition continued during the eighteenth century with the publication of a number of histories of France in which significant attention was devoted to the activities of representative institutions. Representative institutions held a certain fascination for those who lived during the ancien regime because they were the most certain evidence that Frenchmen had at one time possessed extensive political rights. In the earliest times, according to some ancien regime historians, the monarchs had encouraged the participation of the people
Publication Year: 1987
Publication Date: 1987-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 21
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