Chamfort and the Revolution: A Study in Form and Ideology, Issue 11Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort remains one of the most enigmatic 'prompters' of the French Revolution. This study analyses his rhetorical and political programmes in tandem to reveal how Chamfort's discourse and politics inform and elucidate one another in both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. It considers his key political texts - his 'Discours à l'Académie française', Des académies, the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française and his posthumous Maximes et pensées, caractères et anecdotes - and exposes how, in each instance, Chamfort's conception of politics hinges on the adoption and subversion of prescribed discursive forms (reception speech, historical tableau, maxim). In the 'Discours' and Des académies, Chamfort opposes the implicit discursive norm of le bon usage sanctioned by the Académie française, because it represses free expression and at the same time constitutes the Académie itself into an oppressive corporation imbued with neo-feudal values. Chamfort's subsequent interpretations of revolutionary events in his Tableaux historiques, while making explicit this same radical libertarianism, frame some reservations about the insurgent peuple as a political force. In the end, many of the tensions troubling Chamfort's politics are resolved by his posthumous Maximes et pensées, whose prevailing principle of honnêteté gives them a rhetorical and political independence from both the ancien régime, centred on notions of honneur, and the revolutionary Republic, founded on a principle of vertu. Previous studies have tended either to interpret Chamfort's works from their historical or biographical context, or - by considering exclusively the Maximes et pensées - to subordinate them to an established literary tradition. This innovative reading posits Chamfort's texts as an exemplary meeting-place of literary practice and political praxis at the time of the Revolution, shedding new light on both the function of literary forms in Chamfort's politics and the role of Chamfort the writer, as an ideological subject caught up in revolutionary events. |
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... aphorism - Monique Nemer argues that , far from having any kinship with the sentence , Chamfort's maxims represented the advent of the aphorism ( understood as a refocusing of the maxim's reflections onto its own linguistic activities ) ...
... aphorisms themselves were increas- ingly indifferently interchanged in France towards the end of the eighteenth century . Hence , contrary to Féraud's claim , the aphorism was indeed able to inform the moral and political maxime ...
... aphorism stands as a median term between the moral maxim in its classical form and the political slogan , practised with increasing professionalism as the Revolution intensified at home and went to war abroad . 30 It is a striking ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
forms of language | 13 |
a study in ideology | 38 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
Chamfort and the Revolution: A Study in Form and Ideology, Volume 2002 David McCallam No preview available - 2002 |
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From Royal to National: The Louvre Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale Bette Wyn Oliver Limited preview - 2007 |