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The contrasting treatment of different types of foreigners in France before 1789 shows that they were encouraged to settle in France where they were deemed of utility to the state. Such uses could be obvious: foreign troops defended the kingdom; political refugees could be played as pawns in the game of European diplomacy; manufacturers, artisans, and merchants enriched the country. Less obvious was the reinforcement of the prestige of the monarchy, either through enhancing its Catholic image by tolerating foreign clergy, or by seeking a reflection of its glory through patronizing foreigners in the arts and sciences. Yet the state also had to balance its use of foreigners with other considerations, such as domestic stability and diplomacy. Open as the Ancien Régime was to the contributions of foreigners, it was also ready to dispense with them, or at least control their activities, when practical politics dictated. In other words, the treatment of foreigners under the Ancien Régime depended on their role in French society.

This chapter describes the crisis of the of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the context of the changes that were undermining the European Ancien Régime in the second half of the 18th century. The chapter explores the impact of these changes on the economic, political, and social conditions of the Kingdom; the Bourbon monarchy's experiments in Enlightened absolutism in the closing decades of the 18th century; and its attempts to reduce the privileges of the feudatories, the church, and the powerful corporate bodies that dominated the Ancien Régime state.

This chapter examines the chronology and geography of the Enlightenment as a cultural revolution. Eighteenth-century European society underwent profound transformations that changed the course of Western history and further complicated the link between the crisis of the Ancien Régime and Enlightenment critique. In a span of only a hundred years, the European population ballooned by more than 60 percent, from 118 million to 193 million. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to speak of an agrarian revolution, but there was dramatic improvement in productivity and modern economic structures were gaining increasing importance. Other developments sparked by the cultural revolution were the explosion in the publishing industry's output of travel literature and books about the “other,” such as about all kinds of savages, barbarians, and non-European civilizations; globalization; and the growth of trade.

This chapter examines two major phenomena that had a profound influence on the Late Enlightenment: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards neonaturalism in all fields of knowledge. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the Enlightenment had evolved into a cultural revolution directed against the Ancien Régime, culminating in the significant transformation of Western identity. The crisis of the Ancien Régime arose in step with the Late Enlightenment, setting off a process of cultural hegemony that has rarely been witnessed in any other time or place. The chapter considers how the actual enthronement of man and all his faculties as preached by the Encyclopédie and by Enlightenment humanism went hand in hand with the emergence of the new paradigm of a natura naturans.

This chapter examines the rise of aesthetic individuality in Paris, France during the late nineteenth century. It explains that the rise of the market as an aesthetic arena for individual actors reflected the erosion of the corporate society of the Ancien Régime. It contends that in identifying the market as an aesthetic realm, producers of commercial culture were supported by bourgeois elites seeking their own cultural legitimization. It also discusses the social power of aesthetic subjectivity and the cult of aesthetic selfhood.

This lecture discusses an investigation of the vast but unstudied literature of libel that appeared in the French book market during the eighteenth century. It concentrates on four interconnected libelles from 1771 to 1793, and combines an analysis of the genre with an account of a colony of French refugees in London. These refugees were noted to have made slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles, and even grafted a blackmail operation on to their literary speculations. The lecture shows how an ideological current was able to erode authority under the Ancien Régime and became absorbed in a new political culture.

This chapter explains how music can help mobilize people. It mentions the “En revenant de la revue”, which helped mobilize people to vote against the parliamentary republic and contributed to the popularity of General Boulanger. It studies how music and musical taste became a barometer of political sentiment after the 1885 elections questioned the opportunists' continued control of government. It then reviews the Ancien Régime and lists the “movements” that were critical of the artistic agendas of republicanism. Finally, the chapter studies intuition, the républicains opportunists, and their belief on art and universal significance.

This chapter examines the unifying element, and the ultimate defining trait of, the Enlightenment style of thought that pervaded the new humanism of the moderns: a radical cultural reform of the European identity that was implicit in the Enlightenment idea of civilization. It also considers the Enlightenment's critique of traditional revealed religions in relation to its humanism of the moderns in the context of Ancien Régime Europe. The chapter first considers the effects of the traditional reading of Immanuel Kant's philosophy and the historical discontinuity between the humanisms of earlier centuries and Enlightenment humanism before discussing Voltaire's view of religion as a necessity and a useful tool in the life of man.

This introductory chapter discusses the decade of Napoleonic rule in southern Italy (1806-1815) in the context of earlier attempts by the Bourbon monarchy to reform the Ancien Régime Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and of the many different forces that in these years were profoundly reshaping the economic, political, and social institutions of the South: not least feudalism and the agrarian order. It challenges the long-held assumption that in the South, these years gave rise only to a ‘passive revolution’ and were hence the moment when the two Italies embarked irreversibly on separate paths of development. In fact, no other Italian state experienced greater or more profound change than the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in these years. Although these changes often brought conflict, contradiction, and insecurity, they were driven as much from below as from above and gave rise to forms of political mobilization and demands for constitutional government that had no parallels in other Italian states in these years. This offers the starting point for a broad reinterpretation of the history of the South in the period before, during, and after the decade of Napoleonic rule, and calls for new understanding of how and why the South was different both before and after Italy's Unification.

This book has examined the philosophers' point of view about the Enlightenment, and more specifically the question Was ist Aufklärung? that had been posed by Immanuel Kant. It has also postulated a new history of the Enlightenment as an epochal rift and cultural revolution of the Ancien Régime, a cultural history that is ready to embrace a new, extraordinary and original form of humanism, a bold project for the emancipation of man by man, scientifically investigating himself. The book's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters such as Jonathan Israel, who critiqued a kind of social and cultural history of the Enlightenment that has long since ceased to exist in the form in which he still appears to conceive of it, and claimed that Spinozistic secularization and philosophical materialism were the authentic source and original character of our modernity.

Chapter 2 analyzes the debates over education that followed upon the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paris in 1762 and from France in 1764. The expulsion created practical as well as political problems for Louis XV’s France, helping to intertwine Enlightenment debates over the purpose and practices of education with on-going debates about the composition, character, and powers of the French state. It offers a new interpretation of the post-expulsion debates and reforms, arguing that where historians have customarily seen consensus and a series of cooperative but incomplete reforms, there was in fact a deep crisis in Ancien Régime politics, one that centered on ideas about the French nation, state, and society.

This chapter examines the Enlightenment–French Revolution paradigm in relation to questions relevant to the memory and national identity of republican France, the political myth of the demise of the Ancien Régime, or the political, social and ideological roots of nearly all the most important projects of emancipation produced by modern Europe as a republican and democratic entity. The Enlightenment–French Revolution paradigm rests on the connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, whereby the former is considered first and foremost as the origin and genesis of the latter. The chapter discusses the pros and cons of the Enlightenment–French Revolution paradigm as well as the various forms that the paradigm assumed over time, citing in particular the beginning of a parallel process of “nationalization” of the Enlightenment at the historiographical level. It also explores various criticisms against the Enlightenment–Revolution paradigm, including those by Michel Foucault.

Introducing a detailed discussion of the modernization or transition thesis, this chapter argues that understandings of anticorruption did indeed change dramatically around 1800. The revolutionaries declared war on corruption and deemed practices that had been common during the Ancien Régime—especially patronage and the use of public positions for private gain—as corrupt. The consequences of this for anticorruption were far-reaching: the public and the private were more sharply separated and all “old” practices (or recent ones construed as such) were attacked with “new” anticorruption rules. The belief grew that corruption could be eliminated. However, the chapter tells a non-linear story: the essential ambivalence of modernization is fully reflected in anticorruption discourse and efforts. The more closely modern societies are looking for corruption, the more corruption they will find. As the transgression of the public-private-boundary is unavoidable, the success even of present-day campaigns is very limited.

This Introduction by Jean Allain to the English-language translation of the 1803 first edition of Joseph-Mathias Gérard de Rayneval’s Institutions de droit de la nature and des gens places the text in context. The Introduction provides the reader with an understanding of the author and his motivations and situates the text within the annals of the history of international law. The Introduction details the evolution of the man who is effectively the last legal advisor to the French foreign office of the Ancien Régime, and speaks to a book which is drafted in the shadow of both the French Revolution and the coming to power of Napoleon Bonaparte. While the Institutions is Rayneval’s contemporary legacy, the Introduction shows a man at the centre of European diplomatic relations who was fundamental to the shaping the peace of Paris of 1783. To provide further insight into Rayneval and his perspective on the Law of Nations, the 1832 ‘Biographical Note of Mr. Rayneval’ which appeared in the third edition of Institutions de droit de la nature and des gens has also been translated and follows on from this Introduction.

The relations between Spain and the United States from 1783 to 1833 were complex. The United States had initiated its history as a nation with strong republican and expansionist values in its political system while the Hispanic monarchy, anchored in the structures of the Ancien Régime, saw how its presence in almost all of the Americas was disappearing. In this text, which analyzes the complex history of Florida in that period, the differences between the principles of the American republican diplomacy in contrast to those of the Catholic monarchy will be explored as one of the principal reasons to explain the territorial growth of the United States and the loss of Florida and of practically all of the Spanish territories in America.

This chapter argues that historians must go beyond the premises of the paradigm of the Centaur and uphold the autonomy and prerogatives of historical knowledge with respect to the Enlightenment. It suggests that the correct question to ask a historian is not “What is the Enlightenment?” but rather “What was it?” and that we should ask what is it that we know about the Enlightenment's significance in the history of Europe during the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, the historian questioned should not think of the Enlightenment as a kind of philosophia perennis. The chapter also considers Ernst Cassirer's declaration of faith in Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton's scientific rationalism and Michel Foucault's attempt to revive the paradigm of the Centaur as “historico-philosophical practice” in the wake of the great German historiography of the Aufklärung.