Copy of Stealing Fire Test 2 - French Rev_Enlightenment_Frankenstien

Ptolemy (Scientific Revolution)

suggested geocentric system (the earth is center of the universe)

Copernicus (Scientific Revolution)

• argued for a heliocentric universe

• Challenged view of Roman Catholic Church (dominant entity of Europe)

• Revolutionary shift in the way people thought

Newton (Scientific Revolution)

states laws of gravitation

Restructures thinking - universal law governing universe

Enlightenment

Popularized by Kant - immaturity is when men don't think for themselves

Philosphe

• French Enlightenment thinkers

• ommon sense to institutions/practices

Ancients vs. modern

• Ancient - height of thinking reached during classical Greece/Rome

• Moderns - classical will be peaked

Religious (questions asked)

do humans have souls? What does a higher power look like? Is there even a higher power?

Governmental (questions asked in elightenment)

• Voltaire - best gov't is benevolent despot

• Rousseau's social contract - general will is always right, but people have right to choose

• Locke - right of revolution (unlike Rousseau

Economic (questions asked during the enlightement)

Mercantilism - importing raw and selling processed

Adam Smith raises capitalism (laissez-faire)

Immanuel Kant

• freedom is thinking for yourself

• humans struggle by depending on other’s thoughts and opinions

• enlightemnetn is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage

• nonage : inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance

Voltaire

• Religion supports fanaticism/crime

• Philosophical spirit is only cure

• "Once fanaticism has corrupted a mind, the malady is almost incurable"

Thomas Paine

• Nat'l churches monopolize+enslave

• "Prostitution of mind" - declaring belief which you don't have

• Revelation is first-hand (Israelities weren't obliged to believe Moses)

• "My mind is my own church"

Montesquieu

• checks to power necessary for political liberty (3 branches)

• "It is requisitive that government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another"

Beccaria

• capital punishment isn't conducive for society

• Stresses importance of argument/reason

• "These problems deserve to be analyzed with that geometric precision…"

Jean Jacques Rousseau

• to educate children, you need to show them why things matter

• Getting lost in the forest

• Resort to words as little as possible

• "I do not like verbal explanations"

Confessions

• Rousseau

• importance of strong passions and freedom before thought

Separate Spheres for Men/Women

• Rousseau

• female is always connected to her sexuality while men aren't

• Education of women must relate to men

Wollstonecraft - Criticizing Rousseau

Sexism is due to "blind obedience" ○ Daughters must be taught to use reason

"Poetry and Truth"

• Goethe

• systemization of nature is unnatural/backward

• "Old churches have dark windows: to know how cherries and berries taste, ask children and sparrows" ○ Criticism of narrow-minded French culture

Causes of The Revolution:

1. Inequitable class system

2. indecisive & incompetent monarchy

3. Inefficient administration

4. No representative system

5. Inequittable Tax System

6. Growing middle-class

7. Finicial Crisis

8. Series of Bad Harvest

Inequitable class system (causes of French Revolution)

• 3 Estates: clergy, aristocrats, everyone else (95%)

• 1st sons become aristocrats, 2nd joins clergy
  

Indecisive & Incompotent Monarchy (causes of French Revolution)

• Louis XIV - 4 major wars

• Louis XV - in court or hunting ("after me, the deluge (flood)")

• Louis XVI indecisive

  • People distrustful of Marie Antoinette's opulence ("Austrian whore")

  • "Lettres de cachet" - king can arrest anyone
    

No Representative System (caues for French Revolution)

• Estates-General hadn't been called for 175 years

Inequitable Tax System (causes for French Revolution)

• only 3rd Estate pays taxes

Growing Middle-Class (causes for French Revolution)

• Discourse around gov't (social contract - ideas of Enlightenment)

• Upper 3rd Estate prioritizes education, grows in mass/development (upset about taxes)

  • Start buying noble titles ("nobles of the robe")

  • Angered poor nobles ("nobles of the sword")

Finicial Crisis (causes for French Revolution)

• 4 wars, backing of American Revolution

• Canal investment burst with no safety

Romanticism

• Protest movement against rigid limitations of Neo-Classicism

  • French attitude - simplicity, boundaries, ideas from Greek classical

  • Napoleon's imposition of French cultures/ideas during invasions

• Protest against mechanical view of Scientific Revolution

Beliefs of Romanticism:

• math/models demeans human imagination

• rejected idea that humans are basically rational

• Religion is basic to human nature and means to knowledge

Wordsworth & Coleridge

• super Romantic

• glorifications of nature in Lyrical Ballads

• "We murder to dissect"

• "Let nature be your teacher"

Goethe (Romanticism)

Sorrows of the Young Werther

• Werther falls in love to an engaged Lotte, committs suicide

Faust

• Dr. Faustus sells soul to devil to experience everything sensual

• Romantic hope to experience everything

Paradise Lost - John Milton

• Fall of Adam/Eve, fall of Lucifer after arguing with God, war between God's and Lucifer's angels

• Lucifer gives up, instead decides to corrupt his creation

• Lucifer/Satan Quotes:

  • “Better to reign in Hell, to serve in Heaven.”

  • “All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and the study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield”

  • “Knowledge forbidden? Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their lord envy them that? Can it be a sin to know? Can it be death?”

  • “Horror and doubt distract his troubled thoughts and from the bottom stir the Hell within him, for within him Hell he brings and round about him.”

Samuel Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Mariner kills albatross, dooming ship, ship carrying death arrives, everyone but Mariner dies (disrespect to nature) ○

Excerpts :

• "A spring of love gushed from my heart / And I blessed them unaware… / The self-sane moment I could pray; / And from my neck so free / The Albatross fell off, and sank / Like lead in the sea"

• "He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small / For the dear God who loveth us / He made and loveth all

William Godwin

Inquiry into Political Justice (1793)

• If people act rationally, they can live without laws/institutions

  • Human morality grows day-by-day until gov't isn't useful

• Puts blame on individual, not on system

• "To a rational being, there is but one rule of conduct, justice, one mode of ascertaining that Rule, the exercise of his understanding"

  • Justine - framed and caught by priest tricking her into confession

Mary Wollstonecraft

• Died 8 days after giving birth to Mary

  • Before she dies, Wollstonecraft tells Godwin to give Mary full access to education

On the Vindication of the Rights of Women

• Women's self-worth should come from self-command and knowledge (society should allow for their education education)

• Women should reassume midwifery (licensed as doctors)

• Marriage based on friendship

• Right to vote

Percy Shelley

• Withdrew from society by bullying - fostered his imagination

• Expelled from Oxford for propagating Atheism

  • “The mind cannot believe in the existence of God.”

• Inspired by William Godwin, met Mary while visiting

  • Secret affair until he got divorced

  • Ex-wife committed suicide, Percy blocked by father from adopting children

Prometheus Unbound

• Prometheus forgives Zeus and finds salvation

Mary Shelley

• Sent to Scotland by William to get away from stepmother

  • Homeschooled

Influences:

• Heard Coleridge recite Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Listening to Humphfrey Davy (electricity)

• While on summer vacation w/ stepsister, Lord Byron, Percy in Geneva, volcanic eruption made them stay inside

  • Made competition of who could write the scariest story

• Frankenstein published in 1818

Major Themes in Frankenstien

• Isolation/ Lack of Friendship

• Beauty/ Healing Power of Nature

• Pushing Nature to its boundaries

• Doppelganger (monster + Frankenstien)

• Experience shapes us (Locke)

• Responsiblity of creator to creature

• Quest for Glory (self-centeredness/hubris)

Girdonins vs. Jacobins

• under Girondian leadership, war is declared on Austria

  • Austria unites with Prussia

• Fear that aristocrats/clergy were undermining Revolution brought down monarchy

• French shockingly repel Austrian/Prussian advance through "hellish tactic" of passion

• Tension between Girdonins vs. Jacobins

  • Revolution had gone too far vs. more powerful authority

Counter-Revolution

Where?

• Regions resisting to Civil Constitution of the French Clergy

• Angry at mass conscription

• Those unaffected by economic changes

the "Terror"

• Girondins overcome

• Maximilien Robespierre emerges as leading figure on Committee of Public Safety

  • Insane power and control

  • Extensive use of the guillotine

    • 11,000-18,000 executions ("who will be next?")

Thermidorian Reaction

• System of indirect election favors wealthiest citizens

• Churches reopened

• Return of high society

• Directory struggled to toe line between royalists and Jacobins

The Rights of Man

• Thomas Paine

• defined Revolutions as a right

Reflections on the Revolution in France

• abstract rationalism of Enlightenment threatening because it undermines the “natural” ruling elite

Vindications of The Rights of Women

• Mary Wollstonecraft

• criticism of Assembly’s limit of education to men only

• demand women’s right to vote in Britain