Rhetoric was embedded in French Catholic education, and in revolutionary Paris rhetorical skills proved essential for any politician who wanted to command the assembly. Fabre d’Eglantine was an actor and director All expert in manipulating the political action behind-the-scenes. His play Philinte propounded Rousseau’s ideal that theatricality should be avoided in human life. Hérault de Séchelles by contrast drew on training by the classical actress Clairon to become a successful political orator, not ashamed to theorise the art of persuasion. The Marquis de Condorcet was a constitutional theorist who believed in truth, but lacked the performance skills to persuade others. The Comte de Mirabeau demonstrated outstanding skill as an orator and politician in the first years of the revolution, making no show of high personal morality, in contrast to Maximilien Robespierre who, partly in reaction, set himself up as a man of total sincerity. He bypassed the Assembly to control events through the more intimate forum of the Jacobin club. His sense of personal conviction owed much to Rousseau.

This chapter outlines the effective remobilisation and arming of elements of the Monaghan Ulster Volunteer Force in 1920 and refutes claims of a loyalist “collapse” by providing evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities after a wave of republican counter-reprisals in late March 1921. It contends that a number of IRA operations in the area of County Monaghan bordering Rosslea went badly wrong, and that a successful, well-organised loyalist defence helped to bring both sides to agree a formal truce in April 1921. Loyalist resistance continued elsewhere in Monaghan until the national truce of July 1921, putting the IRA under considerable pressure in parts of the county. It also argues that ties between Ulster loyalists in Belfast and those in Monaghan persisted, helping the latter to resist boycotting of their business interests, and shoring up their political position through the Protestant Defence Association in the new Free State.

This chapter sets out why a history of Ulster loyalism in the three counties after partition matters and outlines the literature on ethnic conflict, Ulster loyalism, and terrorism and political violence in Ireland. The chapter then sets out the book’s two main arguments. First, memories of the violence experienced by one generation of Protestants in the three counties entrenched a sense of separation from the new Irish state on the part of subsequent generations. Intergenerational grievance and inter-communal distance kept loyalism alive and set the conditions for militancy and revenge in the future, including during the Troubles. Three-county loyalists played an important role in Ulster loyalist militant movements in Northern Ireland after partition.

This chapter considers the presence and efficacy of loyalist armed resistance in Cavan from 1920 to 1923. It argues that resistance was generally less intense and more poorly organised in Cavan compared to Monaghan. A dispersed population meant that loyalist deterrence was primarily focused on pockets of the county that had sufficient numbers to contest republican control. The IRA in the area near Cavan town, where much of the Protestant population was concentrated, was more reluctant to carry out executions or inflict significant violence than in County Monaghan. This made resistance to arms raids less dangerous and successful relative to elsewhere in the county. Nevertheless, a poorly organised loyalist defence network in the Rathkenny area underlined the dangers of provoking republican violence through overt and ineffective resistance. West Cavan resembled shared similar experiences of IRA violence to that seen in neighbouring County Leitrim. A willingness by the IRA in West Cavan and Leitrim to resort to occasionally shocking acts of violence meant that the loyalist community in this area suffered disproportionately from acts of intimidation compared to east and south Cavan.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of three-county loyalists’ considerable impact on Northern Ireland’s security forces and radical or militant Ulster movements since partition. It describes how these individuals generally came from families that were threatened with, or experienced, republican or agrarian violence after partition. The chapter also explores the important roles played by three-county loyalists in paramilitary organisations such as the Ulster Defence Association during the Troubles. A number of these individuals came from areas that had seen high levels of loyalist militancy in the first half of the century, suggesting an intergenerational consistency across the twentieth century.

This chapter underlines the main contribution of the book. It argues that Ulster loyalism has survived within the Irish state to the present day. The ’affective bonds’ or culture created in previous generations persisted. Three counties’ loyalists were still willing to embrace an Ulster identity even after the partition of the province. What mattered more than political logic or calculation was sentiment. It also observes an enduring strain of frontier militancy in Ulster, summarises the tactical successes of three counties’ loyalists and their wider movements in the 1920s and again in 1970s but concludes that militancy in successive conflicts only served to delay conciliatory reforms, truces and peace agreements.

This chapter considers evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities and resistance in County Donegal in the early 1920s. It investigates why a vibrant UVF movement, active in the county from 1912 to 1914, did not mount a sustained resistance to the IRA in the county from 1920 to 1923. It suggests that low levels of republican violence in the county during the Anglo-Irish War required a more limited response and goes on to demonstrate that Donegal’s loyalists prioritised the defence of Londonderry during a critical period in 1920. Unlike Monaghan, a number of Donegal’s outstanding UVF leaders were killed during the First World War or did not return home. There is also some evidence that erstwhile units of the Donegal UVF quickly and collectively allied themselves with pro-treaty forces during the Civil War (26 June 1922–24 May 1923). The exception was Pettigo, where loyalists targeted republicans in the wake of the British occupation of the village over a seven-month period, during which time they also campaigned to be included in the new Northern Ireland.

This chapter examines the resurgence of suspicions among republicans towards real or imagined loyalists in the three counties, that some Protestants were acting as a loyalist ’fifth column’ for the security forces and/or paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. A successful loyalist cross-border paramilitary campaign in the early 1970s precipitated an IRA counter-intelligence operation to eliminate spies in the three counties. Families that were well known locally for their historical involvement in loyalism were again targeted by the IRA in the 1970s. The chapter outlines the suspicions and inter-communal violence in County Monaghan that led to the murder of Senator Billy Fox and the burning of the family home of his fiancée, Marjorie Coulson.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is often viewed as one of the early modern attempts to construct a theory of positive liberty. This interpretation makes sense. In Book I, Rousseau writes of freedom as a form of rational self-determination that enlarges and ennobles minds. Some theorists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have argued that this notion of freedom opens the door to tyranny and blame Rousseau for the authoritarianism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Rousseau is probably best considered a theorist of negative liberty. The Social Contract is in many respects a deeply practical work that primarily seeks to prevent both government and interpersonal domination and is animated by an underlying skepticism toward Rousseau’s very own solutions to these problems.

When Rousseau published the Social Contract in 1762, there was no more illustrious authority on politics than Montesquieu. Rousseau draws on Montesquieu’s discussion of republics, but his departures from his predecessor are even more important. Notably, he criticizes Montesquieu for not seeing that the sovereign authority is the same in all states and that “Every legitimate government is republican.” The chapter begins with Montesquieu’s treatment of republics in the Spirit of the Laws to identify the features of classical republicanism that attracted Rousseau and also to reveal Montesquieu’s ambivalence about these ancient models. It then turns to Rousseau’s endeavor to revive republicanism by putting it on a new basis of the principles of political right.

The success of Rousseau’s political vision depends on citizens placing the common interest above their private interest whenever the two conflict. Rousseau says very little about how citizens could be motivated to do so in the Social Contract, however, which gives rise to questions about how the text relates to his other works. This chapter challenges liberal-egalitarian interpretations of Rousseau that draw on Emile to extract a model of modern citizenship for the Social Contract and instead argues that the Discourse on Political Economy is the most informative text for understanding the theory of republican citizenship required to make the Social Contract project viable. In doing so, it elucidates the moral psychology underpinning Rousseau’s proposals for cultivating political virtue, before responding to the objection that this cannot have been what he had in mind for his native Geneva, which he claimed to have taken as the model for the Social Contract.

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

Can the claim that the United States of America was founded on the principles of republicanism? This chapter uses digital humanities approaches and the tools developed by the Cambridge Concept Lab to pose this question, and it concludes that such a contention must be false. The chapter demonstrates that the idea of republicanism, as an ideology or set of beliefs about the nature of government and society was not availlable to the colonists at the time of the founding.

Both local agency and French intervention created the Helvetic Republic. The events of 1789 in France affected the debate elsewhere in Europe, and the presence of French troops in the Pays de Vaud had a coercive effect, but fundamental political changes were also made according to traditional cantonal norms and responded to ongoing Swiss debates and repertoires of action. Local Swiss patriotic elites’ shaping of a hybrid or blended republicanism adds to the wider discussion on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Political actors in the old Swiss Confederation had debated concepts of (Swiss) freedom, individual and collective liberty and liberties since the late seventeenth century. Many who were excluded from the Old Regime hoped to be welcomed with an expansion of a conception of liberty. When this entry was rejected, these spurned local elites often sought to overturn the Old Regime in the Swiss Confederation and elsewhere.