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Summary

The introduction highlights the significant role that revolution played in French political thought during the nineteenth century and identifies the historiographical gaps that this study will fill. Rather than fading into obscurity after 1871, revolutionaries remained active and sought, relatively successfully, to re-establish a viable ‘revolutionary’ position in French politics and society. This was achieved through intellectual experimentation rather than unifying behind a single revolutionary voice. From 1789 to the mid-1880s, successive generations of activists sought to reinvent continuities with their predecessors, drawing upon new ideas to invest familiar terms such as equality and solidarity with fresh meanings more appropriate to their circumstances. There was no fixed ‘revolutionary tradition’ in France during the nineteenth century: rather, it was a process of perpetual intellectual adaptation.

This first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of France's last nineteenth-century revolution and the re-emergence of socialism as a meaningful electoral force offers new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific, Julia Nicholls pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era. She shows that this was an important and creative period, in which activists drew upon fresh ideas they encountered in exile across the world to rebuild a revolutionary movement that was both united and politically viable in the changed circumstances of France's new Third Republic. The relative success of these efforts, moreover, has significant implications for the ways in which we understand the founding years of the Third Republic, the nature of the modern revolutionary tradition, and the origins of European Marxism.

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Introduction

Summary

Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871–1885

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Introduction

Summary

Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871–1885