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" “The quality of the blood”: Race, gender, and empire in Revolutionary French nationalism (1789–1815) "
Alexandra Rachel Tolin Schultz
H. W. Lebovics, Kathleen
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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54505
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| Doc. No
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TL24459
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| Call number
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3250427
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| Main Entry
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Alexandra Rachel Tolin Schultz
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| Title & Author
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“The quality of the blood”: Race, gender, and empire in Revolutionary French nationalism (1789–1815)\ Alexandra Rachel Tolin Schultz
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| College
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State University of New York at Stony Brook
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| Date
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2006
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2006
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| Page No
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289
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| Abstract
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The Quality of the Blood: Race, Gender, and Empire in Revolutionary French Nationalism (1789-1815) examines the emergence of modern French nationalism in the Revolutionary period. This thesis argues that elites who had intimate contacts with empire and immigration policy played a crucial role in the formation of a national identity. In particular, this study critically evaluates key texts from the period, including newspapers, memoirs, and archival sources, as well as travel and naturalist literature, and demonstrates not only the centrality of the nation as an eighteenth-century category of difference but also its increasing exclusivity. The first chapters focus on the career of Claude Milscent, a Saint-Domingue born planter who eventually became a radical Parisian journalist and abolitionist in the early 1790s. A careful reading of his newspaper and of related contemporary sources reveal that although Milscent was one of the most committed egalitarians of his time, he and his fellow emancipationists were unable to abandon either their beliefs in the existence of profound human differences, the national, political, and economic benefits of the plantation complex, or their absolutist vision of a national will that disallowed diversity of thought. The next chapters concern Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and its implications for French nationalism. Here I suggest that although many of the men who accompanied Bonaparte on his expedition had sincerely held beliefs in French cultural superiority, they were eager to share the revolutionary promise of political liberation abroad. However, when confronted with local resistance, they turned their focus toward defining the cultural traits that rendered Egyptians unable to receive the ostensibly universalist message of 1789. The thesis concludes with a reading of a 1801 pronatalist tract written by an imperialist named Poncet de la Grave, who during the monarchy was a government official working to restrict immigration to France. He argues the danger of both the declining birthrate in France and of the influence of foreign cultures and internal moral failings in effecting population change. With these chapters, as with the others, I emphasize the proliferation of narrower definitions of national belonging during the Revolutionary period.
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| Subject
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Social sciences; Empire; French; Gender; Identity; Milscent, Claude; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French; Nationalism; Poncet de la Grave, M.; Race; Revolutionary; Sexuality; European history; 0335:European history
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H. W. Lebovics, Kathleen
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State University of New York at Stony Brook
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