Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France

Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France
Author: Michael Rapport
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780198208457

In 1789 the French Revolution opened with a cosmopolitan flourish and progressive observers across the world hailed a new era of international fraternity, based on a new kind of politics. Foreigners were welcomed to France, to enrich the regenerated nation and to become citizens. By theTerror of 1793-94, however, this universalist promise had all but died. Some foreigners in France were guillotined, hundreds of others were jailed, expelled, watched closely and were obliged to carry special identity cards. How and why foreignors were squeezed out of French social and politicallife- and to what extent- is the subject of this book. Besides such issues as citizenship, nationality, passports and surveillance, this study considers the experience of specific types of foreignors, like those who served in the French army; in the clergy; foreign radicals or patriots; and those who contributed to French economic life. The dramatictransformation in the fortunes of foreignors during the revolution reveals much about the origins of modern concepts of nationality and citizenship and the development of national identities. In defining the limit of the nation, the revolutionaries and foreignors alike faced difficulties which haveparticular ressonance today.

Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France

Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France
Author: Michael Rapport
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2000-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191543233

In 1789 the French Revolution opened with a cosmopolitan flourish and progressive observers across the world hailed a new era of international fraternity, based on a new kind of politics. Foreigners were welcomed to France, to enrich the regenerated nation and to become citizens. By the Terror of 1793-94, however, this universalist promise had all but died. Some foreigners in France were guillotined, hundreds of others were jailed, expelled, watched closely and were obliged to carry special identity cards. How and why foreignors were squeezed out of French social and political life- and to what extent- is the subject of this book. Besides such issues as citizenship, nationality, passports and surveillance, this study considers the experience of specific types of foreignors, like those who served in the French army; in the clergy; foreign radicals or patriots; and those who contributed to French economic life. The dramatic transformation in the fortunes of foreignors during the revolution reveals much about the origins of modern concepts of nationality and citizenship and the development of national identities. In defining the limit of the nation, the revolutionaries and foreignors alike faced difficulties which have particular ressonance today.

The Family and the Nation

The Family and the Nation
Author: Jennifer Ngaire Heuer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501725602

The French Revolution transformed the nation's—and eventually the world's—thinking about citizenship, nationality, and gender roles. At the same time, it created fundamental contradictions between citizenship and family as women acquired new rights and duties but remained dependents within the household. In The Family and the Nation, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer examines the meaning of citizenship during and after the revolution and the relationship between citizenship and gender as these ideas and practices were reworked in the late 1790s and early nineteenth century.Heuer argues that tensions between family and nation shaped men's and women's legal and social identities from the Revolution and Terror through the Restoration. She shows the critical importance of relating nationality to political citizenship and of examining the application, not just the creation, of new categories of membership in the nation. Heuer draws on diverse historical sources—from political treatises to police records, immigration reports to court cases—to demonstrate the extent of revolutionary concern over national citizenship. This book casts into relief France's evolving attitudes toward patriotism, immigration, and emigration, and the frequently opposing demands of family ties and citizenship.

Unnaturally French

Unnaturally French
Author: Peter Sahlins
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501718487

In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the tens of thousands of foreign citizens whose exhaustively researched social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. Sahlins makes a signal contribution to the legal history of nationality in his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership.Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This "citizenship revolution," long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject. The author completes his original book with a study of naturalization under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. Tracing the twisted history of the foreign citizen from the Old Regime to the New, Sahlins sheds light on the continuities and ruptures of the revolutionary process, and also its consequences.

Reproductive Citizens

Reproductive Citizens
Author: Nimisha Barton
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501749684

In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight—the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women—mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.

Citizen Sailors

Citizen Sailors
Author: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674915550

In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its time: it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.

Colonial Citizens

Colonial Citizens
Author: Elizabeth Thompson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231106603

First, a colonial welfare state emerged by World War II that recognized social rights of citizens to health, education, and labor protection.

The French Revolution and Human Rights

The French Revolution and Human Rights
Author: Lynn Hunt
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1319328466

Exploring the issue of rights and citizenship, Revolutionary France, French Revolution and Human Rights uses original translations and commentary of both debates and legislation that led to the French development of the modern concept of human rights.