• The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

    Author(s):
    Faith Hillis (see profile)
    Date:
    2017
    Subject(s):
    Europe, History, France, Area studies, Globalization, Russia
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    European history, French studies, Russian history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KW6N
    Abstract:
    In the late nineteenth century, France experienced concurrent revolutions in domestic politics and international affairs. Anti-parliamentary, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic movements corroded the liberal foundations on which the Republican project rested. Meanwhile, France concluded an alliance with its longtime geopolitical and ideological rival, tsarist Russia. This article argues that these two momentous events are genealogically connected. It reconstructs a series of cultural exchanges that began in the 1870s between a small circle of Republican intellectuals and defenders of Russia’s autocratic regime. The individuals involved in these exchanges, who worked to render the values of the Republic comprehensible to tsarist loyalists—and vice versa—played an important role in laying the groundwork for the alliance that would emerge in the 1890s. These same circles also found themselves in the vanguard of France’s anti-liberal revolution, and not by happenstance. The dialogues that these circles initiated between east and west produced new ideological hybrids that reconciled republicans’ traditional commitment to mass political participation with Russian conservatives’ aversion to capitalism, individualism, and the parliamentary-constitutional order. This melding of seemingly contradictory agendas provided the intellectual foundations for France’s anti-liberal mass politics.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1086/690124
    Publisher:
    University of Chicago Press
    Pub. Date:
    2017-3-20
    Journal:
    The Journal of Modern History
    Volume:
    89
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    39 - 78
    ISSN:
    0022-2801,1537-5358
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    7 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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