Vol. XXXII, 2019
L’article analyse, parmi les éléments psychologiques et d’imaginaire politique qui ont accéléré le parcours de la Révolution française, l’importance de la théorie des droits naturels. Colportée par la presse et dans les assemblées révolutionnaires, cette théorie est devenue en effet la référence normative absolue de l’engagement politique, en tant que motivation et enjeu de tout changement institutionnel. De cette façon, assimilée dans la conscience publique, la théorie démocratique des droits naturels représenta une cause de la radicalisation entre 1789 et 1794, d’autant plus que les institutions n’ont pas toujours consacré d’une manière intégrale les traits égalitaires affirmés en principe. Elle engendra aussi une culture politique du proteste, légitimée par le fait que, selon la théorie, le gouvernement était le résultat de la volonté des citoyens, donc ils avaient tout droit de lui imposer leur indignation et leurs désirs.
The article aims to present the abolitionist movement (measures against the slave trade and emancipation of slaves) in the French Revolution era (1770–1820). The article is structured in three sub-periods, helping to capture the traits and mutual influences of the abolitionist trend in Great Britain, France, the United States of America, and Latin America. The main philosophical works and the pamphlets of the abolitionists are presented and the main events that resulted in the abolition of slave trafficking and their gradual or immediate emancipation are shown: parliamentary struggle, wars of independence, slaves’ riots, and revolutions. The conclusion is that the French Revolution had an immediate influence on the emancipation of slaves in the French, English, Dutch and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America. The English and American abolitionist movements took place on their own coordinates, the events in France causing a prudent attitude towards the immediate emancipation of slaves. At that time the fight against slave trade and their gradual emancipation prevailed.
Throughout the 19th Century, the principles of the French Revolution animated the actions and hopes of all the nations, shaping a pattern with echoes in the whole world. For the states of Western Europe, the political issues were subsidiary to the social and human. For Southeastern Europe, which was still under foreign rule, the rights and liberties of the individual were not yet clear and few understood them, and therefore the acceptance and signification of these principles was rather political, the innovative spirit being only associated with patriotism. At the end of the 18th Century and during the first decades of the 19th Century, for the people of Southeastern Europe freedom meant the liberation from the Ottoman yoke (the Greek case), gaining the national autonomy (the Serbian case), or the removal of the Phanariot rule (for Moldavia and Wallachia). One by one, the nations of Southeastern Europe understood, accepted and applied the principles of the French Revolution.
L’un des lieux-communs propres à la majorité des discours anthropologiques c’est de confondre ou d’assimiler selon le cas les rites propres à chaque société avec les spectacles folkloriques dont les autorités étatiques ont tiré des spectacles à l’usages des locaux en voie d’urbanisation ou des touristiques en mal d’exotisme de pacotille. L’auteur de ce texte quelque peu pamphlétaire veut montrer qu’il n’en est rien. Il affirme que le rite est une sorte de mise en scène de l’être-là communautaire dans le monde ; le rite est ainsi, il ne dit ni le bien ni le mal ni le beau ni le laid, c’est pourquoi il n’est jamais une leçon de morale ou d’esthétique. Tandis que le spectacle folklorique du rite ressortit au théâtre et donc à la catharsis, c’est-à-dire à une leçon d’esthétique, de morale et de politique. L’auteur illustre ainsi, avec du matériel venu des sociétés primitives, ce dont Nietzsche avait eu l’intuition dans Die Geburt der Tragödie, à savoir l’opposition entre « l’essence inesthétique du rite » et « l’essence esthétique de la tragédie ».
During the 19th Century, the evolution of the decorative arts was for a long time in contrast with the political developments. Political revolutions have not had a history that is synchronous with that of artistic revolutions until the end of the century, only becoming so in the first decades of the 20th Century. We intend to analyse some elements of the modernist movement in decorative arts which emerged in the last decades of the 19th Century, based on a progressive ideology, socially motivated, which aimed to reform the society by calling for a new type of design. We will present two case studies: the Arts and Crafts, a movement in the decorative arts appeared in the United Kingdom in the second half of the 19th Century and Bauhaus, a school of arts and crafts that existed in Germany between 1919–1933. We start from a comparison between the attitudes of the two movements regarding the industrial type production, achieved through the use of the machine. Arts and Crafts, whose main ideologue was William Morris, had consistently argued for rejecting the use of the machine in the production of decorative art objects, while the Bauhaus, inspired by Walter Gropius, was characterized by the intention to make the industrial products aesthetic. Also, the two movements had a series of common elements, both artistically, through the attention paid to functionalism, as well as socially, by trying to use the arts for changing the society. Furthermore, both started from a re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, as an inspiration for organizing the production. The main ideologues of both movements believed, at least for a while, in the possibility of socialist revolution, but were forced to resort to a capitalist type of production. However, they contributed through their ideas to an artistic revolution in design and architecture.