Keywords

France, History, Revolution, Images

Abstract

In the latter half of the Eighteenth Century, France experienced a seismic shift in the nature of political culture. The king gave way to the nation at the center of political life as the location of sovereignty transferred to the people. While the French Revolution changed the structure of France's government, it also changed the allegorical representations of the nation. At the Revolution's onset, the monarchy embodied both the state and nation as equated ideas. During the Revolutionary Decade and through the reign of Napoleon different governments experienced the need to reorient these symbols away from the person of the king to the national community. Following the king's execution, the Committee government invented connections to the ancient past in order to build legitimacy for their rule in addition to extricating the monarchy's symbols from political life. During the rule of Napoleon, he used classical symbols to associate himself with Roman Emperors to embody the nation in his person. Through an examination of the different types of classical symbols that each government illustrates the different ways that attempted to symbolically document this important shift in the location of sovereignty away from the body of the king to the nation.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2007

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Lyons, Amelia

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

History

Degree Program

History

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0001901

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0001901

Language

English

Release Date

December 2007

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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Included in

History Commons

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