Call for Papers | Revolutionary Speeches, Speeches about Revolutions
From the Call for Papers:
Revolutionary Speeches, Speeches about Revolutions: A Comparative Study of Revolutionary Eloquence in France and in the United States
Paris Nanterre University, 16–17 March 2023
Organized by Hélène Parent and Augustin Habran
Proposals due by 31 October 2022
“The eulogy for this American hero should be delivered by the most eloquent mouths,” Fontanes affirmed in the funeral oration he gave for George Washington in the temple of Mars on February 9, 1800. The revolutionary American hero and first president of the United States, who died in December 1799, was frequently used as a reference by the orators of the French Revolution from all political camps as a tool for various rhetorical strategies. Indeed, as they looked for founding myths and heroes that would suit the new nation, that was not founded from scratch, French revolutionaries kept convoking models from other times and spaces. The example of Washington perfectly illustrates this outstanding circulation of references. He was first celebrated in the United States as a modern Cincinnatus; and this myth was then reclaimed by French orators who had themselves been educated to classical culture.
It is this dynamic circulation of references and rhetorical and political models between these two spaces (the United States and France) at the time of their respective revolutions that this symposium aims at studying. We will focus more particularly on the representations and the founding myths that allowed for the emergence and definition of concepts including the nation, the political figure (as an ideal orator) and the people in political speeches. Furthermore, the way these two revolutionary events also became myths, symbols or models shall be analyzed through the study of their representations in literature and art more generally (painting, theater, cinema, etc.) from the time they occurred until today. As far as the American Revolution is concerned, we shall focus on the period spanning from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the ‘Revolution of 1800’, Thomas Jefferson’s election, that provided the ongoing debate over the very nature of federalism in the early republic with a temporary solution. Regarding the French Revolution, we shall consider the period spanning from the General Estates of 1789 to the suppression of the Tribunat, last deliberative assembly of the Empire, in 1807.
The study of these partly concurrent periods of democratic establishment will be carried out through the prism of the notion of eloquence, being defined here both as whatever has to do with the political speech per se (deliberative eloquence, parliamentary notably) and as the spaces where the latter circulates by means of imitation, repercussion or parody of the rhetorical forms and codes of the oratory genre: newspapers, essays, pamphlets, founding documents, etc.
The committee invites proposals that may address—but not limited to—the following questions:
1. The imaginary figures, symbols and models convoked in political speeches, laws, essays or newspapers of the French and American revolutions may be studied. Particular attention shall be paid to proposals allowing for a comparative perspective that will highlight the circulation of references between the two spaces (how the French Revolution reappropriates specific symbols of the American Revolution for instance) or potential similarities in the apprehension of symbols or models in both spaces. Besides the content, the question of style may also be addressed: What language(s), what style(s), what stylistic device(s) are used to express these imaginaries? What vision(s) of the ideal orator (and of the “political figure”) emerge(s) with the birth of these modern democracies? What is a representative of the people? How is this figure theorized and represented (and therefore, how is the “people” theorized and represented)? All these questions shall be addressed in the light of a striking paradox: How can one affirm inventing something new (a nation, a political regime) while using models and symbols from the past? How were those models adapted and transformed?
2. The question of the multiplicity of eloquence should also be tackled: in contrast with the parliamentary eloquence developed in dominant political spheres, where, how and through which figures does popular and minority eloquence emerge? (the eloquence of the people versus that of the elites; the eloquence of women, of African Americans, of Native Americans, etc.)
3. Ex post representations of public speaking in its plurality and of its diverse practitioners may also be studied: how are the great figures of both revolutionary periods (the Founding Fathers in the United States, the orators of the French Revolution, the figures of popular/minority eloquence, etc.) themselves turned into models or deterrents through their later (positive or negative) representations in literature and art until today? How do revolutions become new myths through the narratives developed around them? Here again, the comparative perspective will be favored.
Proposals in French or English (about 300 words) with a short bio should be sent before 31 October 2022 to Hélène Parent (hparent1404@gmail.com) and Augustin Habran (augustin.habran@gmail.com). Communications may be delivered in both French and English during the symposium.
Organizing Committee
Hélène Parent (Ph.D. in French Literature, CSLF, Paris Nanterre University) and Augustin Habran (Associate Professor of American History, REMELICE, University of Orléans)
Discours des révolutions, discours sur les révolutions: Une étude comparée de l’éloquence révolutionnaire aux États-Unis et en France
Held at Paris Nanterre University, on Thursday, 16 and Friday 17, March 2023, this symposium is part of the Dire / montrer l’éloquence, 1750–1850 project (University Paris Lumière – Paris Nanterre / Paris 8, 2021–2023).
[1] Louis de Fontanes, Éloge funèbre de Washington, prononcé dans le temple de Mars le 20 pluviôse an 8 [9 février 1800], Paris, Henri Agasse et Dupont, an VIII, p. 13.
[2] Voir par exemple Denis Lacorne, « Mémoire et amnésie : les fondateurs de la république américaine, Montesquieu et le modèle politique romain », in Revue française de science politique, N° 42-3, p. 363-374, ou encore Garry Wills, Cincinnatus : George Washington and the Enlightenment, New York, Doubleday, 1984.
[3] Voir Hélène Parent, Modernes Cicéron. La romanité des orateurs d’assemblée de la Révolution française et de l’Empire (1789-1807), thèse de doctorat soutenue à l’Université Paris Nanterre le 12 octobre 2020, 704 p.
[4] Par exemple, la Déclaration d’Indépendance, les constitutions, le Code civil, les journaux révolutionnaires, les Federalist Papers, etc.
Call for Papers, Panels, and Roundtables | ISECS 2023, Rome
Giovanni Paolo Panini, Préparation du feu d’artifice et de la décoration de la fête donnée sur la place Navone à l’occasion de la naissance du Dauphin, 30 Novembre 1729, 1729 oil on canvas, 42 × 98 inches (Paris: Musée du Louvre , 415)
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From ISECS:
International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS / SIEDS)
16th International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Rome, 3–7 July 2023
Proposals due 15 September 2022 and 31 January 2023
The Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS / SIEDS) is the world’s largest meeting of specialists on all aspects of the eighteenth century, and takes place every four years. Recent ISECS congresses have been held in Montpellier (2007), Graz (2011), Rotterdam (2015), and Edinburgh (2019). The 16th ISECS Congress will be held in Rome, Italy, from Monday, 3 July to Friday, 7 July 2023. It is organized by the Italian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Società Italiana di Studi sul Secolo Diciottesimo – SISSD) and hosted by Sapienza Università di Roma and Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata.
While proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables on any topic relevant to the long eighteenth century (1670–1830) are warmly welcomed, we particularly invite contributions that address the Congress theme: Antiquity and the Shaping of the Future in the Age of Enlightenment.
In the 18th century, a new interpretation of the past radically innovated the dominating view of and approach to tradition. The legacy of antiquity was always there as shared memory, but the critical and analytical attitude that characterised 18th-century culture also transformed its relationship with antiquity, which was renegotiated and modernised. Indeed, the 1700s witnessed a reconstruction of the foundations of knowledge, considering not only the different forms of knowledge itself, but also the individual and his/her existence in the present. This change created a major break with the past and laid the groundwork for the new patterns of thought and expression that have developed in the subsequent ages and continue to do so, up to the present day. They build for the future, but in creative dialogue with a vanished Antiquity. The challenge that the Congress is to face lies precisely in the capturing of the deep sense and meaning of this transformation, which involves all branches of knowledge and can be approached from different perspectives and with different methodologies.
The programme will include theme-related keynote lectures, panels, round tables, and paper presentations. The congress languages are English, French, and Italian. As a first step in the scientific organization of the Congress, the online Call for Panels and Round Tables is now open from 30 April 2022 until 15 September 2022.
Please submit a proposal through https://www.isecs-roma2023.net. Panel organizers are asked to supply (1) a title, (2) a brief description of the theme of the proposed panel, and (3) a list of the panelists along with a title and abstract of their contributions. Panels have a duration of one and a half hours, and should consist of 3 to 4 speakers (depending on the amount of discussion time the panel organizer wants to provide). It is also possible to submit a panel proposal without panelists or only partly filled with panelists. A list of the accepted panels will published on the congress website before October 15.
When the online Call for individual Papers is open (from 15 October 2022 until 31 January 2023), it will be possible to submit proposals either for an already accepted open panel (i.e. a panel with fewer than 4 panelists) or for new panels to be set up by the congress organizers on the basis of the paper proposals received and selected.
Roundtable organizers are asked to supply (1) a title, (2) a brief description of the theme of the proposed round table, and (3) a list of the contributors to the round table. Please note that Panel organizers will be allowed to submit a proposal for a paper to be read in another panel if they do not contribute a paper to the panel they are chair of. Roundtable organizers and contributors will be allowed to submit a proposal for a paper anyway.
Call for Panel Proposals | HECAA at 30
Hannah Otis, View of Boston Common, about 1750
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1996.26)
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HECAA@30: Environments, Materials, and Futures of the Eighteenth Century
Boston, 12–15 October 2023
Proposald due by 1 September 2022
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) announce an open call for panel proposals for our quinquennial conference, to be held in Boston, 12–15 October 2023.
On the land of the Massachusett and neighboring Wampanoag and Nipmuc peoples, Boston developed in the eighteenth century as a major colonized and colonizing site. Its status today as a cultural and intellectual hub is shaped by that context, making it a critical location to trace the cultural legacies of racism and social injustice between the eighteenth century and today. For whom is ‘eighteenth-century art and architecture’ a useful category? What eighteenth-century materials, spaces, and images offer tools or concepts for shaping our collective futures? In considering these questions, we aim to be deliberate about expanding HECAA’s traditional focus on Western European art and architecture and specifically encourage proposals from scholars working on Asia, Africa and the African diaspora, Indigenous cultures, and the Islamic world.
We invite proposals for panel topics that engage with any of the above questions from various cultural perspectives. Topics could focus on ‘environments’ (e.g., workshops, urban spaces, oceans, religious spaces, domestic spaces), ‘materials’ (e.g., silver, sugar, canvas, wood, paper), ‘futures’ (e.g., period visions of the future or new directions in the field); or ‘actors’ (e.g., artists, workers, makers, patrons). We encourage creative and expansive ways of thinking about these topics. We also welcome panel proposals addressing other questions and approaches that are vital to eighteenth-century art and architecture.
Selected organizers will be asked to form panels of 3–4 speakers delivering 15-minute papers, or a roundtable session, from a separate open call for papers that will be publicized widely in Fall 2022.
In addition to plenary sessions, the conference will feature visits to area museums and architectural sites; panels that connect to collections or places in or around Boston, Cambridge, Salem, and Providence are welcome. Panel organizers should expect to attend the conference in person.
Interested panel organizers should submit a one-page abstract describing the topic and proposed format to Stacey Sloboda (stacey.sloboda@umb.edu) and Susan Wager (susan.wager@unh.edu) by 1 September 2022. Organizers of successful panels will be asked to join HECAA if they are not already members.
New Book | The Fountain of Latona
From Penn Press:
Thomas Hedin, The Fountain of Latona: Louis XIV, Charles Le Brun, and the Gardens of Versailles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-0812253757, $70.
Ovid tells the story of Latona, the mother by Jupiter of Apollo and Diana. In her flight from the jealous Juno, she arrives faint and parched on the coast of Asia Minor. Kneeling to sip from a pond, Latona is met by the local peasants, who not only deny her effort but muddy the water in pure malice. Enraged, Latona calls a curse down upon the stingy peasants, turning them to frogs.
In his masterful study, Thomas Hedin reveals how and why a fountain of this strange legend was installed in the heart of Versailles in the 1660s, the inaugural decade of Louis XIV’s patronage there. The natural supply of water was scarce and unwieldy, and it took the genius of the king’s hydraulic engineers, working in partnership with the landscape architect André Le Nôtre, to exploit it. If Ovid’s peasants were punished for their stubborn denial of water, so too the obstacles of coarse nature at Versailles were conquered; the aquatic iconography of the fountain was equivalent to the aquatic reality of the gardens.
Latona was designed by Charles Le Brun, the most powerful artist at the court of Louis XIV, and carried out by Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy. The 1660s were rich in artistic theory in France, and the artists of the fountain delivered substantial lectures at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on subjects of central concern to their current work. What they professed was what they were visualizing in the gardens. As such, the fountain is an insider’s guide to the leading artistic ideals of the moment.
Louis XIV was viewed as the reincarnation of Apollo, the god of creativity, the inspiration of artists and scientists. Hedin’s original argument is that Latona was a double declaration: a glorification of the king and a proud manifesto by artists.
Thomas F. Hedin is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is the author, with Robert W. Berger, of Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles, also published by University of Pennsylvania Press.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Note on Measurements
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1 Foundations
2 Fountains in Context
3 Original State
4 Visual Narrative
5 Latona Group
6 Lycean Peasants
7 Panegyric and Manifesto
Epilogue
Appendix A: Execution of the Fountain
Appendix B: Mansart’s Marble Cone
Appendix C: Marsy’s Lecture of 7 December 1669
Appendix D: Nathan Whitman’s ‘Fronde Thesis’
Appendix E: Translations of Ovid
Appendix F: Elaborations of the Western Axis, Briefly
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations follow page 90
Call for Papers | G.L.F. Laves and Colleagues, 1770–1860
From the Call for Papers:
G.L.F. Laves and Colleagues: Architects as Designers of Interiors and Furniture, 1770–1860
Museum August Kestner, Hanover, 17–18 March 2023
Proposals due by 12 September 2022
Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves (1788–1864), among the most important representatives of classicism in Germany, decisively shaped the image of the city of Hanover with his urban-planning designs and structures. Numerous secular buildings, including the Leineschloss in the city centre—the residence of the kings of Hanover from 1837 to 1866 and today the seat of the Landtag of Lower Saxony—as well as the reconstructed Schloss Herrenhausen and private palace, are reminders of this court architect of the Kingdom of Hanover. Building alterations and new constructions based on his designs have survived in various places in what is now Lower Saxony, including Schloss Derneburg and the Schloss Celle. As part of these projects, Laves also designed the corresponding interiors, which put him in line with his famous contemporaries Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Berlin), Leo von Klenze and Jean-Baptiste Métivier (Munich), and Johann Conrad Bromeis (Kassel). A majority of the interiors designed by Laves were destroyed in World War II—such as the representative halls of the Leineschloss (1834–36) and the living quarters of the royal family in the Palais an der Leinstrasse (ca. 1818 and later)—and the furniture scattered. Based on the research project of Thomas Dann, who has a comprehensive view of designs for furniture and interiors thanks to his many years of archival work and research around surviving furniture, the Museum August Kestner is showing the exhibition G. L. F. Laves—ein Hofarchitekt entwirft Möbel from 6 November 2022 to 26 March 2023. For the first time in Hanover, a selection of Laves’s drawings for furniture and interiors will be on view, together with examples of furniture created according to his designs.
Parallel to the exhibition, mobile – Gesellschaft der Freunde von Möbel- und Raumkunst e.V., the Museum August Kestner, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris are organizing an international conference that seeks to place Laves’s furniture and interior designs in a larger historical and cultural context. Among the well-known architects who were frequently encountered in the 19th century and who—like Laves in Hanover—designed interiors as well as furniture were the English architects Jeffry Wyatville, John Nash, and Thomas Hope, along with Charles Percier, Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, and Jakob-Ignatz Hittorff in France, and Pelagio Palagi in Italy. It is this special aspect of his work that is the focus of the conference Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves and Colleagues: Architects as Designers of Interiors and Furniture, 1770–1860, with particular emphasis on the furniture designs. From an expanded European perspective, the question of the defining characteristics of architects’ furniture will be taken up.
Further themes and questions might include:
• What sources of inspiration/role models are called upon and what materials are preferred for the execution?
• What role do surrogate materials play, such as decoration in stucco or sheet iron and zinc?
• How did the transfer of knowledge transnationally between the architects and craftsmen work?
• What is the relationship between architect and client when it comes to the design of interior spaces?
• What sources are there on the collaboration between designers and the executing tradesmen?
The conference will take place on 17–18 March 2023 in the Museum August Kestner in Hanover and is geared towards junior and early career scholars. Proposals for a 20-minute presentation (abstract of 300 words maximum; the conference languages are German and English) together with a short biography (including email and physical address as well as institutional affiliation) should be emailed to the following address by 12 September 2022: laves@dfk-paris.org. You will be informed of the outcome of your submission by the beginning of October 2022 at the latest.
Conference Organizers
Mirjam Brandt (Museum August Kestner, Hanover), Andreas Büttner (Städtisches Museum Braunschweig), Jörg Ebeling (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris), Martin Glinzer (art historian, Berlin), Henriette Graf (Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg), Petra Krutisch (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg), and Sally Schöne (Museum August Kestner, Hanover)
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Note (added 27 March 2023)— A summary of the conference (in German) by Meinrad von Engelberg can be found at ArtHist.net.
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