Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...male Glee Club is the oldest college chorus in the country, founded in 1858. The club became the first college singing group to travel abroad when the French government invited it to perform in 1921. The Glee Club was also the first collegiate choral organization to go around the world in the 1950s. The club has since repeated the feat, most recently in 1967. Since 1965, the group has cut 43 records, including four in the last four years...
Edmund Burke cast an indignant eye across the English Channel at the French Revolution and wrote sarcastically: "Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, they are forming plans for the good order of future society." Burke was the prototype of skepticism about certain revolutions. Since the French Terror, history has paraded past too many Utopian dramas of transformation that ended by being as totalitarian, as murderous, as the regimes that they swept away-triumphs of hopeful zealotry over experience. Stalin turned the Russian Revolution into a self-devouring machine that crushed its own in the basement of the Lubyanka. Especially because...
...governing split moderates and radicals. In the second stage, extremists rise and consolidate their power. Next comes the Terror, when the regime desperately tries to accomplish revolutionary goals no matter what the cost in blood. This horror often engenders a Thermidorean reaction (named for Thermidor, the month of the French revolutionary calendar in which the reaction occurred), when moderates regain control and the nation begins a period of convalescence. But ahead lies the danger of the fifth stage: the coming of a dictator still fired by some revolutionary zeal, and beyond that, the possibility, of a Bourbonism restored...
...liberating vehicle, although an ironic one, to Western eyes. There are several layers of paradox in the relationship between religion and revolution. The word revolution first entered the English language as a political term around 1600, and implied restoration of the old order. Later revolutions, like the French and the Russian, were explicitly antireligious, anticlerical. And yet revolution is almost always cryptoreligious in its vocabularies, disciplines and even operating psychologies. Revolution needs martyrs, saints, zealots, and almost always involves a rigorously ascetic ideal. Revolution, like religion, means faith and commitment, righteousness, intolerance, overriding goals, doctrine and ideology. In the revolutionary...
Barbara Tuchman, historian, deploring lack of American recognition of the arts: "Every French town has an Avenue Victor Hugo. We never have a Mark Twain Street...