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the French Revolution changed the nature of imperial rivalry

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now total wars were fought over the very existence of the colonies within empires

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Goya and many other painters

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wars are now between peoples for peoples

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bodies were now sites for political conflict

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not fighting over territory or dynasty

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fighting over the meaning of membership in society

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shifting balance between settler populations in neo-Europes and the incumbent populations

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stand-off between the newcomers and incumbents

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loose, not always peaceful, coexistence

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with the arrival of total war to these outlying areas, we see the beginnings of exterminist campaigns

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led new arrivals to remove or exterminate incumbent populations

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fueled by the land rush

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Jeffrey Amherst (1717–1797)

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famous during Seven Years War

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seized Quebec

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in back-lands of English colonies, he was a notorious Indian hater

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the effort to exterminate Indians from territories to open up lands for European settlement, presages dynamics that we see take place later in other corners of the world to exclude people, destroy people, remove people from the lands that they lived in

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once you propose the fundamental idea that the government should be made by the people for the people, what ensues is a conflict over who the people are

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along with the revolution of rights, we get a revolution in the practice of political violence

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these are related to each other: violence and membership

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rights revolution

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changes from the late 18th century altered the concept of the political subject

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spread around the world

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the by-product of global conflict and global phenomenon

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French Revolution

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certain people enjoyed these rights

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defined now as citizens

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Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

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age of revolution ushers in a new concept of the political subject endowed with rights to protect themselves

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how do you choose who enjoys these rights

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invent another category called the nation whose co-members get to enjoy these rights

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the United States and French revolutions were fought in the name of a people united as a nation

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this fundamentally altered the concept of sovereignty

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used to reside in the ruler

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from Ming to Qing to Louis XIV

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now the rights to rule where not divinely inscribed

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it was the people who were themselves were the repository of sovereignty

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for Thomas Jefferson, these rights are self evident inscribed in the rights of man

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the freedom from capricious state power

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right of the state to torture

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out of this debate, we derive our idea of universal human rights

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Bartolomé de las Casas

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argued for the right of Indians to be protected from the Conquistadors as God's creatures

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these norms governing creaturehood began to be addressed and questioned

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invention of the novel

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Rouseau: "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse"

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Samuel Richardson: "Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady"

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first novel in history, in the modern sense

•

create a sense of empathy with the characters

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heroic stories, on the other hand, were not about the identification with the character, but even deification

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focusing on passion, love, virtue

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emotional

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an effort to regard each other as autonomous, feeling beings

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the essential integrity of individuals and their bodies

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led to campaigns to rid the world of torture and public spectacles of pain

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e.g. expressed in Goya's painting

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inflicting pain through torture, shown to be a barbaric act

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Adam Smith "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"

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published in 1759

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first chapter uses examples of torture

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asks: what if we knew that the victim of the torture was our brother?

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act of imagination and empathy

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identification is our source of sympathy for other people

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our individuality is defined by our capacity to identify with the pain of others

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across Europe their ensued a widespread campaign to abolish judicial torture

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1783 Britain

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1789 France

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the state using the body of a political subject as a tool for influence was abolished

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bodies were now seen as self-contained

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this trend even had effects on architecture for common people

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special rooms to keep the body private

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the separation of beds

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there was a new sensibility to the human body as something sacred which had rights

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novels about personalities and empathy for others became popular

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and this new talk of rights contained within each human began to change the course of human events