Robespierre had Danton and his followers arrested, convicted, and beheaded. A movie produced on Danton by Poland's Andrzej Wajda in 1983 clearly showed the zeal of the revolutionaries against this Rule of Terror (Weiss). The movie argues that Robespierre was so concerned with keeping his own power, he destroyed the principles on which the revolution was founded. In a scene of the film, the Convention realizes Robespierre's intentions, and someone

Napoleon Although there are some elements of Napoleon's domestic and foreign policies that would suggest he was extending Enlightenment idealism through his autocratic regime, his coming to power is more accurately framed as marking an end to the French Revolution. Some of the French Revolution's core principles did emerge during Napoleon's rule. For example, Napoleon's legal and judicial reforms offered a more egalitarian model than the ancien regime had due to

nations real? What makes them more or less real? Consider two concrete examples of the embodiment of national ideology. Are nations real? Because of their establishment in the political firmament of contemporary society, nations seem or 'feel' so real that we forget most of the nations we take for granted are relatively young constructs. Italy and Germany were fractious, yoked-together provinces well into the 19th century. Even the United States only

Emile Durkheim came to prominence at a time when Europe was attempting to redefine itself. It had already experienced a significant and major break with the past (its customs and traditions) during the Protestant Reformation in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Catholic Europe splintered apart. The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment that followed led to a new rationalist spirit in Europe (England and France in particular), which served as the

In short, the United States became more aggressive in attaining foreign resources and access to trade. This was a result of the expansive nature of empires, and the fact that America, as characterized by Boot, was gradually becoming a "great power." Largely, the Great Powers of the modern world have come into being as emerging economic and political trends have allowed. The ever shifting tides of the world's social foundations

homosexual practices might have begun in the early centuries, the word "sodomy" was first used by a Catholic missionary, now a saint, Father Peter Damien around 1050. By sodomy, he meant masturbation and anal intercourse between men, a sin he condemned as the most perverse of sexual sins in his long letter to the Pope, entitled "the Book of Gomorrah." He emphasized that God designed sex exclusively for procreation