Abstract: Most recent studies on the Italian exile community during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era have clearly expressed the need to overcome periodizations and evaluations still influenced by implicit political and national paradigms. In fact, reconstructions of political dynamics in their concrete development and the qualitative attention to biographies push to overcome the "hindsight" of Nation-State centred visions, to put into focus the complex and non-linear development of the parameters of political contemporaneity. The county of Nice between 1792 and 1794 represents an interesting case study to deepen the discourse on the development of revolutionary practices. Although recognized as one of the centres of Italian revolutionary exile (Rao, 1991; Addante, 2024), Nice experienced a considerable migratory flow even before the exodus of Italian patriots in 1794, since its occupation by French troops in October-November 1792. The article aims to overturn the judgment on Italian expatriation in France as a phenomenon exclusively tied to the history of Italian Risorgimento, and to interrogate the experience of national borders in order to understand the revolutionary phenomenon in its transnational dimension. Through the documents of the local institutions and of the Jacobin society of Nice, I will outline the experience of a revolutionary cosmopolitanism worthy of further investigation.

This article delves into the translation and editing work of Louis-Mathieu Langlès (1764-1824), a significant figure in French Oriental studies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining Langlès’ translations of British literature about Asia, the analysis underscores two interrelated strategies shaping his work. The first strategy involved the dissemination of knowledge about Asia through translations shaped by both a literalist approach to the text and intensive editing practices. These practices resulted in the incorporation of extensive footnotes and additions that served both informative and domesticating functions and highlighted Langlès’ agency as a mediator of knowledge. The second strategy centres on Langlès’ reform project for the French system of teaching and learning Asiatic languages, resulting in the establishment of the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes in 1795. This strategy is strongly connected with his translation work as it reflects Langlès’ pragmatic vision of Oriental studies as based on the British example, particularly the scholarly activities of individuals working for the East India Company. His translations, therefore, were not mere acts of appropriation but both embodied and encouraged ‘emulation’, allowing us to reveal the interplay of scholarly admiration and political competition and to uncover a distinct strand of Anglophilia within the broader context of early French Oriental studies.

In June 1720, a plague epidemic broke out in Marseille, killed half its population and, spread to Provence and Languedoc, thus arousing fears of contagion in England, where the memory of the Great Plague of London in 1664/5 was still vivid. While the English newspapers published short news on the mortality and measures taken by the French authorities, a leisure periodical, «The Free-Thinker», a bi-weekly essay paper published in London and circulated throughout the country between March 1718 and July 1721, chose to devote a series of twenty-five papers to the contagion between December 1720 and June 1721. The present study analyses the rational and liberal discourse of this periodical. It will show that at a time when the plague was the subject of many providentialist sermons, «The Free-Thinker» offered its readers an exclusively rational discourse based on the popularisation of medical, statistical and historical knowledge about the plague. «The Free-Thinker»’s arguments also echoed both the essentially preventive approach of the English government and medical polemics concerning two contagionist conceptions of the disease. Finally, although the periodical justified its series by using the argument of public good and put forward public health policies, its aim was primarily to counter a radical contagionist discourse which was considered harmful to the economic and political freedoms of its readers.

The events in Poland between the years 1763 and 1772 that led to the first partition of the Republic aroused great interest in Europe. The information in question also appeared in the newspaper pages of several Italian states. The theme returned in volumes written by Venetian authors, including Domenico Caminer's Storia della guerra presente tra la Russia e la Porta Ottomana and Istoria delle turbolenze della Polonia dalla morte di Elisabetha Petrowna fino alla pace fra la Russia e la porta Ottomana in cui si trovano tutti gli avvenimenti cagione della rivoluzione di quel regno by Giacomo Casanova. The article aims to highlight the two different models of information used to elaborate on the same historical subject: Caminer's dry style, typical of gazetteers who tend rather to stick to the facts and show great reticence in their comments, and Casanova's polemical and subjective style.

The article is dedicated to two travelogues written in French by leading figures of the Polish Enlightenment such as Tomasz Kajetan Węgierski and August Fryderyk Moszyński. It aims to present and compare the portrayal of Italians conveyed by the two travellers. Węgierski toured to Italy in 1779, while Moszyński went to Italy between 1785 and 1786. The authors of this article mainly focus on the two travellers’ attitudes towards the people they met along their journeys and their observations of Italians in general as well as the inhabitants of different regions. Moszyński and Węgierski’s perception of certain aspects of Italian lifestyle and society have also been discussed in this paper. The analysis of the two journals shows that the authors were good and critical observers, who wanted to convey a subjective but realistic view of the country they visited.

The color organ with its modern interpretation is an electronic device representing sound in a visual configuration. The origins of the color organ inventions can be traced back to the hand-operated models based on harpsichord design promising the splash of colors upon pressing a key. In this perusal, the harpsichord appears as a tool of fashion with its unique interpretation taking place in a setting where the author got into the habit of calling the ocular harpsichord ‘la toilet’. The acquisition of a certain tendency made the author develop a habit of calling ornaments in general as ‘visible music’. Throughout the narrative incorporating romantic features, the concept of ornament in music manifests itself visibly on clothing and architectural decoration adhering to the philosophical fulcrum between the 18th-century decorative aesthetics and the inventiveness of the Lumières. As a logical consequence, a mathematical structure applied in architecture could turn into keyboard compostition.

In the early modern period, the representation of the continents by means of allegorical figures enjoyed great popularity. The book Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli, is very stimulating, richly documented and fundamental with regard to the detailed source-critical examination of concrete individual visualisations of the continents. The focus of the book rather lies with the 16th century, while part 5 focuses on the 18th century. In the 18th century, continent allegories entered into the public sphere and reached broader strata in the society. In this century, Eurocentrism progressed considerably, but did not invent it. The volume’s co-authors pose the question of Eurocentrism as well as that of racism with regard to the late Middle Ages and the 16th century. Because of their widespread use, continent allegories can be counted among the most important primary sources from which we can draw conclusions about how extra-European cultures could be represented, interpreted and viewed from a European perspective. They represent much more than just an art-historical source, they are, especially when one thinks of their accessibility in public spaces for everyone, actually a historical source of the first rank, behind which not least travelogues and theoretical concepts such as the history of civilisation as a universal history compete with the Christian history of salvation in the Bible.

The culture of the eighteenth century played a crucial role in proposing a positive image of Islam. The Valencian Jesuit Juan Andrés was particularly engaged in this re-evaluation of Arab culture in order to stress how much Iberian Arabs had contributed to the renaissance of Western culture and civilisation. In his treaty Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura (1782-1799) Andrés committed himself to outlining specific elements of the Medieval renaissance nurtured by Spanish Arabs between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. His interpretation on Al-Andalus concealed a «patriotic» intent, namely that of glorifying the historical role of Spain (rather than Italy or France) in the development of the European literary canon.

Was Denis Diderot “the master of Danton”, as the historian Aulard asserted, or was he “the master of Brissot” as Jean Dautry stated? Or rather, was the philosophe the true inspiration of Babeuf? From a general point of view, research on the circulation and heritage of Diderotian political ideas in Europe has mostly been interpreted in relationships of analogy or in contrast with the event, ideas and men of the French Revolution. This article aims to analyze the debate on the most recent historical readings that have reawakened the hermeneutic dialectic on the relationship between the political thought and works of Denis Diderot and the spokesmen of the French Revolution. The significance of this study thus lies in its focus on the most recent historiographical readings on the uses of Diderotian stratified production, which over time have distorted his political vocabulary. At the present time, we have some data – from the cross-analysis between the study of unpublished sources and new research perspectives on political traineeships and clandestine circles – —on which to base future research: on the eve of the Revolution, Diderotian thought circulated in clandestine pamphlets and, in those same years, some men of the future Constituent took inspiration from the philosophe. Therefore, the category of “general will” in use among the men of the Constituent and the Legislative (Thouret, Brissot) seems not to be of Rousseauian derivation only.