H-France Review Vol. 3 (October 2003), No. 125
Response to Tracey Rizzo's review of D.M.G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order. Malden, Mass., Oxford, Melbourne, and Berlin: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. viii + 424 pp. Map, bibliography, and index. $27.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 0-631-23363-6.
By D.M.G. Sutherland, University of Maryland.
Rêves de la Révolution, a response to Tracey Rizzo
It is always flattering to have such a long and considered review of one’s work and also to be given the opportunity to give a lengthy response. Tracey Rizzo has put her finger on several new features of the book. The material, for example, on taxation, the economy, population growth, and living standards is entirely new and comes from my recent research, only some of which has been published.[1] She also notes one of the most interesting new features of the book: not only that there are more details about the war and civil wars, but also there is far more space devoted to the rhetoric of revolutionary violence. This is a very emotional topic, but as Michel Vovelle has said, we must face it.[2] Too often during the bicentennial, the Vendean Wars were used as a device to discredit the Revolution as a whole, to the point that Maurice Agulhon complained there was a Chouan behind every hedgerow. It is gratifying that Professor Rizzo thinks I have presented a balanced treatment of the genocide controversy in the Vendée and that she is taken both by the writing and by the descriptions of events like the White Terror. As critics have said of Milton, the devil is a fascinating creature.
Nonetheless, I have a lot of objections to the approach the review takes.
“Impugn,” “deride,” “put down,” dismiss,” “insinuate,” “careless,” “name dropping,” “guilty,” “equivocal,” “cliché-ridden,” “perpetuate... stereotypes,”--these are powerful accusations that Tracey Rizzo uses to describe my book, and especially to characterize my attitude to fellow scholars. They are also grossly unfair. For example, I do not dismiss or impugn Mathiez, Lefebvre, and Soboul ever or anyone else (I invite any fair-minded reader to consult the page references she cites to verify this for themselves). When I express my disagreement, I always explain why I do, but Tracey Rizzo apparently does not realize that an expression of disagreement is a mark of taking another scholar’s interpretations seriously; it is not a hostile act or a personal insult. Her inflammatory language precludes giving the reader a fair rendering of the arguments in the book, let alone fulfilling a reviewer’s prime responsibility of evaluating them.
Tracey Rizzo also appears to have a profound personal and politicized reaction to what I have written. She says she is part of a targeted group (targeted? why are her affiliations relevant?); she thinks it important to know what my politics are and appears to have expended some effort to figure them out (why? although my politics certainly ought to be obvious from the comments on page 74); she praises William Doyle’s books for being more politically neutral, as if that is a virtue in itself. She thinks my account might leave readers, including herself, with a “distaste for the whole affair.” And she quotes Gary Kates approvingly that I rob “the event of its dreams for a new political order.” Inducing distaste among readers or robbing the event of its dreams (an interesting metaphor, suggesting that waking up the dreamer is illegitimate?) was not, and is not my intent. My intent is to engage readers in a serious discussion of serious issues. Moreover, surely it is better to present and criticize the arguments and evidence that bring on these feelings. Far better than deploring a conclusion one does not like. Rizzo nowhere shows the complicated picture I draw is in any way false. In any case, I wonder what Tracey Rizzo would have me do? Stop the larceny? Suppress the parts that are unpleasant? Stop the narrative before it all went rotten? And when was that? Excuse it all because the revolutionaries’ dreams were so worthy? Ignore the appalling hardships of ordinary people, many of whom were widows, whose fixed incomes were destroyed by an entirely avoidable monetary policy?
It is extremely frustrating to know how to deal with a review that is so full of ad hominem attacks and that no where lays out or evaluates what my arguments are in any detail and how they have changed over the years. On thinking it over, however, it seems to me there are three main areas that H-France readers might like to see addressed: 1) why the book has the shape it does; 2) the place of female agency in the October Days; and 3) the relation of cultural history as it is generally practised to-day and the problems it poses for some of the major issues of the Revolution.
Structure of the Book
The book intends to engage the reader fairly directly in the narrative, partly because the omniscient stance academic authors usually take can be deceptive to readers,[3] and partly because I wanted to explain to students especially why historians think certain aspects of the subject are passionately interesting. I suspect most of us do this in our teaching anyway, but unlike a lot of fields, the history of the Revolution is itself part of a civic discourse that is very animated in France.[4] Disputes are seldom just quarrels among professors but are often undertaken with a silent audience in mind, whether they are readers, audiences at a son et lumière, visitors to a lieu de mémoire, or simply téléspectateurs. Explaining the contours of various controversies to readers in the Anglo-sphere aims to clarify issues and convey the sense of immediacy the subject has for readers in France. I did consider introducing the book or individual chapters with a historiographical section but rejected it. It seemed more practical to introduce the issues on an as needed basis even if the price was some fracturing of the material.
October Days and the Book
Professor Rizzo says I deny agency to women in my depiction of the October Days. I am indeed denying that women alone envisaged and executed this affair.[5] So does everyone else who writes about this episode seriously. This does not deny women anything, but it is another example of Rizzo’s making charges rather than dealing with evidence. Being part of a process that probably planned the march on Versailles in advance, however murky this will always remain, shows a considerable extension in political skills over the previous six months. Furthermore, refusing to adopt a supine attitude towards royal authority in the hopes that somehow “they” would solve the food shortages and the political crisis is one sign among many of an advancing political awareness on the part of Parisian working people, whether male or female. All that seems obvious. Again, what are Rizzo’s expectations here? Rizzo’s language also is interesting. According to her, I write such and such about women in the October Days but “his research challenges this premise (sic)” that women had no agency (italics added). (Again, fair-minded readers should verify what I say on the first whole paragraph on page 78 with her assertion that I deny women any agency as historical actors). How does Tracey Rizzo imagine those passages about women and religion later on in the book (pp. 108,195-7, 268-9) got there unless I wrote them in?
Cultural History and the Book
Professor Rizzo claims I write about cultural history “grudgingly” and that I ignore ideas. This is not true. She has overlooked the influence of Antoine de Baecque (politics of the body, corruption-regeneration, September Massacres, representations of the death of Robespierre), James Johnson (a fabulous article on masks and deception), Jacques Guilhaumou (political culture of Marseille, communications relays, death of Marat), Claude Langlois, Annie Duprat, and Susan Dunn (representations of the death of Louis XVI, cartoons and prints), Michel Vovelle (images, dechristianization, geography of various kinds of commitment or resistance), Jean-Clément Martin (regional consciousness, lieux de mémoire) and much else. The book also reflects my fascination with Lynn Hunt, Tom Kaiser, and Chantal Thomas’s research on the pornographic representation of Marie-Antoinette, partly because the material is so gripping, partly because it was a part of a wider dialogue about the nefarious and corrupting influence of the royal court, and partly because so many of the accusations against her were repeated at her trial and in the press accounts of her execution. There is also quite a large amount of space devoted to dechristianization and resistance to it, and I think a novel argument, that this continued in different forms after Thermidor, indeed thanks to the Petite Eglise, down to our own time.
On the other hand, having raised it, Tracey Rizzo has an obligation to note why I am skeptical of other parts of the pornography-Revolution argument. Since she does not do so, let me say that I doubt that an eighteenth century reader’s perusal of a lascivious novel detailing the sexual initiation of a young woman by various smarmy clerics and adulterous aristocrats, a very old trope, immediately prompted that reader to reflect that a regime that had been there for a thousand years had now been delegitimized and that a Declaration of Rights would be a good thing. [6] Even though such literature might have philosophical disquisitions interspersed among the naughty bits, I doubt our reader, or indeed his grandfather when he was a teenager, “read it for the articles.” Part of scholarly exchange is the ability to express skepticism over such arguments.
Cultural History and the Revolution
Tracey Rizzo confuses my genuine admiration for the work of the cultural historians of the Old Regime and the Revolution with some skepticism about what the sub-field has achieved or what it sometimes claims for itself. Generally, it relies upon a very narrow base of sources that are made to carry an enormous explanatory burden. Indeed, for empiricist historians like myself, the reach of some cultural history is breathtaking. There is, for example, the claim that the shifting role of fathers in a few dozen eighteenth-century novels “fatally undermined the absolutist foundations of the monarchical regime” or the claim that this changing role determined the fate of the King. Surely this is close to impossible to verify with the remaining evidence.[7] Or, to take another example, the desacralization of the monarchy argument certainly shows how the political role of Jansenism claimed (or reformulated older claims of?) implicit rights about freedom of conscience and the accountability of public authority, but Jansenism did not go so far as to undermine the monarchy itself. The case of the journalist Mairobert, which I cite from Laurent Cartayrade’s thesis, shows how at least one Jansenist drew the conclusion that the monarchy was a monstrous despotism but that nothing could be done about it.[8] The idea that desacralization had a wide effect is inconclusive at best.[9] Surely the episode of treating the King’s dismembered body on the deck of the guillotine as a holy relic and the Jacobins’ rhetoric of the King as a magical figure whose death would purge the Republic of the corruption of centuries shows that sacral monarchy survived both the abolition of the institution and the death of the King. Even some regicides thirty years later could barely write about it. Thibaudeau called the 21 January 1793 “... l’événement le plus tragique de la révolution” but could not bring himself to write any more.[10]
Professor Rizzo fairly concludes that I think the Revolution was a failure. Although its effects were incalculable in many spheres, it did not effect a successful transition to a representative liberal or democratic regime. It is remarkable that all historians know the Revolution ended with the imperial dictatorship, that Napoleon was restored in 1815 amidst delirious acclaim, and that he was treated afterward in quasi-religious terms in popular culture, yet they proceed as if the Empire never existed. The Revolution, they say, was an apprenticeship in democracy or a step in France’s road to political modernity. Witness, for example, the reviews of Patrice Gueniffey’s Le nombre et la raison that insist the Revolution’s electoral practices looked toward the future.[11] Surely, however, Gueniffey is correct: the electoral system excluded opinions hostile to the revolutionary settlement and the revolutionaries were prepared to use violence to maintain that exclusion. Was there a single prominent politician elected after October 1791 who represented constituents who deplored the visceral anti-clericalism and eventual anti-Catholicism of the revolutionary political class? For most of them, the religion of ordinary people was bunk; advocacy of religious toleration was an expedient, not a principle. It took an outsider to that class, Bonaparte, to insist this debilitating prejudice was ruinous.
The vast majority of revolutionaries were idealists and it easy to endorse this aspect of their politics, but their methods were frequently exclusionary and partisan from a very early stage. Many historians sympathetic to the Revolution do not emphasize enough this tension between ends and means. They pay too little attention to those who were on the business end of the ends-means conundrum. Thus, after a thorough summary of a great deal of work on recent cultural history, Suzanne Desan writes that the revolutionary state “struggled with intensity to create new institutions to embody its principles and placed supreme confidence in the law’s ability to bring about renewal … [It] created organizational channels and ideologies for individuals and social groups to influence politics.”[12]
Earlier, she finds a common theme in this work of cultural historians to be the creation and implementation of modern ideas of citizenship. The notion that the revolutionary state was somehow a school for citizens is certainly novel. True, there was no end of exhortation to civic behavior by the state and by the thousands of busybodies in the Jacobin clubs. No one who has consulted the newspapers, pamphlets and archives of the time can miss it. But the idea that this state was a benign institution refashioning its subjects into eager citizens humming down the road to modernity misses many other things about the nature of this state and about what it did.
Ideals and Violence
The revolutionary state for most of its existence was weak, and it was extraordinarily violent. It believed in law at the rhetorical level, but it was frequently partisan in its application. Witness the failure to prosecute the perpetrators of lynchings in a timely manner, or at all, from 1789 until the Empire. It did not create channels for social groups to express their differences or influence policy. A great deal of political difference was ignored or suppressed or persecuted. Every successful revolutionary journée after 1789 in Paris nullified, or partially nullified, the results of an election. It was illegal, moreover, to be a refractory priest or a royalist after 1792. The penalty for either was death. The Revolution was not the school for citizenship that many assume. In areas where the Revolution was contentious, Jacobin clubs were not sites of political sociability. Instead, they were the expression of a faction that well before the Terror had made itself loathed. They incited to murder in any number of places. In Lyon, for example, one innovative architect of death as early as February 1793 advocated that a guillotine be affixed to the Pont Morand over the Rhône, the better to deal with the disposal problem and to intimidate enemies gathered on either bank.[13] The apologetic view of revolutionary sociability cannot possibly explain why Jacobins were so hated and why after Thermidor so many were lynched, murdered in prison, knifed on the street, stuffed into heavy sacks and repeatedly banged against stone walls, tossed out of hospital windows (after having been mugged the day before in broad daylight), hurled over the battlements of ancient forts, and all the rest. Law, the nation, the patrie, liberty, equality, and so on were enormously partisan words and concepts. As late as the 1830s people were saying, “Je ne suis pas de la nation.” If the Revolution was a school, the teachers flunked.
Moreover, the Revolution left a disputed bequest. It did not establish an uncontested legacy of democratic egalitarianism. The debate over the meaning of the Terror did not end on the last page of Bazcko’s book. It continued after, with the revolutionaries arguing that the Terror was sui generis, a kind of coup d’état within the Revolution that in no way spoke to the Revolution’s ultimate significance.[14] Indeed, as I tried to show in the conclusion of Quest for a Civic Order, there was a dialogue between the surviving conventionnels after 1815 and a younger generation of historians.[15] The internal coup d’etat thesis was quietly forgotten to be replaced by the ‘thesis of circumstances’ argument, an argument that can be traced to the Revolution itself. At the time, it was fluid, and could be manipulated to suit the needs of the moment.[16] Only later, after much refining, suppression, trimming, and buffing did the thesis of circumstances become modern, as it were.
The Thesis of Circumstances
Quest for a Civic Order tries to deal with the most prominent explanation and defence of the Revolution, the “thesis of circumstances;” that is, the argument that the revolutionaries and the terrorists did what they did because of the extreme peril in which the nation found itself as a result of internal insurrection, the threat of foreign invasion, economic collapse, and treason in the military and in the government. Some historians have been uncomfortable for a long time with the thesis of circumstances because to them it appeared to excuse all too much. But François Furet and Keith Baker articulated a counter-argument to the thesis of circumstance brilliantly. Without reviving the thesis of circumstance either, Quest for a Civic Order scatters its critique of the Furet-Baker argument throughout the text, so let me take the opportunity to express it more succinctly.
As I understand it, the Furet-Baker thesis is that the anti-democratic and authoritarian strains within the Enlightenment and the philosophy of the early Revolution led to/scripted/pointed in the direction of the Terror. In other words, the Terror has its origins in ideology, whether that was the attempt to break totally with the past and reconstruct society on the basis of ideology; in the inherent tension between the principle of sovereignty expressed as the General Will and the sovereignty of representative government which revolutionaries distrusted anyway; in the adoption of a language of will as opposed to a language of justice; in the baleful influence of classical republicanism; and so on.[17]
There are two problems with this approach. The first is that to connect the Ideology dot directly to the Terror dot, one has to forget about explaining why the Terror occurred when it did and where it did. Yet the timing and spatial distribution of Terror were not random; the narrative between 1789 and 1793 matters enormously. And to understand the narrative, one must return to human agency, social structures, local political peculiarities, how the Revolution affected boring things like taxation and rents, or interesting ones like religious structures and culture: in short, one must pay attention to the fact that the Revolution was resisted.
The other problem is that those who want to draw a heavy black line between ideology and Terror never define the Terror precisely, or at all. Not only is there a blank when it comes to defining institutions, juridical frameworks, the very different operational patterns of different revolutionary tribunals, the relation between local faction and extreme repression there is also a blank when it comes to defining terrorist ideology. Or indeed, whether terrorist ideology was even necessary to have a terrorist regime. If we assume Terror was coterminous with military, popular, and revolutionary commissions and tribunals, it is a fact that such institutions functioned after Thermidor until well into the Consulate with a nearly identical legal basis and with the same expedited operating procedures as those of the Year II with none of the same chilling rhetoric justifying them.[18]
Moreover, it is simply assumed that the rhetoric of the Terror was vaguely Rousseauist and that Robespierre embodied it. But while the high priests of the Convention could recite Rousseauist theories of sovereignty better than anyone in their class, the rhetoric of repression in the provinces was much more varied. This language was primarily that of punishment, vengeance, cleansing, and curing, but Biblical as this sounds, there was no forgiveness or redemption either. Along with this were classic metaphors of purification--lightning, fire, and magisterial power--the purpose of which was to intimidate the lethargic and to extirpate decay, degeneracy, sloth, moral lassitude, and diseased parts of the body politic. The mood was never defensive; instead it was excited, exhilarated, impassioned, triumphal, and defiant.[19]
In effect, the revisionists and the cultural historians are in the same kind of historiographical box that the Marxists were in: the classical interpretation of the French Revolution. This was a top-down, Paris-out interpretation, one that denied “agency” to the provinces, and that dismissed as worthless or backward the opinions of the vast majority of French men and women. A great deal of cultural history is uncannily similar. It too adopts a top-down, Paris-out diffusion model of political processes and claims to characterize the political culture of huge numbers of people by examining newspapers and pamphlets and extrapolating from there. Archival research is rare. A couple of days in the CARAN to satisfy one’s curiosity is good enough; immersing oneself in provincial archives is apparently anathema.[20]
In the Workshop of History: Constructing the Modern Revolution
Too many cultural historians not only define their field too narrowly, they also do not seem to realize how many of the assumptions they make about the Revolution itself derive from their predecessors, whose goals were often very different from foreign academic historians to-day. The classical interpretation was initially intended to give the Revolution a human face. In some cases--the happy years, the good Revolution--this is easy. In other cases, it is not. Take, for instance, the issue of state sponsored violence. Part of the early strategy of making the Revolution acceptable to those who made and acclaimed the Second Republic involved airbrushing out the maximalist terror (a term defined in the book, pp. 177-8) from historical memory: the Bédoin Affair where sixty-three people were guillotined or shot because someone (who was never caught) tossed a liberty tree down a well; the lynchings of refractory priests at La Rochelle in March 1793 where the perpetrators, some of them women, joyously danced through the streets soaked in the blood of their victims (agency through depravity?); the deportation and brutal resettlement of Basques; the ghastly mission of Joseph Le Bon in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais (he once had a woman executed for playing the piano while the news of the fall of Valenciennes to the Austrians was announced); and the operation of revolutionary and military tribunals at Nantes and Angers where thousands of people were executed following so-called trials that lasted a few seconds and where on certain days, every single accused was found guilty and sentenced to death.[21]
Where the suppression of memory proved impossible, as with the noyades at Nantes or the mitraillades at Lyon, it was always possible to present these as the work of deranged or isolated individuals, like Carrier or Collot d’Herbois. Historians who do this accept the Thermidoreans’ view of the Terror, a view that wanted to develop a discourse that preserved a revolutionary republican regime but that severed that regime from Terror. This discourse also limited the inevitable settling of accounts to prominent players and allowed others who had also done appalling things to slip into the gloom of the past where they still remain. The great advantage of this focussing on Carrier and Collot was that it evaded any discussion of, for example, drownings elsewhere, as at Angers, or the operation of the Commission des Sept at Lyon. The consequence was that by the twentieth century, it was possible to void the Terror of content and to normalize it, to de-problematize it, to present it as a more or less commonplace judicial procedure.[22] Thus the dream of a new political order could be maintained once again. The stolen goods miraculously re-appeared, and we can all pretend that reality was just a nightmare. In any case, nightmares are soon forgotten.
Since the early classical writers eliminated or reduced the phenomenon of atrocity and since many republican historians after Aulard downplayed the civil wars, both the Vendean Wars and the others, it is easy to start asking questions mal posées about the Terror. Minimizing the degree of opposition the Revolution provoked leads to seeing the Terror as generated from within the revolutionary mentality, from an inner craving of Jacobinism to create enemies by imagining conspiracies everywhere. Or to see Terror as the result of language, or alternatively, to explain the violence of the period as the opening of a discursive gap so great in the national community that only violence could act as a sort of negotiation of the “mutual incomprehension.” Or one can say that Jacobin violence was a reversion to atavistic urges, a function of the cruelty of the monarchy and the zeal of religious intolerance that punished dissent. Both of these corrupted popular sensibilities.[23] Although they are certainly worth discussing, none of these propositions recognizes that the Jacobins faced serious enemies with passionately held beliefs; that extremist Jacobinism in the Midi was an outgrowth of torturous intra-urban disputes for power between elites and among the common people; and that the revolutionaries’ fear of conspiracies was reasonable, at least up to a point.
At the same time, it seems to me, this does not mean that repression was a simple matter of justifiable self-protection and legitimate defence. Just as the Terror was not the unfurling of consequences of abstract principles, neither was it a measured response to treason and invasion. Instead, its narrative is how contemporaries tried to deal with the fiscal and religious policy mistakes of the Constituent Assembly. These mistakes did not flow from the enormously successful revolution that destroyed the Old Regime and gave the world the Declaration of Rights, which, as Michel Vovelle has reminded us, is still a beacon and an inspiration. Instead, ill-considered decisions that harmed the new citizenry’s economic security and religious convictions provoked popular opposition and a simultaneous effort at repression. Each fatal decision afterwards--and especially the war--made it more and more difficult to return to the bliss of the fateful, incomparable year, 1789. The outcome was not scripted, but still the Revolution’s terrible agonies and legacies made establishing democracy in France enormously difficult. Surely, this is its eternal fascination and its lesson.
NOTES
[1] D.M.G. Sutherland, “Peasants, Lords, and Leviathan: Winners and Losers from the Abolition of French Feudalism, 1780-1820,” Journal of Economic History, 62, no. 2, (March 2002): 1-24.
[2] “Democracy, episode 11,” broadcast CBC, July 14, 1989, rebroadcast October 1990, rebroadcast on History Channel, November 23, 1998.
[3] See, for instance, the review in The Economist (November 2, 2002: 82) of Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Penguin, 2002), a review that totally fails to realize how Jones’s portrayal of the Revolution has a distinct point of view, one closer to Soboul than to Furet.
[4] See especially, Steven L Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies: France, 1789/1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995): passim.
[5] Curious readers might like to sample a rendition of the October Days that leaves men, and by extension, the military component, entirely out of the story in Donald Kagan, Steven E. Ozment, and Frank M. Turner, The Western Heritage 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003): 636. This photo-shopping of the role of the National Guard and the King’s Bodyguard is slipping into academic writing too: see David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 295-6.
[6] Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).
[7] Lynn Avery Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 34.
[8] Laurent Cartayrade, “Pidansat de Mairobert (1727-1779) and the Observateur Anglais: inventing the ‘Ancien régime,’” MA thesis, University of Maryland, 1991.
[9] This is not to say that the image and representation of the monarchy remained static. David Garrioch is the latest of many to tackle this difficult question (The Making of Revolutionary Paris, 169-78), but he more frequently asserts the unpopularity of the king rather than demonstrates how ubiquitous this unpopularity was among Parisians. Needless to say, there was apparently no expression of hostility to the principle of monarchy itself. Despite the desacralization argument, there is little evidence for it among future deputies to the Estates General. Actually Tackett cites none at all: Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996): 102-3). Louis XVI remained personally popular among Parisians until the Flight to Varennes; see Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003): 101.
[10] Antoine-Claire Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur la Convention, et le Directoire (Paris: Baudouin frères, 1824): 11.
[11] See Melvin Edelstein’s review in Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 303 (1996): 161-4; Jeff Horn’s in ibid., no. 311 (1998): 89-109; Rafe Blaufarb, “The French Revolution: The Birth of European Popular Democracy?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995): 608-18; Timothy Tackett’s review in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 44 (1997): 167-9. See also Melvin Edelstein, “L’apprentissage de la citoyenneté : participation électorale des campagnards et des citadins 1789-1793,” in L’image de la Révolution française: communications présentées lors du Congrès mondial pour le bicentenaire de la Révolution, Sorbonne, Paris, 6-12 juillet 1989, ed. Michel Vovelle, (Paris ; New York: Pergamon Press, 1989), I, 15-25. Despite the sub-title Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789-1799 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Malcolm Crook points out the limits of the electoral system as an apprenticeship and argues against its reflecting a new political culture.
[12] “What’s after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies, 23/1 (2000): 195.
[13] A. Salomon de La Chapelle, Histoire des tribunaux révolutionnaires de Lyon et de Feurs, établis en 1793 par les représentants du peuple, et liste des contre-révolutionnaires mis à mort (Lyon, 1879): vj-vij. Maurice Wahl, “Joseph Chalier. Etude sur la Révolution française à Lyon,” Revue historique, 34, no. 1 (1887): 18-9.
[14] Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution After Robespierre (Cambridge, England; New York; Paris: Cambridge University Press; Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 1994). Mona Ozouf, “The Terror after the Terror: An Immediate History,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: The Terror, ed. Keith Michael Baker, (New York: Pergamon, 1994): 5-38. Howard G. Brown, “Echoes of the Terror,” forthcoming in the December special issue of Historical Reflections/ Réflexions historiques, entitled ‘Violence and the French Revolution.’
[15] Sergio Luzzatto, Il terrore ricordato: memoria e tradizione dell’esperienza rivoluzionaria. Nuova ed. ampliata. ed. (Torino: Einaudi, 2000).
[16] Contrast, for example, Collot d’Herbois’s speech to the Convention of 1 nivôse An II on his mission to Lyon with his defense a year later: Rapport fait au nom du Comité de salut public sur la situation de Commune-Affranchie. s.l., s.n. and Éclaircissemens nécessaires sur ce qui s’est passé à Lyon l’année dernière. Paris: De l’Imprimerie nationale, 1795. Both of these are available on Gallica.
[17] François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1981), esp. 62-3. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 25-7, 252-305. And Baker’s introduction to the Terror volume (supra): xiii-xxviii. See also Patrice Gueniffey, La politique de la Terreur: essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789-1794 (Paris: Fayard, 2000): passim.
[18] Howard G. Brown, “From Organic Society to Security State: The War on Brigandage in France, 1797-1802,” Journal of Modern History, 69, no. 4 (1997), pp. 661-95.
[19] I hope to elaborate on these issues in my paper to the WSFH on October 31, 2003.
[20] Rebecca Spang, “Paradigms and Paranoids: How Modern Is the French Revolution?” American Historical Review, 108/1 (2003): 144, a call for a “return to the archives.” Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) is an example of how avoidance of local archives diminishes the quality of the work. Collot d’Herbois, for example, had an audience--the people of Lyon--in mind during his mission there in October-November 1793. Consulting the immensely rich Fonds Coste at the Bibliothèque municipale of Lyon as well as many secondary works (e.g., Michel Biard, Collot d’Herbois: légendes noires et Révolution. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1995), not to mention Collot’s political writings, would have enhanced the author’s thesis about the confluence of political and theatrical styles during the period. It might also have avoided important inaccuracies like repeating the old saw that Collot’s mission to Lyon was motivated by revenge for the hostile reception he received there in 1787-8. Since he was not badly received, this fable should be investigated further.
[21] Except for the following, these affairs are discussed in Quest for a Civic Order: Claudy Valin, Autopsie d’un massacre : journées des 21 et 22 mars 1793 (Saint-Jean-d’Angély: Editions Bordessoules, 1992); and Auguste-Joseph Paris, La terreur dans le Pas-de-Calais et dans le Nord. Histoire de Joseph Le Bon et des tribunaux révolutionnaires d’Arras et de Cambrai. 2. éd. rev. et augm. ed. (Arras: Rousseau-Leroy, 1864).
[22] See Lynn Hunt’s very fine discussion of this in “Forgetting And Remembering: The French Revolution Then And Now,” American Historical Review, 100/4 (1995): 1119-35. For an example of the process of minimizing both opposition and Terror, see Jones, Great Nation where the beginnings of the Vendean rising in March 1793 are described as “civil disobedience,” (468) and where the author fails to mention the decree ordering the complete physical destruction of Lyon (486-7).
[23] Dorinda Outram, “Revolution and Repression,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, no. 1 (1992): 58-67, esp. p. 64. Antoine Casanova, Claude Mazauric, and Claudine Ducol, Vive la Révolution : 1789-1989: réflexions autour du bicentenaire 1789-1989 (Paris: Messidor/Editions sociales, 1989): 110. Patrice Higonnet, Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998): 3, 114, 182.
D.M.G. Sutherland
University of Maryland
ds79@umail.umd.edu
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H-France Review Vol. 3 (October 2003), No. 125
ISSN 1553-9172
