Reckoning with Terror

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The events of 9 Thermidor marked not only the end of the Reign of Terror but also the beginning of a long process of coming to terms with its legacies. This chapter examines this process. It argues that in the aftermath of the Terror, contemporaries of the revolutionary era grappled with a series of novel dilemmas around retribution, redress, and remembrance, confronting a wide range of issues about responsibility, loss, and individual, familial and social identity as a result. What made these dilemmas new is that they would have been unthinkable under the old regime. They emerged from the democratizing thrust of the Revolution. In this sense, the French Revolution transformed how modern societies face the consequences of massive violence.

Why Moderation?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This book explores moderation in French political thought during the period 1748–1830 by focusing on a wide range of political, historical, sociological, and philosophical writings related to the French Revolution. Arguing that moderation is the quintessential political virtue, the book discusses two main themes: moderation under the Old Regime, when moderate agendas were used as means of criticizing a rigid and inefficient hierarchical structure and proposing concrete blueprints for political reform; and various attempts at institutionalizing moderation during the revolution and its aftermath, when it was primarily interpreted and used as a means of “ending” the revolution. It suggests that moderation has intrinsic substantive political orientations and values of its own and is related to constitutionalism, a politics of skepticism as opposed to a “politics of faith” and of absolute ends. This prologue provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

The Afterlives of the Terror

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
Ordinary Citizens ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This book examines how those who lived through the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. It shows that, contrary to claims that are made often in the literature, there were complicated, painful, and often honest debates about how to deal with the effects of mass violence on self and society after the Terror. Revolutionary leaders, relatives of victims, and ordinary citizens argued about how to hold those responsible for the violence accountable, how to offer some sort of relief to the victims, and how to commemorate this controversial episode in the politically charged climate of post-revolutionary France. Their solutions were not perfect, but their debates were innovative. The dilemmas that they struggled with, dilemmas around retribution, redress, and remembrance, derived from the democratizing impulses of the Revolution. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and on the literature about the major traumas of the twentieth century, this book argues that the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts was born out of the social and political upheavals of the 18th century’s Age of Revolutions.

3. The reign of terror

2018 ◽  
pp. 38-53
Author(s):  
Charles Townshend
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

What are the origins of terrorism? ‘The reign of terror’ explains that the notion of terrorism, or terror, came from the French Revolution. The terror transformed the Revolution from a liberating to a destructive force. Those who instigated the terror had to find justification for their violent killing. Their motivation provides a key to the distinctive nature of modern terrorism. The revolutionaries may have seemed to act as crusaders, but the Reign of Terror was informed by the Enlightenment assumption that human agency can change the social order. The French Revolution’s use of violence created a model for the application of terrorizing force by state actors that lasted two centuries.

4. What it ended

2019 ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Vested Interest ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The French Revolution began as a destructive force. The revolutionaries wanted to abolish anything associated with the old order. ‘What it ended’ describes how the French Revolution had begun as an attack on despotism, aristocracy, old-style corporatism, and privilege. It provided an opportunity to dispense with the old and replace with new. However, although the Revolution symbolized the assertion of political will against the constraints of history, circumstance, and vested interest, the revolutionaries soon realized that will alone is not enough to destroy the old. The old fought back. But these attempts were always problematic as concerns with the old regime remained. No true restoration was ever possible.

Situating the Reign of Terror in the History of Modern Terrorism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The French Revolution

The historiography of terrorism attributes a foundational place to the Reign of Terror, yet the Reign of Terror was very different from anything associated with terrorism today. This chapter aims at placing the Reign of Terror in the history of modern terrorism. It discusses the multiple meanings of terror during the revolutionary era, when it was seen simultaneously as an emotional experience, a historical event, and a political concept. It also examines the practices of political violence during the French Revolution, showing that they were less repressive and more chaotic than is often assumed. The chapter argues that the Reign of Terror invites us to question the definitions and broaden the categories of analysis that currently dominate the historiography of terrorism.

From Caterpillar to Butterfly and Back: A Waistcoat of the French Revolution

Costume ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper analyses the construction, colour and enigmatic embroidered motifs of an extremely rare Revolutionary-era waistcoat or gilet, recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Though the garment’s provenance is unknown, it must have belonged to a noble convert to the Revolutionary cause; through his clothing, he declared his allegiance to the political and sartorial ideology of the Revolution. The gilet provides a snapshot of a man and a nation in the midst of a metamorphosis.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

Contemporary visions of France: the Revolution, Women and History: A Summary of the 1989 Fall Colloquia, New York University’s Institute of French Studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Studies ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The seven colloquia held at New York University’s Institute of French Studies during the Fall 1989 semester offered some new perspectives on the French Revolution, and took stock of various elements of French Society and history two hundred years after the taking of the Bastille.

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