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.

scholarly journals The Ire of Satire Meets the Error of Terror

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 200-204
Author(s):  
Biko Agozino
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Effective Policy ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The French Revolution

The reign of terror named terrorism as a state ideology during the French revolution but the practice of terrorism as public policy predated cries of liberte, egalite et fraternite, given the unprecedented peculiar history of Maafa or the African holocaust that went on for centuries, first across the Sahara and then across the Atlantic, under the sponsorship of various states. The error in terrorism is that it presumes that human beings are such scary cats that fear would be an effective policy for domination or liberation. On the contrary, human beings are a strange piece of work capable of facing the scariest threats even with a thrill of heroism or a yearning for martyrdom. The error in terrorism is that the state continues to fight fire with fire, a crazy form of vaccination by which the lethal doze of the disease is prescribed as the panacea for the virus. The error in anti-terrorism terrorism is that terrorists are not afraid to die and often crave martyrdom whether they are stateless or be-medaled agents of a state while the state frequently sponsors its own favorite terrorists against chosen enemies in proxy wars that tend to boomerang.

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.

Revolution as Vendetta: Patriotism in Piedmont, 1794–1821

1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Broers
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ideological Commitment ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.

Ancient Revolutions in the Literature of Polish Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226
Author(s):  
Maciej Junkiert
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
Literary Reception

This article aims to examine the Polish literary reception of the French Revolution during the period of Romanticism. Its main focus is on how Polish writers displaced their more immediate experiences of revolutionary events onto a backdrop of ‘ancient revolutions’, in which revolution was described indirectly by drawing on classical traditions, particularly the history of ancient Greeks and Romans. As this classical tradition was mediated by key works of German and French thinkers, this European context is crucial for understanding the literary strategies adopted by Polish authors. Three main approaches are visible in the Polish reception, and I will illustrate them using the works of Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). My comparative study will be restricted to four works: Krasiński's Irydion and Przedświt (Predawn), Słowacki's Agezylausz (Agesilaus) and Norwid's Quidam.

‘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.

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