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Terror

The Terror is a central topic in French Revolutionary studies and beyond. It has served as a cautionary tale for all revolutionary impulses for centuries. Can one have a revolution without terror? Or are revolution and terror 'co-substantial', meaning you can't have one without the other. Scholars working on the French Revolution more specifically confront the question of how a revolution, brought about in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, could end up lapsing into oppression, purges and fratricide? The scale of the catastrophe itself merits the historian's attention: 17,000 judicial executions, nearly that figure again in prison deaths, and between 250,000 and 400,000 deaths in civil war. The Terror was traumatising at the time, of cousre, but the guillotine's shadow would hang over France throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To support the principles of the Year II (1793-1794) was often seen by liberals and conservatives as reviving the Terror.

Different methodologies and conclusions have been adopted on the period. Marxist historians tended to attribute the Terror to circumstances, notably the war and food shortages. Second-wave revisionists emphasised ideology, which (as we have seen), they believe was dangerously utopian. More recently, historians have stressed the role of emotions, particularly of anger and fear, in bringing about the political violence of the Terror. There are also debates over dating the Terror. Some begin with the 'bottom-up' terror of the September Prison Massacres in Paris in 1792, others with the 'top-down' creation of revolutionary tribunals in 1793. And whereas some see the Terror ending with the fall of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety on 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794), others stress that political violence and purges continued over the next year.

SlidesLink opens in a new window for the Terror phase (1792-94)

Quiz: on Popkin (ch 5) and other readings up to and including this week. 20 multiple choice questions. Counts towards participation.

 

Core primary reading

* Mason and Rizzo, FRDC, chps 8- 9

Core secondary reading

D. Edelstein, ‘What was the Terror?’ in Andress (ed.), OHFR, 453-470.

Film

We will discuss the film in Week 5 (next week)

(1983). Dubbed in English

(1983). Original, subtitled in English

 

Questions

1. What are the main lines of interpretation of the Terror in today's scholarship, according to Dan Edelstein?

2. What do the primary sources reveal about the role of the emotions in the Terror?

3. What do the primary sources reveal about the role of ideology in the Terror?

4. What do the primary sources reveal about the role of circumstances or any other factor in the Terror?

 

Further reading

Overviews of the Lead-up to the Terror

D. Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom (2005)

T. Tackett, The Coming of the Terror (2013)

M. Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution

S. Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (2012)

P. Campbell, T. Kaiser, M. Linton, Conspiracy in the French Revolution (2007)

 

Terror

D. Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (2008)

A.J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (2000)

C. Hesse, ‘The Law of the Terror’, Modern Language Notes 114: 4 (1999), 702-718

H. Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution (2^nd ed. 2010)

R. Scurr, Fatal Purity. Robespierre and the French Revolution (2006)

D. Andress, ‘Liberty and Unanimity: The Paradoxes of Subjectivity and Citizenship in the French Revolution’, Language and Revolution (2002)

A. de Baecque, Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths under the French Revolution (2002).

B. Reilly, ‘Ideology on Trial: Testing a theory of revolutionary political culture’, French History, 19 (2005).

T. Tackett, ‘Interpreting the Terror’, French Historical Studies, 24 (2001)

N. Hampson, The Terror in the French Revolution (1981)

R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (1941)

P. Guéniffey, La Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence institutionnelle, 1789-94 (2000)

P. Higonnet, ‘Terror, Trauma and the Young Marx Explanation of Jacobin Politics’, P&P, 191 (2006)

M. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (1988)

M. Ozouf, ‘Le cortège et la ville: les itinéraires parisiens des cortèges révolutionnaires’, AnnESC, 26 (1971)

J.P. Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (1997)

J.P. Gross, ‘Progressive taxation and social justice in eighteenth-century France’, P&P, 140 (1993)

S. Wahnich, In Defense of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (2016)

P. McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2012)

 

Jacobins to 1792

C. Lucas, ‘The crowd and politics’, FRMPC 2.

G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959)

G. Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century : Studies in Popular Protest (1970)

R. Cobb, Paris and the Revolution (1998)

G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959)

R. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820 (1970)

R.B. Rose, Tribunes and Amazons: Men and Women of Revolutionary France, 1789-1871 (1998)

H. Burstin, Le Faubourg Saint-Marcel à l’époque révolutionnaire (1983)

R. Monnier, Le Faubourg Saint-Antoine (1789-1815) (1981)

R. Monnier, L’espace public démocratique: Essai sur l’opinion à Paris de la Révolution au Directoire (1994)

M. Genty, Paris 1789-95: l’apprentissage de la citoyenneté (1987)

P. Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (1998)

M. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution (3 vols., 1982-99)

D. Andress, The French Revolution and the People (2004)

C. Walton, 'Clubs, Parties, Factions' in D. Andress, The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (2015), ch 21, pp. 362-381.

 

Esp. 1793-94 (Year II)

R. Cobb, Paris and its Provinces, 1792-1802 (1975)

R. Cobb, The People’s Armies (1987)

M. Slavin, ‘The French Revolution in Minaiture: the Section Droits-de-l’hommem 1789-95 (1984)

M. Slavin, The Making of an Insurrection: Parisians Sections and the Gironde (1986)

M. Slavin, The Hébertistes to the Guillotine (1994)

A. Soboul, The Parisian sans-Culottes and the French Revolution (1964)

G. Williams, Artisans and Sans-culottes (1968)

J.M. Gourden, Gens de métiers et sans-culottes. Les artisans dans la Révolution (1988)

W. Sewell, ‘The sans-culotte rhetoric of subsistence’, FRMPC 4.

C. Lucas, ‘Revolutionary violence, the people and the Terror’, FRMPC 4

R.M. Andrews, ‘The Justices of the Peace in Revolutionary Paris, 1792-4’, P&P, 52 (1971)

R.M. Andrews, ‘Social structures, political elites and ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792-4’, JSH, 19 (1985)

M. Sonenscher, ‘Artisans, sans-culottes and the French Revolution’ in A. Forrest & P.M. Jones (eds), Reshaping France (1991)

J. Guilhaumou, ‘Les milles langues du Père Duchesne: la parodie de la culture populaire pendant la Révolution’, Dix-huitième siècle, 18 (1986)

C. Jones & R. Spang, ‘Sans-culottes, sans-café, sans tabac: realms of necessity and luxury in eighteenth-century France’, in M. Berg & H. Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850 (1999)

R. Wrigley, ‘Transformations of a Revolutionary emblem: the liberty cap in the French Revolution’, FH, 11 (1997)

H. Burstin, ‘Problèmes de travail à Paris sous la Révolution’, RHMC, 44 (1997)

A. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution (2000)