Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, 2013

For contemporaries, probably the most striking feature of 1789 was its suddenness and completeness. In a matter of a few months, the most powerful monarchy in the European world, the wealthiest aristocracy, the most complex institutional apparatus, the most sophisticated hierarchy, crumbled, disappeared-and all without significant loss of blood. If it hadn't been 1789, and if they hadn't been brought up to use different linguistic protocols, the writers and talkers of the time might have called it all a miracle, a clear instance of the particular workings of Providence; Mirabeau or Lafayette or even Louis XVI himself might have been dubbed 'the Great Deliverer', the 'man of God's right hand', the instrument of God's benign purpose, as had William of Orange on a similarly bloodless and seemingly miraculous occasion (frequently compared to the events of 1789) a century earlier.! But, it was 1789. And the form of explanation was fundamentally different. Revolutions are, of course, literary events also, and the crumbling of the French state was saturated by words, in print, in conversations and in political meetings. The linguistic explosion was almost as striking as the revolutionary circumstances the writers and speakers grappled with, the new order they tried to explain. Groups hitherto politically inarticulate were suddenly invited to list their grievances so that the good king could put them right. The result was a collection of complaints and aspirations so complicated and voluminous that it still defies the computer. Newspapers and periodicals, few in number, subject to the vagiaries of ancien regime censorship, devoted in the main (as Mornet2 demonstrated) to belles lettres and science, made way for a deluge of politics; political clubs proliferated at every level; electoral, communal, sectional assemblies seemed to meet almost continuously; the various National Assemblies-the 'Constituant', the 'Legislative', and the 'Convention'-leant their enormous prestige to the rhetoric of Revolution. Some words quickly became taboo, mhers sacred: reading simple place names became 'a silent course in ethics'; and uttering terms like 'patrie' ,'nation', 'regeneration', 'virtue', 'terror', a son of revolutionary catechism. It is not too much to claim that the most striking and perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Revolution is indeed its new language of politics: 'its linguisticality', writes Lynn Hunt, 'is its most revealing aspect; its linguistic functions, its linguistic structure and its linguistic status are its most disclosive attributes' .3 Until recently, Revolutionary discourse has not received its proper attention: language has usually been treated as a a screen rather than a sign. Terms like virtue, for example, have made most historians uncornfonable: 'virtue', they have argued, must stand for something else. The opponents of the Revolution from Burke onwards had always argued that such language was invariably a hypocritical cloak, the tool of scoundrels or less frequently the self-delusion of fools. Marx devoted some of his most celebrated pages to what he called the masquerades or camouflages of Revolutionary language; and writers like Soboul or Poulantzas-more reductionist than their master-have written off the moral idioms or the rhetorical tropes of the Revolutionaries as mere ideology or false consciousness. Alben Soboul, for instance, sees in the 'vinue' invoked by Robespierre and St Just an instance of their pre-bourgeois intellectual limitations: 'incapable of analyzing the economic and social conditions of their time ... they believed in appeals to vinue'. Similarly, for Poulantzas, the terrorist idiom of the 'Pere Duchesne' was little more then 'a plebian manner to put an end to the enemies of the bougeoisie'.4 For their pan, revisionists like Cobban or Cobb, yet more materialist than the materialism they denounce, more caught in the polarization of the illusory and the real, simply don't bother

Reviews in History, 2015

a-peoples history of the -french-revolution Place of Publication: London Reviewer: Michiel Rys A People's History of the French Revolution is David Fernbach's translation of Eric Hazan's 2012 book Une histoire de la Révolution française. The change of title hints at what indeed is Hazan's original stance in his account of this historical event, an event that up to now has never ceased to fascinate writers and intellectuals. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that Hazan's History of the French Revolution appeared under this title in Verso Books, a publishing house famous for its stimulating critical books. Among these books are not only several people's histories (of Scotland, London etc.) but also a couple of reassessments of the French Revolution, such as the thought-provoking essay by Sophie Wahnich.(1) In Wahnich's analysis, 'Terror' has to be taken as an ultimate violent reflex, a last resort. It occurs at exactly those crucial and highly emotive moments, when the popular cause is under pressure and is betrayed by the representatives of the people. Hazan too tries to capture the anxieties of the people, tries to understand the course of events and is not tempted to take any a priori negative stance towards revolutionary violence. This position comes to the fore exemplarily in his short history of the semiotics of terror (pp. 299-303). Hazan makes a compelling case that (Jacobin) Terror is an ideological construct that is used as a rhetorical instrument to attack the political enemies of the Thermodorians (an idea also put forth by others, such as Alain Badiou (2)). Hazan suggests that Terror was another term for justice. Such a reading is in line with Sophie Wahnich's analyses, which try to break the alleged genealogical link between revolutionary Terror and totalitarian state violence in the last century. Moreover, Hazan's interpretation is a subtler version of Slavoj Žižek's radical, mobilizing reappraisal of Maximilien Robespierre's 'Divine Terror'. In a foreword to a selection of Robespierre's speeches, Žižek pleads for radically alternative politics in a more just society and thinks beyond capitalism and its social, economic and ecological catastrophes.(3)

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

Theory and Society, 1984

This paper aims to identify some challenges facing the field of French Revolutionary studies and proposes potential ways of moving forward. The most immediate challenge, I believe, involves making the Revolution relevant to debates about democracy. Throughout much of the twentieth century, interpretations of the Revolution were implicitly tied to competing conceptions of democracy, social and liberal. When François Furet famously stated that 'the revolution is over' in the 1970s, he meant that the Marxist philosophy of history had been debunked and that the 'totalitarian' nature of the French Revolutionary tradition had been exposed. (Furet, 1981(Furet, [orig. 1978) Though controversial, his claims revitalized the field in the decade leading up to the Revolution's bicentennial.

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English edition), 2016

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2001

Few would question the proposition that the French Revolution has been one of history's great polarizing events. The sheer scope of the revolutionary project and the means employed to transform abstract concepts into tangible ideals and institutions divided the Revolution's most ardent supporters from its most fervent detractors. The ambiguous tenure of the Revolution continued to cast a long shadow over the unsettled political culture of nineteenth-century France. However, as the Third Republic achieved the stability denied its two predecessors, so too, the Revolution was less the guiding force of the political left and more a national legacy. On a different level, though, the Revolution continued to generate conflict. The passions that once dominated French politics have, for the past three decades, reverberated in intellectual circles. The two studies explored in this review highlight, to varying degrees, the meaning of the French Revolution for both its participants and for subsequent generations. Whereas the collection of articles in Unfinished Revolutions examine the cultural idea of revolution in France (as opposed to the French Revolution, in particular), Marie-Hélène Huet's Mourning Glory considers both the French revolutionaries' views of the opportunities presented them as well as how posterity has treated the revolutionaries' efforts. In the context of Huet's presentation, Mourning Glory is a double entendre. On one level, it refers to the morning glory flower, whose radiance only

This contribution to a major debate surveys, evaluates and adds to recent interpretations of the Revolution since the Bicentenary in 1989.