David Andress

Beyond irony and relativism: what is postmodern history for

Abstract This essay argues that, to avoid debates over postmodernism in history becoming sterile disputation, new views of the purpose of history are required. Works which address the teaching of history in relation to postmodernism have tended to converge on the idea of history as a public discourse/narrative, to the neglect of questions of its individual educative value for the student. History reconfigured as a mode of exploration in human action and perception, via the kind of ethical perspectives suggested by Richard Rorty, would evade the need to find ‘truth’ either in agreed narratives or a critical present‐centred perspective (an implication, it is suggested, of Keith Jenkinss recent work). The value and purpose of history, if it cannot unproblematically indicate ‘truths’ outside of the individuals perspective, would best be seen as helping to expand and destabilize that perspective by challenging its bases. History as a tool of personal growth requires rather more discomfiture to the student th...

The denial of social conflict in the French Revolution: discourses around the Champ de Mars massacre, 17 July 1791.

This article argues that, despite the revisionist trend in recent historiography, the Champ de Mars Massacre has continued to be seen as a straightforward social conflict. Moreover, a strong tendency simply to denounce popular violence still prevails in that historiography, despite a body of work on the cultural complexities of this phenomenon in the eighteenth century. Contemporary reactions to the massacre present a more ambivalent picture of it. Detained individuals frequently expressed social hostility toward the elite, and it is clear that much of the violence of this day partook of these attitudes and of their inverse expression from above, but press and administrative reactions focused on locating groups outside society on whom to pin the blame. Such reactions crossed the political spectrum, and it is suggested that the whole episode demonstrates at once the complex sociopolitical tensions of the French capital and the inability of the contemporary political culture to theorize a divided body politic.

Neighborhood Policing in Paris from Old Regime to Revolution: The Exercise of Authority by the District de Saint-Roch, 1789-1791

The reputation and supposed significance of the Parisian districts of 1789–1790, formed to elect delegates to the Estates-General, and transformed by revolution into organs of local democratic power, suffered a classic rise and fall in the latter half of the twentieth century. Considered not even worthy of an index entry in George Rude’s classic 1959 study of Parisian popular protest, they were passed over for reasons of strict chronology by Albert Soboul’s simultaneously researched account of the ‘‘popularmovement’’ of the sansculottes. As Soboul rose to dominance, however, historians sought to extend his model of the essential merits of the local Parisian activists back in time, and the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a series of publications that took the districts as their explicit focus, placing them in a narrative of ever-present, but accelerating, virtuous radicalism. For Maurice Genty, the districts were the first step in a revolutionary apprenticeship in democracy, while for R. B. Rose, they were the start of a movement that led directly to the ‘‘making’’ of the sansculottes—in their soboulien idealized sense.

Press and public in the French Revolution: a Parisian case-study from 1791

A very great deal has been written in recent years about the press in the French Revolution, and we are now well informed on the technology and work-organization of the major presses, the careers and manipulations of major publishers, the rhetorical strategies of leading propagandists, and the general array of press techniques which originated in the ancien regime and blossomed under revolutionary liberty.’ What remains less clear, however, is just how the press related to its immediate context at the time of production - what impact the turbulent politics of Paris had on the many publications that issued from the city, and how exactly those publications themselves influenced what was going on around them. Subtle and complex pictures have been painted of the evolution of attitudes and discourses within the press, but these have not translated well into efforts made to relate press discourse to events and attitudes visible in public life, particularly outside formal politics.

The Shifting Landscape of Revolutionary Interpretations: A Death of the Past and a Rebirth of History?

If there has been one great advance in the historiography of the French Revolution since the bicentennial, it is perhaps that we, as historians, have ceased to argue about what kind of world-historical event the Revolution essentially was and have resolved to focus more concretely on how its remarkable episodes were experienced.

Popular Violence in the French Revolution: Revolt, Retribution and the Slide to State Terror

There can be few historical subjects so mythologized as the violence of crowds in the French Revolution. As recently as 2005, leading historians Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt were content to state bluntly that ‘popular violence defined the French Revolution’, and went on to note that such violence ‘pushed the Revolution forward, but … also threatened to dissolve it altogether in an acid wash of blood, political vengeance and anarchic disorder’.1 While Censer and Hunt, like other surveys of the historiography, are able to show clearly that historians have embraced competing collective visions of this threatening (or in the case of George Rude, politically conscious) mass, they do not consider the overall validity of such characterizations.2 While it may be true that mass political involvement in revolutionary events most easily took the form of protesting crowds, and while such a crowd always admits of the potential of violence, there is a long way from these basic facts to the attribution of political change to ‘popular violence’. As this chapter will argue, it is the structures and limitations of ‘popular violence’ which are the most interesting features of that phenomenon, and which connect it far more intricately than is usually recognized to the other much-mythologized component of the French Revolution, the state-directed violence of the Terror.

Book Reviews and Short Notices

So many books with the same title. And, apparently, there are many more—in total 13 at the last count, responding to ‘la nouvelle question d’histoire moderne proposée à l’Agrégation et au CAPES d’histoire’, which, according to the blurb on the Poussou volume here, ‘frappe par son ampleur, tant sur le plan historique que sur le plan historiographique’. Well, French academia has evidently struck back with vigour. Of the three volumes reviewed here, that by Robert Calvet comes closest to being a simple textbook. Calvet is a fairly prolific author who has turned out one or two books a year for some time now, alternating between broad socio-cultural surveys (Les Japonais, 2003) and this type of academic text; he has also recently produced volumes on seventeenth-century politics and nineteenth-century rural society for the CAPES. This work is well laid out, with brief thematic chapters: the first seven on the events in America and France, the following ten a geographical survey of unrest elsewhere in Europe and the world, and the final seven a series of concluding reflections on counter-revolution, conspiracies, urban and rural revolts, women’s roles, and religion and myth-making in revolutions. The majority of chapters end with one or more extracts from primary sources, and incorporate a fair degree of historiographical discussion into their presentation. The bibliographical resources provided are impressive, although weighted a little less than might have been possible towards very recent work. In aspiring to be comprehensive, the book sometimes finds itself diving far back beyond its notional period—to the conquest of the Incas in the 1500s, for example (p. 136), or is reduced to excessively brief summary— such as of Lynn Hunt’s work on revolutionary symbolism (p. 222). However, it retains throughout a tone that is brisk, yet reflective, often turning aside to neatly sum up a problem of historiography, or raise an interesting geographical parallel. Given the broad range offered, it is an impressive achievement for a single author. This is especially the case when one notes how many scholars have been brought together for the other volumes

Representing the Sovereign People in the Terror

By ‘Terror’, this chapter takes to mean the period approximately from the summer of 1793 to the summer of 1794, and the term is used in that sense as a marker, rather than a subject of analysis. The other three terms of the title, however, shall all be subject to analysis, singly and collectively, because ‘representing the sovereign people’ encapsulates in a phrase many of the most urgent concerns of the radical Revolution.