Minchul Kim

Volney and the French Revolution

ABSTRACT:This article examines Volney right before and after 1789. Placed together in their intellectual historical context, his works in this period – Travels in Syria and Egypt (1787), Considerations (1788), and The Ruins (1791) – offer a valuable guide into the workings of the “Enlightenment narrative” of “European” and “Oriental” history at the critical juncture of the age of revolutions. The image of Volney as a progressive stadial historian and optimist revolutionary hereby cedes its place to that of Volney the worried republican indulged in the heroic attempt to find a way to build a free and stable polity.

Pierre-Antoine Antonelle and representative democracy in the French Revolution

ABSTRACT This article examines the political thought of Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, a prominent democrat during the French Revolution. In pamphlets and newspaper articles between 1795 and 1799 he put forth an elaborate theory of ‘representative democracy’ which was a novel and radical vision of political reform and republican international order. His political and economic plan for a democratic future was focused on conceptualizing a realistic transition path to a genuinely republican society. In the wake of historians who pointed out the existence and importance of the idea of ‘representative democracy’ during the Directory, this article delves into the content of this idea by placing it in the context of Antonelle and his fellow travellers’ political struggle to consolidate the Republic while avoiding both anarchy and aristocracy.

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

Humans naturally only own their own wills. Property rights in the material world have been worked out over the course of history, and the ownership of one’s own will does not alter that fact; there is no rationally and ‘metaphysically free property’ (58). This conservative theory of the right to property contradicted Kant’s nascent account of rightful external freedom, and so he strove to demolish it by demonstrating that the right to possession is a fundamental postulate of natural reason. Contrastingly, Maliks shows how Kant’s notions of ‘permissive laws’ and ‘provisional rights’, acceptable stepping stones on the way to republicanism proper, which have puzzled many commentators, are enunciated as part of an accommodation with conservatism that became more pronounced as the Revolution wore on and as Kant came ever more under attack from radicals such as Fichte. There are similar—and similarly illuminating—answers to questions about Kant’s intentions in all the chapters of this book. Kant’s Politics in Context is a remarkable piece of scholarship. Unusually, it will make for stimulating reading for Kant scholars—who have much to gain from Maliks’s contextualist approach—as well as serving as a clear introduction to Kant’s political theory. Kant, first narrator of the battle between rationalism and empiricism, probably only has himself to blame for the fact that the history of ideas has so often been written as the ‘history of ideas with a tendency to a teleology all their own’, as Annabel Brett once put it; but we can be thankful to Reidar Maliks for restoring to full view the teleology of a human being urgently and consummately engaged with the political issues of his day.

The many Robespierres from 1794 to the present

Biographies of Robespierre have been pouring out since the dawn of the century. Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc’s book is an intervention by two historians of modern political thought to the problem of ‘redundancy’ of his biographies that, according to the authors, change little or nothing of the prior works of sympathetic biographers, liberal scholars and ‘anti-revolutionary’ historians. There were not many biographers of Robespierre among the twentieth-century ‘republican’ historians who held a major portion of university posts in France, which is ironical, given the importance of his figure in French republican political culture. Touching on this issue, the authors question whether an authentic biography of ‘Robespierre the man’ is possible at all, given that a large quantity of source documents have been deliberately and lopsidedly destroyed by his political enemies since his death. Without an affirmative or negative answer, the authors head out to their own task: a ‘history of the idea of Robespierre’, delving into the creation of his légende from a long-term view that takes account of the specific contexts of its construction, eventually aiming at its deconstruction. The book is more detailed than George Rudé’s Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat (1975) and has a more richly contextualised narrative than François Crouzet’s short chapter, ‘French Historians and Robespierre: Dedicated to the Memory of François Furet’, in Haydon and Doyle’s co-edited volume, Robespierre (1999). Instead of merely exposing the positive or negative assessment of writers, Belissa and Bosc meticulously try to show how and in what context each writer wrote about Robespierre. The book is divided into three parts: Part I covers his lifetime, Part II covers his afterlife—that is, ‘the Robespierres’ from 1794 to 2012—and Part III is thematically arranged to show the repetitive arguments and patterns of the légende. Robespierre earned mostly negative representations in plays, novels and films. His representations in the political, cultural and academic spheres are classified into nine ‘facets’, each dealt with in sweeping syntheses in Part III: (1) the signs and origins of Robespierre’s mental ‘defects’ that can be allegedly discerned in his youth; (2) his body, either as the ‘infirm body of the tyrant’ or the ‘sacrificed body of the martyr’; (3) his sexuality, either the ‘licentious tale’ or the ‘chaste martyr’; (4) his moral and psychoanalytic character; (5) his political career as a revenge of the ‘envious’ and the ‘frustrated’; (6) the Terror and his ‘dictatorship’; (7) whether he was a ‘liberal bourgeois’ or a ‘leveller’; (8) his ‘Rousseauist’, ‘archaic’ and ‘utopian’ inclinations; and (9) his ‘priestly’ opposition to dechristianisation—and each of these aspects had variations within. While the elements of contemporary praise for the lawyer from Arras stayed more or less constant from his debut in the National Assembly and the Jacobin Club to his fall in