We are delighted to present here an entirely new research article by Annie Jourdan of the University of Amsterdam, exploring the context of the French Revolution’s infamous ‘Law of 22 prairial’. The full article can be downloaded from the link below:

Les journées de Prairial an II

All comments and reflections welcome!

A thought-provoking meditation on how the ‘Arab Spring’ represented a brief window in which it seemed that social media was an uncontrollable force for democratic empowerment. And how it turned out, instead, to be very easy to turn to the cause of supporting authoritarian and reactionary structures.

In this piece, extracted from a new book, the journalist Jack Shenker comes very close to looking forward to the day that schoolchildren confront soldiers in the name of “the Revolution”.

A new colleague joins us at the Revolution Network, and introduces himself below: welcome, Jacob!

Laughter as a Political Strategy in the National Convention

My name is Jacob Zobkiw and I have recently been awarded a PhD for my thesis entitled ‘Political Strategies of Laughter in the National Convention, 1792-1794’ at the University of Hull. Having just discovered this fascinating blog thanks to Marisa Linton, I thought it might be appropriate to introduce my work to the community and offer a few thoughts regarding the motivations behind laughter in the Republic. Continue reading What was there to laugh about during the Terror? →

Adriana Sisko of the University of Kentucky, who works on  same-sex relationships in the French Revolution, gives an extended response to the debate opened in the previous post:

This is fascinating, and I’m happy to see a discussion of this nature amongst scholars I admire.

I’ve never read the ‘des bains chinois de Saint-Just’ reference before so I’m very interested to hear more on that. My initial thoughts are that Danton’s claim relates to both 1) the preexisting rumors of Saint-Just having ‘noble blood’ and therefore aristocratic habits…some amusingly mocked Saint-Just by calling him ‘Le Chevalier’; and possibly 2) an insinuation of the sexual debauchery some attributed to public bath houses, as well as the linkage frequently made between aristocratic monetary greed and sexual greed that ‘exceeded’ the bounds of the natural. After all, earlier during the 18^th century police monitored public bathhouses based on the fear and assumption that indecency was more likely to take place there. There were of course several bathhouses in Paris. Even during the Revolution there were multiple bathhouses in Paris. I would be interested in confirmation in this, but I’ve read in secondary sources that the history of public baths as places of sexual debauchery and even sodomy dates back to the Middle Ages in France (Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600, by David Higgs). Fun fact, earlier during the 18th century Diderot wrote the following in a confessional private letter of his: “In the public baths among a number of young men, I noticed one of astonishing beauty, and I could not help drawing near him”. Continue reading Private and Shameful Vices – the debate continues →

When on 31 March 1794, at the height of the French Revolutionary Terror, Saint-Just denounced Danton, Desmoulins and other deputies, detailing a long series of ‘crimes’, one accusation stood out as rather curious. Saint-Just said that Danton had been a ‘faux ami’ to Desmoulins when he spoke of him with contempt and attributed to him ‘des vices honteux.’ Saint–Just took the accusation from notes made by Robespierre who declared that Danton had attributed Desmoulins’ waywardness to ‘un vice privé et honteux, mais absolument étranger à la Revolution.’ Does anyone have an idea of what this shameful vice of Desmoulins may have been? We have come up with a number of possibilities, but we wondered if anyone else had ideas. Possibly on a similar note, Danton at his trial spoke of ‘des bains chinois de Saint-Just’. We wondered what may have lain behind these allegations and counter-allegations, and particularly whether they might be code for sexual allegations and/or dodgy political deals, aristocratic luxury or an alarming combination of all three? We have found some intriguing information on the Chinese Baths on the Boulevard des Italiens, in the late eighteenth century.

Thanks for any help you can give with this.

Marisa Linton and Mette Harder

David A. Bell has been keeping busy lately fanning the flames of revolutionary contention. See the updated post below for Eric Hazan’s response to a recent review, and this forthright exchange about a very different interpretation of what the French Revolution all really meant.

Popular sociability as a concept and a problem in revolutionary Paris, 1789-1791.

David Andress

Given at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montréal, Canada, October 2014.

The precise contours of popular sociability in distant periods are, like crime, one of the so-called ‘dark figures’ of history. We know that the lives of ordinary people were full, self-evidently, of interactions, and we can glimpse through the historical record a qualitative flavour of many of them, but a synthetic overview can only come by piecing together a few limited fragments. There were somewhere in the region of half a million people of the labouring and artisanal classes in late eighteenth-century Paris, and we can say an extraordinarily great deal more about many of them than we could half a century ago. Continue reading A conference paper on revolutionary popular sociability →

… not that they have much to say about it, except for a baffled tone & a suggestion of those crazy French, caring about politics…

The Atlantic was a bit more thoughtful a few days earlier…

According to the French leftist standard-bearer Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the act of turning the events of the 1790s into the backdrop for Assassins Creed Unity, the latest instalment in a successful first-person adventure game series, is “a dirty business of instilling more self-disgust and declinism in the French,” adding that it risks leaving the nation with nothing but religion and skin-colour to unite them – with evidently reactionary implications.

While one might be tempted to remark that historians of the French Revolution are now finding out how medievalists have felt all these years, there is no doubt that this game has occasioned lively debate – even before anyone had the chance to actually play it. Continue reading The existential horror of reducing the Great Revolution to a video game… →