Objects of Study or Agents of History – the continuing academic and moral conundrum of the violence of the French Revolution

David Andress

Given at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of French History, Durham, 11 July 2014

Today I’d like to talk about the question of how we talk about violence in the French Revolution. This is of course a perennial question over the last 225 years. However, it is also one that repeatedly tends to gravitate towards what are, I’d argue, particularly problematic types of answer. Violence in revolutionary situations is fundamental to our understanding of those situations, of their participants, and of their attitudes to the disruption and reconstitution of sovereign power. Too often, however, this direct attention has been, and continues to be, diverted into two opposing over-simplifications: violence as morally repugnant and shocking, on the one hand, and violence as the normalised exercise of power, on the other. Continue reading A conference paper on talking about the violence of revolution →