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… →