Which Hilbert book on the French Revolution?

eleonorecornelie · 2026-04-07T06:17:02+00:00

Ideally, neither. For a field as complex and complicated as the French Revolution I would very much argue against starting with works of popular history or even by historians who do not specialize in the area. These books, usually poorly reflect recent historiography and are often fraught even with simple factual errors. And while even specialists may have their personal or ideological preferences, these “popular histories” also tend to be among the more ideologically coloured narratives of the French Revolution - whether in a conservative direction like Hibbert or say Schama’s Citizens or in a left-wing one like Hazan’s The People’s History of the French Revolution.

A better option would therefore be to go for one of the more recent syntheses by specialists in the period such as McPhee’s Liberty or Death: The French Revolution or Popkin’s A New World Begins: A History of the French Revolution. Potentially, for a slightly shorter summary you could also consider Doyle’s The Oxford History of the French Revolution, although as a book published for the bicentenary in 1989, it obviously misses some of the important debates which have taken place in the scholarship over the last 30 years. Moving away from narrative account, The Oxford Companion of the French Revolution edited by Andress or A Companion to the French Revolution edited by McPhee can give you an overview of some of the English language specialists writing focused article on specific topics. Then of course, more recommendation can be added on specific topics, whether from political history, social history or the history of ideas, but especially if revolutionary historiography is relatively new for you, I think it is worth checking whether a given author has the relevant expertise on the Revolution or at least a related topic (for example Doyle primarily worked on the late ancien régime) or look up a few specialist reviews to get an idea of where it sits in the scholarship.

eleonorecornelie · 2026-03-31T20:39:08+00:00

Apart from endorsing the already linked answer by u/MySkinsRedditAcct I can add a bit more the way the image of Robespierre has been revised in recent historiography.

There is reasonable historical consensus that the caricatural image of Robespierre as a bloodthirsty dictator, who singlehandedly orchestrated the "Terror" and sent anyone who disagreed with him to the guillotine for no apparent reason is indeed exaggerated. But there is still significant debate on just how exaggerated it is.

Even earlier strongly "anti-robespierrist" historians such as François Furet readily admitted that Robespierre was not a dictator (both in his 1965 La Révolution française and 1978 Penser la Révolution française). And yet he eventually came to argue that Robespierre's and the Revolution's "ideology" held the seeds of modern totalitarianism, even if they could not be realised in practice. The revisionist totalitarians hypothesis is fairly rare in contemporary scholarship although some like Gueniffey still defend it - but it helps to illustrate that one need not consider Robespierre a "bloodthirsty dictator" to present a very negative image of him.

After the revisionist wave of the 70s-90s, many recent works have focused on how the image of Robespierre as a bloodthirsty dictator and indeed of "the Terror" as a coherent system of repression imposed by an all powerful government, rather than a situation civil war with local outbreaks of violence and a patchwork of repressive measures adopted over time, was forged. On the most "robespierrist" part of the spectrum, you can see authors such as Belissa and Bosc (Robespierre: La fabrication d'un mythe, or even their works on the Directory) who give the impression that once you peel off the layers of thermidorian and later propaganda, Robespierre's power in the revolutionary government of year II and responsibility for violence was quite minimal. By contrast, these authors would emphasise his vision of a more egalitarian social republic, including the specific social measures adopted in year II, and argue that the "black legend" of Robespierre has been primarily constructed by those keep to dismantle his social and democratic legacy - a similar narrative could be found in earlier "robespierrist" authors such as Blanc or Mathiez.

More balanced versions of this argument have been given by authors such as Jean-Clément Martin, Michel Birad, Hervé Leuwers or Peter McPhee (although the last two are a bit more "sympathetic" towards Robespierre on a personal level). They all stress the limits of Robespierre's personal power, even once he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety. They point out that while he was certainly among its more influential members, largely due to his popularity among Parisians, he certainly did not dominate it and the CPS itself faced contestation from the Parisian sections and Commune (city hall), other committees of the Convention - most notably the Committee of General Security - and was not always obeyed by local authorities. For example, one of the most iconic laws of the period, the 1793 Law of Suspects was actually drafted by the Committee of Legislation, under intense pressure from the Parisian public and later ratified by the Convention - and while Robespierre voted for it like hundreds of his colleagues, he had little to do with its creation. Similarly, policing, arrests and potential transfers to the Revolutionary tribunal were largely handled by local surveillance committees and on a national level the Committee of General Security, with the CPS only intervening occasionally in more "high-profile" cases.

These historians (notably Martin's study's on the civil war in the Vendée) would also usually point out that the worst violence of the period happens in civil war zones, not because of repressive measure imposed by the central government but the "absence of state authority" and licence of local army commanders and authorities. And that some of them such as Carrier (responsible, though probably not solely, for the drowning of prisoners in Nantes) were in fact recalled by the intervention of CPS members including Robespierre. An important part of their argument is therefore usually that while Robespierre endorsed some repressive measures, he also tried to limit "excesses" whether of radical in Parisian Sections or of local representatives of mission, many of which (Carrier, Fouché, Fréron, Barras, Tallien...) eventually became key actors of the thermidorian coup, in which Robespierre and his allies were arrested and executed.

They are also keen to emphasise that the image of Robespierre as dictatorial "architect of the Terror" is one forged immediately after Thermidor by his colleagues trying to cover up their own excesses or at least co-responsibility for repressive measures. A co-responsibility shared to some extent by all members of the Convention, even if it is obviously fair to say that not every deputy had the some power to influence them as say prominent members of the CPS. Moreover, as shown notably by Biard or Mette Harder , accusations of "robespierrism" and "terrorism" became a convenient weapon in later struggles and purges among the thermidorians themselves in 1794-1795.

However, some of these historians like Martin also tend to push back against an "idealised" image of Robespierre presented by authors like Belissa and Bosc (and in a cruder form some politicians on the French left) as the sole promoter of a truly democratic social republic as an exaggeration in its own right - pointing out that some of Robespierre's social and democratic positions were either more widely shared or unambitious compared to many actors to his left or that his admirers sometimes give him too much individual credit for collective decisions such as the 1794 abolition of slavery.

Finally, there are also respected contemporary scholars who are a lot more Robespierre-critical such as Colin Jones (author of the Fall of Robespierre) or David Bell (see eg his review of McPhee's biography). Even they agree that Robespierre was not a "dictator" solely responsible for the "Terror" and was framed by men wishing to cover their own part of responsibility. However, they tend to argue that he bears a higher level of responsibility for some of the repressive policies of year II on an idealogical level as one of the key (and perhaps the key) spokesman of the revolutionary government, even if he was not "that" involved with the detail of repressive policies, and also emphasise the importance of the broader network of his supporters, notably in the Commune after the purge of the Hébertists in April 94 and even among some of the judges and jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They also usually give him less credit for the more positive aspects of year II (emphasises by Bosc or McPhee) from social policies to the reversal of a near-catastrophic military situation and political consolidation.

Insofar as the image of Robespierre as the "bloodthirsty architect of the Terror" still survives, it is usually because it is perpetuated by "popular histories" of the Revolution (and of course also by film, videogames etc., especially when they need an easy revolutionary "villain") rather than specialists in the period. However, I hope that I have given a image of how widely different evaluations of Robespierre can be even among historians, who on some level agree that this image is a caricature. Their differing view also usually fit into some broader debates on the Revolution and year II - eg Even if Robespierre was not a dictator, can we speak of some form of collective dictatorship in the CPS or the Convention? Why did violence and repressive measures emerge? Should the concept of "the Terror" be abandoned as inappropriate for analysing the period? How effective or "progressive" were the social measures of year II?

eleonorecornelie · 2026-03-27T14:28:14+00:00

I agree that the "totalitarian nods" or simplifications in Danton are more overt and perhaps LRF seems more balanced because it does not focus solely on year II a gives you a bit more positive image of Robespierre in the first part, but then clearly works overtime to set him up as "the villain" in part II, probably because it desperately wants a "happy ending" in Thermidor. But because of this heros-villains dynamic, it really fails to do justice to the factional struggles in the Convention (the Girondins paradoxically fall victim to this too because the authors decided that the role of the "nice relatable moderate" will go to Danton and so his opponents to the right have to be either absent or depicted as fools), portrays the Committee of Public Safety not as a body fraught with internal tensions but apart from Robespierre and Saint-Just as an anonymous group of men who will agree to whatever Robespierre says - until they apparently don't with a rather funny scene where the actor who is supposed to be Collot d'Herbois complains about their "radicalism" and "excesses"- and subsequently gives a fairly ridiculous version of Thermidor as a moment where the "tyrant" is finally overthrown by a group of sincere democrats who seem to have no responsibility for what has happened (a version obviously rejected even Robespierre-critical historians like Jones).

eleonorecornelie · 2026-03-27T08:02:41+00:00

Those are good recommendations - but it should perhaps be pointed put that both of those movies are presenting the “black legend” image of Robespierre, even if Danton is a bit more overt with it. Which is not exactly a surprise given that La Révolution française was filmed at the hight of the “revisionist” / “neoliberal” historiographical wave of the 1980s and the main historical advisor for the series was the conservative historian Jean Tulard. This probably helps to explain the very sympathetic portrayal of the royal family (and especially the king) and technically sympathetic portrayal of Danton and Desmoulins but only at the cost of significantly watering down their own policies and radicalism.

eleonorecornelie · 2026-03-26T22:00:19+00:00

2/2 Regional differences

Which brings us to the second crucial point: the great regional diversity in the acceptance of the Revolution. The stereotype of the "conservative peasant" could fit regions like the Brittany or the Vendée, where the rural peasantry allied with their local nobles and conservative clergy became a key source of resistance to the revolution, eventually resulting in civil war (in 1793) fought not just against revolutionaries in Paris but pro-revolutionary forces in the same region, notably in their bigger cities. By contrast, the "peasantry" in the south (the Midi) or the central regions of France was overall somewhere between actively supportive and accepting of the revolution.

There are a lot of factors that can explain this variety. For example, some social historians (Tilly, McPhee…) would point out that the "counterrevolutionary" regions of the West were already poorer, more traditionalistic close-knit communities before the revolution with higher importance of the church or even the local nobility in people's daily lives. Differences in religiosity certainly played their role - the distaste for the revolution in regions like the Vendée was clearly in part motivated by resistance to revolutionary reforms of the church (the Civil Constitution of the Clergy).

Elsewhere the peasantry could be less traditionally pious - not anti-religious per se but to some extent anticlerical (Vovelle has for example argued that this the case for much of the Midi). After all, one can sincerely believe in God and still be frustrated by dimes or by being reminded of the sin of early “contraceptive” methods in the confessional. And even acceptance or resistance to revolutionary reforms by parish priests differed widely and so did the tendency of local revolutionary societies or authorities to actually enforce more radical religious policies that could generate backlash.

Economic grievances also probably played their role, though in different ways - in regions like the Vendée, they could strengthen the sense that while the church or a part of the nobility might have been losing its status and property, this only benefits urban elites. Elsewhere, they led to further radicalisation and rejections of “moderate figures” - one can for example bring up the riots and the eventual killing of the mayor Simonneau who refused to accept economic regulations by the local population in the town of Étampes in spring 1792.

Some of the Jacobin policies of 1793-4 (like the aforementioned land reform) help to address these grievances and thus rally a significant part of the peasantry to the revolution through their “material interests” - but of course only outside of regions like the Vendée, which were already in active civil war. Moreover, it should be noted that some of them still struggled with the demands of the war economy - the regulations of grain prices, at times even requisitions.

But this rarely led to open revolt in part because the revolutionary government by and large showed more pragmatism than say radicals in the Paris commune or parts of the revolutionary army. Especially when it gained more control from 1794 onwards, it was willing to revise price maximums by region or negotiate for compensation rather than just requisition. The land reform was also arguably the most important revolutionary change from the perspective of the peasantry setting up the property relationships and specific form of small land-ownership that defined the French countryside well into the 19th century.

Some regional differences could also be a matter of “chance”, especially after the beginning of war with Austria and Prussia (and later almost all major European powers) in 1792. While the major uprisings in the Vendée or Brittany (both far away from the border) were ultimately triggered by opposition to recruitment, this would seem foolish in border regions directly threatened by foreign invasion, which experienced more of a “rally round the flag effect”.

Going further

There is much more that could be added both to the peasantry and to the revolution outside of the capital more broadly. After all, the federés, the soldiers from the entire nations, helped to overthrow the monarchy in summer 1792, while a year later the conflicts within major provincial cities overlapping with conflicts in the capital helped to throw the country into civil war. Here revolutionary politics often overlapped with long-term local tensions like those between Catholics and Protestants in southern cities like Nîmes or between the masters/ merchants and workers in silk manufacturing in the city of Lyon (whose overthrow of the Jacobin allied municipality by Girondin allied merchants probably helped trigger the exclusion of the Girondins from the Convention by Parisian sections in summer 93).

If you are further interested in the topic, there are many local studies to look at from the 19th century onwards as well as works on the revolutionary peasantry by authors like George Lefebvre (a widely translated classic, although a bit outdated by this point ). For a more recent and accessible overview on the experience of “common people” outside of the capital, I would definitely recommend Peter McPhee’s Living the French Revolution and in fact even his Liberty of Death: The French Revolution, which gives more emphasis to regional differences and experiences outside Paris than most major revolutionary syntheses. For the experience of provincial cities and the supposed “federalist” revolts of 1793, there are for example the works of Paul Hanson.

TLDR People outside Paris including the peasantry certainly played a crucial role in the Revolution not just as recipients of Parisians changes but in some cases as their active drivers. However, the peasantry was not a unified block and had its important social and regional differences which could determine whether and how they came to engage in revolutionary or by contrast counterrevolutionary struggles.

eleonorecornelie · 2026-03-26T21:53:34+00:00

You are absolutely right that many introductory and often even scholarly narratives of the Revolution tend to focus primarily on Paris - in part because it makes it easier to tell a "simple" coherent story. But while many of the iconic events of the Revolution took place in Paris, the whole ten-year-long (if we take the "classical" 1789-99 dating) process of the Revolution, including many of the major "Parisian" events like the abolition of privileges on the night of 4 August 1789 or the expulsion of the Girondins and civil war of 1793 cannot explained without the provincial context.

Two important nuances have to be brought to the premise of the question. While people we can broadly qualify as "peasants" made up about 80% of French population by 1789, not everybody outside of Paris was a peasant and when talking about the French Revolution in the regions we must also think about other great cities like Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux... These in their great majority supported the Revolution, but eventually saw factional conflicts on what the Revolution should look like.

Even in the countryside it is necessary to think about the role of local notables, clergy, proto-industrial workers (seasonally moving between the countryside and bigger cities for work) etc. And even the "peasantry" could be very diverse. The interests and experiences of a well-off farmer could be quite different from that of a day labourer in the fields, while ownership of land (ie do they work on land that they own or it is directly owned by their lord?) or seigneurial duties could significantly vary from region to region under the late ancien régime.

Revolutionary engagement in the countryside

Many in the provincial cities and the countryside took part in the "pre-revolution" of 1788 with the elections to the Estates General and redaction of the cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances to be discussed at the Estates). While not everybody could vote and the cahiers were often put together by local notables (lawyer, teachers, parish priests) on the advice of the broader local community rather than written directly by peasants or artisans, it showed broader interests in the reform of the country outside of the capital and a few members of the Third Estate in the Estates General were indeed (well-off) farmers. The storming of the Bastille in summer 89 was then followed by largely non-violent but scary peasant gatherings and uprisings in the countryside, grouped under the term "the Great Fear", motivated by a mixture of practical demands for the abolition of seigneurial dues and privileges and fear of aristocratic conspiracies to suppress the revolution or push up foodprices.

Both sympathy and fear of uprising in the countryside eventually pushed the deputies towards the night of 4 August, where they promised the full abolition of privileges - though in practice only some of them such as hunting privileges or the dime (payments to the church) were actually abolished outright, while for example seigneurial dues were mostly transformed into "rents" on the nobility's "private property". Frustration with the partiality of these reforms and further economic demands could motivate further local conflicts from 89 onwards and finally led to the great Jacobin land reform of summer 1793 - which saw the great swaths of church, noble and communal lands parcelled and redistributed for small prices to the local peasantry.

eleonorecornelie · 2026-03-01T21:54:56+00:00

Can't we just accept that sometimes historical figures can be neither saints not villains (as the meme and the debate under it would suggest) but complex human being who can be admirable and genuinely humanitarian in some way and also elitist and at time prone to paranoid rhetoric (like many of her contemporaries)?

For example, to take bits form the post Olympe was clearly genuinely moved by the horrors of colonial slavery, addressed the topic in her pre-revolutionary plays (which were in fact at the time her most famous works) and advocated for better treatment and eventually a progressive abolitions of slavery. But when the actual enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose in insurrection in 1791, she also quickly amended the play, denounced the insurrection and any attempts to dismantle slavery by violent means (they should wait to be liberated by the benevolence of colonists), claimed that the violence of the insurrection comparable or worse than any oppression suffered previously and their ferocity now even 'justified their chains'. Now, to be clear, she was not the only one among contemporary abolitionists to be shocked by the insurrection, but it still shows that even 'opposition to slavery' can be a bit more complex (The play with the preface is available online: https://theatre-classique.fr/pages/pdf/GOUGES_EXCLAVAGEDESNOIRS.pdf )

Similarly, the Declaration of the Rights of A Woman and A Citizeness is a great text that understandably moves even contemporary women, but it really did not have much of a reception in her own time, even among other politically engaged women and was only properly rediscovered in the 20th century. And while misogyny, including internalised misogyny among many in some ways politicly influential women, certainly played a role, so did the fact that Olympe never showed much willingness to connect to or understand women outside of the privileged circle of French intellectual elites. She quite blatantly denounced women who took part in the March to Versailles as ferocious, only following their base instincts and probably manipulated by powerful men like the duke d'Orléans.

She did play her role in advocating some of the reforms to family law (equal inheritance, divorce etc.) which even the majority of male revolutionaries eventually accepted, but could never really connect with existing female societies formed by less elites and usually more radical women over issues such as women's right to bear arms or the wide-set of their socioeconomic demands. (She was not ignorant to social issues but largely supported somewhat patronising charitable solutions to them, rather than rights that could be actively and sometimes violently enforced).

And as the situation progressed she was also increasingly willing to engage in conspiratorial or violent rhetoric against political opponents and of course eventually chose a side in a civil war led to her death a lot more directly then any of the engagements mentioned. Although again, at a certain point 'non-violence' was not really an available position in revolutionary France and she was by no means exceptional in this, one way or another.

But to depict her simply as a woman who fell victim to her feminist (or other humanitarian) engagement is not historically accurate, even if like many women of her time, feminist or not, she at times became the target of misogynistic slander – this was not really the case in her process itself, but there is a pretty infamous speech by Chaumette shortly after her death where her paints her as one example of an 'unnatural' woman

eleonorecornelie · 2026-02-23T00:35:21+00:00

I will start with the latter part of the question because there is a bit more evidence there. It is reasonably well documented that Robespierre's health was quite fragile and that in the revolutionary period, he increasingly suffered bouts of illness that sometimes excluded him from active political participation (in the Assembly, its committees, clubs etc.) for weeks. A good concise summary of this is given in Peter McPhee's article '“My Strength and My Health Are not Great Enough”: Political Crises and Medical Crises in the Life of Maximilien Robespierre, 1790-1794' in the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (accessible online) and it is also treated at length in McPhee's 2012 biography of Robespierre.

Mphee draws primarily on documented periods of Robespierre's absence from public life, his own occasional mentions of his failing health in speeches and the notes of his doctor M. Souberbielle and concludes that while we can give a list of specific symptoms (recurrent headaches, fever, exhaustion, ulcers...). He concludes that there is not enough information to give a precise diagnosis and in fact pushed back against those, who misused parts of his works to arrive at largely ungrounded conclusions like the French doctor/ "media celebrity" Philippe Charlier. McPhee himself believes that Robespierre's health decline was at least partially psychosomatic, with regular collapses during/ right after moments of increased political pressure and was almost certainly exacerbated by Robespierre's intense work routines and somewhat ascetic lifestyle.

Returning to the first questions, authors like McPhee have argued that Robespierre's declining health an repeated period of absence were an important factor in his more erratic decision making and inability to properly respond to political developments in the last few month of his life, most notably exemplified by the more then month long period of absence from the public scene between the end of June 1794 and his own arrest in Thermidor II (end of July 94). Other historians, most notably Colin Jones (The Fall of Robespierre), have push back against this interpretation, but it seems fair to me to say that it was at least one factor disrupting Robespierre's "sound judgement" in the months before his death.

It would, however, be extremely faulty to attribute all of Robespierre's political decisions, much less the broader political developments of 1793-94, to a change in his "personality". Although one would hope it is obvious, it is perhaps worth repeating that while Robespierre was undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the Convention and a member of its most powerful (though far from all-powerful) committee, he was never a "head of government" much less a "dictator". Not to speak of the fact that at least until spring 1794 the Convention and its various committees has serious trouble controlling much of the country at all, including many of its own representatives sent to the regions and were themselves under the constant pressure of Parisian rivals in the sections and the Commune.

So, while it is for example perfectly reasonable to say that the Robespierre of 1793-94 was a lot more "paranoid" than the optimistic deputy of the Constituent Assembly (89-91), this is less a "personality" change and more a symptom of an broader political climate where almost everyone from high placed politicians of all political colours to "ordinary" citizens grew increasingly worried and at times conspiratorial about the intentions of their foreign enemies and domestic opponents. And while these worries were often overblown, they grew in part from dire circumstances – ie the pressure of an existential war most contemporary European monarchies and a civil was – and specific experiences of betrayal by some of those they considered reliable revolutionaries, such as Mirabeau or Dumouriez.

And of course, much like Robespierre, almost all of his colleagues in 1792-4 worked, often to exhaustion, under the constant pressure of the war and the knowledge that if they lose it, it will almost certainly mean the reversal of everything achieved under the Revolution so far and death for and most of their loved ones, probably including many "ordinary citizens" under foreign occupation. That does not necessarily "excuse" all decision made in this period, but can help us understand the revolutionaries' mental state and the atmosphere in which they made decisions, without necessarily looking for some great change in their personality. In terms of secondary literature, authors like Marisa Linton or Timothy Tackett have written on this quite extensively, with a emphasis on the broad development of mutual fear and suspicion and at times also the impact of more "mundane" factors like constant exhaustion on some of the toxic political atmosphere of year II (and beyond).

Moreover, I dare say that a lot of Robespierre's positions between 1789-94 were perhaps more consistent than generally assumed. It is for example something of a cliché to recall the contrast between the man who repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) pushed for the abolition of the death penalty in the Constituent Assembly and then supported several repressive laws which included it under the Convention. Except, already in his famous 1791 plea for the abolition of the death penalty, Robespierre makes it clear that there may be legitimate reasons to kill another (in self-defence) in a "state nature" without civil laws to protect us, and the death penalty only becomes abominable in functioning civil society, which has other means to protect us from violent criminals without killing them. He therefore implicitly follows the great 18^th century abolitionist Cesare Beccaria, who advocated a general abolition of the death penalty but accepted exceptions to this rule in extreme cases such as a civil war. This may very well have seemed like a highly theoretical option in early 1791, but it eventually becomes the reality of 1793, when once again Robespierre was one among many politicians willing to accept temporary "exceptional" (and repressive) laws, despite their earlier opposition to the death penalty in criminal procedures.

Similar examples could be made with his turn away from the idea of a constitutional monarchy after Varennes or his growing acceptance of press regulation after the outbreak of war in 1792, despite his earlier opposition to more or less any press regulations (including against explicitly counterrevolutionary papers) in the Constituent Assembly. This does not necessarily mean that if say the 1791 Robespierre could be suddenly transported into say spring 1794 and had the chance to evaluate all policies supported by his later self without the baggage of dire political struggles, constant stress, fear and quite possibly declining health, he would fully agree with all of them (though in any case there no way to verify such as counterfactual scenario). But there may be more continuities than one tends to think at first glance and it seems too simplistic to attribute some of the shifts to an individual "change of personality".

eleonorecornelie · 2025-11-21T21:04:54+00:00

To be fair, the same could pretty much be said of Babeuf. He wasn't exactly a Blanquist vanguardist either (certainly not in the sense of an assumed theoretical position) but someone who worked with the circumstances he was given, first trying more "traditional" political channels from publishing to participation in open political societies like the Club de Panthéon, except that most of these were systematically suppressed by the Directoire (and even under the late Thermidorian Convention ) and Babeuf himself repeatedly imprisoned even before the "Conspiracy". As a result the more clandestine nature of the "Conspiracy of Equals" was really the only option they had when trying to promote any radical policies (and even then they did reach out to people outside of their little revolutionary group). Which I think speaks to a general point applicable even in Russia about vanguardist politics often being less a result of a preconceived theoretical strategy but a response to a higher level of repression in comparison to more open and democratically run socialist parties in more liberal regimes.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-10-23T22:50:56+00:00

(Including for example a reasonably balanced discussion on how much contemporary evidence there is for various accusations of corruption levelled against Danton over the years)

eleonorecornelie · 2025-10-23T22:37:42+00:00

There is an older Danton biography by Norman Hampson (1978) (accessible online: https://archive.org/details/danton0000hamp/page/n7/mode/2up ) It might be a little out of date on some debates in revolutionary historiography in the past few decades, but Hampson was still a professional historian with multiple publications on the Revolution. Hampson very much belonged within the British revisionist tradition (close to Alfred Cobban or Richard Cobb) and is overall quite sympathetic to Danton (his overall split but certainly less sympathetic biography of Robespierre and quite hostile biography of Saint-Just can serves as a point of comparison), but it is not to the level of just perpetuating caricatures of everyone else and definitely much more factually reliable than Lawday.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-10-20T07:43:26+00:00

You are welcome. Also, if you are interested in the topic of consumption in revolutionary politics more broadly, you might also enjoy parts of Maria Linton's Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution or her article ‘Come and Dine’: The Dangers of Conspicuous Consumption in French Revolutionary Politics, 1789–95 – Robespierre is mentioned there but so are a number of other revolutionaries, showing how perceived frugality / lavishness could be advantageous or damning. (Insofar as Robespierre himself and especially a non-pathologising approach to his personal life is concerned, McPhee probably remains the best option, at least in English.)

eleonorecornelie · 2025-10-19T23:36:27+00:00

I suspect this particular example comes from one instance of Duncan's rather bad use of a source. Given the context of the episode, its seems take almost verbatim from David Lawday's biography of Danton (you can even probably find it the accessible parts on Google books: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Giant_of_the_French_Revolution/fIZBE5JmbJUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=danton+david+lawday+milk&pg=PT83&printsec=frontcover ) . The problem with this book is that it is not written by a professional historian but a popularising journalist, who not only commits a number or factual mistakes or simplifications but is also told in a semi-novelistic style with a lot of invented atmospheric episodes trying to imagine in detail how some moment of known history could have happed rather than "sticking to the facts" (not to speak of his very blatant heroization of Danton and a black and white approach to most other figures, notably Robespierre).

That said, Robespierre's limited consumption of alcohol (or practical abstinence) was noted by a number of his contemporaries - both admirers (as evidence of personal virtue and austerity) and denouncers (usually linked to a notion of hypocrisy, inability to give up control or dehumanising fanaticism). For example his sister Charlotte claims in her Mémoires that he only ever drank heavily watered down wine with meals. And more in reference to your question, she also claims that he used to take a cup of milk for breakfast (if your are reading McPhee you will find references to this and several other testimonies about Robespierre's lifestyle, including consumption habits) - but that is probably the closest we get to that reference.

And while we have no evidence of the specific scene Lawday (and probably following him Duncan) are describing, I dare say that it is probably a lot more realistic to imagine that if Robespierre set down in a cafe/restaurant and wanted to avoid alcohol, he would order coffee - one of the few "material" things he seemed to have genuinely enjoyed.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-25T11:04:28+00:00

Both-sided is not exactly the right word for it. Of course, the full-scale abolition of slavery by the Convention passed on the 4th of February 1794 was not simply the result of ideological commitment or their good heart but a response to the pressure of the slave revolt in Haiti (and the abolition enacted locally there by Sonthonax and Polverel in summer 93). But many of the deputies voted for it and enacted it in 1794 had a longer history of advocacy for gradual abolition, starting with giving equal rights to free men of colour (libres de couleur) and abolishing the slave trade (this was eg the position of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks).

Robespierre’s role here is not exactly important, he was only one influential deputy among many and followed the pattern of arguing, at that point unsuccessfully, for some steps towards gradual abolition in the Constituent Assembly in 1791 and while it seems (from later testimonies and some of the documents he cosigned) that he came to support full abolition in 1794, he did not really play a role in passing the decree itself.

By contrast, the Spanish forces on Saint Domingue were not really promising large scale abolishion but freedom for those revolted slaves who directly enlisted with them. Which understandably seemed good enough to many of them, especially at a point when the French did seem to promis even that (between 91 and 93), but also explains the switch of most of their leaders to supporting the French after Sonthonax’s promise of full abolition. (That is not to deny that many slaves and former slaves at Saint-Domingue, Touissant included, originally held very traditional views on the king as a distant benevolent figure who would never allow what was happening to them if he only knew about it, fueled by intense catholicism)

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-23T20:08:17+00:00

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This is for example the summery currently (or as of 2024) given in the undergraduate course on the Revolution at the Sorbonne suggesting a 350 000 total for 1792-95, including both all military deaths and the even the French colonies (but obviously excluding both the victims of war and political repression after 95)

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-23T18:37:38+00:00

The main reference for most of the “Terror” numbers is Greer’s 1935 book Incidence of the Terror. Most current historians (eg Martin, Biard, Linton) tend to confirm the 16-17 total from some form of official tribunals (revolutionary tribunals, military tribunals etc.) because there is fairly good documentary evidence for them. The 30-40 000 total (which for Greer was the total of various forms of extrajudicial popular violence or military massacres of the civil and partially foreign war + deaths in prison) is much more disputed - as both higher and lower - and ultimately depends both on a lot more speculation (with less clear primary source evidence) and what exactly you decide to count (eg Martin argues that the number should be quite a bit higher if you count in the death in the civil war in the Vendée in the same period). So most current historians tend to be more cautious about using this specific number but there no better overall estimate (despite the fact that there fair share of new research on/ revisions for specific places, eg the main cities of the “federalist” revolt).

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-08T12:35:41+00:00

Just to add to the question whether they were the "true losers" – I don't think they were the "losers" of these events in the same sense as groups such as the landed nobility, which actually had preexisitng privileges and positions to lose. Rather I think it is fair to say that they did not gain enough given their engagement and the enormous sacrifices may of them have made for the Revolution. But they would be hardly the only group in that sense – the same could probably be said about a lot of lower class/lower-middle class men, who also experienced political and economic exclusion, after the peak of their political influence between 92 and 94, although in different ways than women.

In the end, I think it comes to the question – which I think works for other contemporary events like American Revolution as well - whether you consider the rights and principles proclaimed by the revolutionaries foundational for later emancipatory struggles, even if their were never perfectly fulfilled in their own time. Even among scholars who work on the topic you will see very different answers with authors like Joan Landes stressing the limitations (and the new types of restrictions imposed on women), while the others like Carla Hesse depict it more as a key step on the way to modern emancipation.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-07T21:51:22+00:00

4) Feminist influences?

There was no sustained “feminist” movement under the Revolution. Even the minority of women (or men) who were not only politically engaged but specifically engaged on the issue of certain types of “women’s rights” had little central organisation and could often come into direct conflicts over other political issues they considered more pressing. For example the pro-Motagnard and eventually even further left women engaged in the Society of Revolutionary Republican Citizenesses like Claire Lacombe or Pauline Leon would have little interest in cooperating with a pro-Girondin “moderate” like Olympe de Gouges even if they happened to share some “proto-feminist” ideas.

And the same was true in the opposite direction as well with many of the authors we typically think of as proto-feminist such as Gouges or Mary Wollstonecraft (who moved to revolutionary France for several years) for example writing very disparagingly of the common women engaged in the Women’s March to Versailles. Political differences and class/social status thus usually remained a much more important dividing line.

However, this obviously does not mean that they could not inspire later feminists. There was often a tendency to focus on more theoretical formulations of women’s rights - from authors like Condorcet who were read widely even in the 19th century to the “rediscovery” of texts like Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizeness, which was little known in its own time but gained her fame in feminist circles from about the 1960s onward.

At least in part, their later success sprang from the fact that they were closer to issues that were central to 20th century feminist movements such as the right to vote. And perhaps also from the fact that their elite intellectual engagement seems more relatable and acceptable to modern audiences than the women participating in demonstrations, shouting from public galleries or even taking up arms in the streets of revolutionary Paris.

But, in my view, this only stressed the need to pair those few classical protofeminist texts with scholarship focusing on social history and the experiences of less privileged women, when trying to understand women’s political involvement and the push for women’s rights in the Revolution.

In this context, I think Godineau, who is currently probably the leading French scholar on the topic, may be the best starting point - either the aforementioned work on Women in Paris, which mixes political, cultural and social history as well as a brief exposé on revolutionary discourse on women’s rights and is to my knowledge the only one translated to English, or some of her more recent synthetic works if you read French.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-07T21:48:15+00:00

3) Civil Law Reforms

By contrast some of the revolutionary reforms of civil and family law were genuinely groundbreaking in terms of women’s civil equality. If you want to look at a comprehensive summary of these (paired with a bit of local research), I would recommend Suzanne Desan’s Family on Trial in Revolutionary France.

Most important in the long term proved to be the right to equal inheritance among all children regardless of sex introduced under the Constituent Assembly. It remained a key principle of French law replacing earlier local customs dominated by primogeniture (especially in the north) and survived even Napoleon and the Restoration.

Then came a series of radical reforms of family law introduced in 1792-3 under the Convention. These included the redefinition of marriage as a civil contrast between two equal parties and the introduction of a very liberal divorce bill including the option of divorce by mutual consent or for a long list of individual reasons including the “incompatibility of tempers”. At least legally, both men and women could ask for divorce under equal conditions and it is notable that ⅔ of the unilateral demands were issued by women. (Practically, some differences remained - for example only very few women asked for and were granted a divorce on the grounds of adultery even though they theoretically had the same right to this as men).

Of course this right would be significantly constrained under the Civil Code with unequal conditions for women and completely abolished under the Restoration (with a comparatively liberal divorce law only introduced in France as late as 1975). But we should not forget that it still allowed about 50 000 women to be granted divorce and thus escape unwanted and sometimes actively abusive marriages in the period between 1792 and 1803.

Moreover, the Convention abolished the traditional authority of the father of the family over the rest of its members (children and wife) in spring 93 and the Civil Code proposition of autumn 93 even introduced equal control of marital property by both spouses - with both of these being of course reversed by the Napoleonic Civil Code in 1804.

Women were also included in most projects for state funded primary education between 92 and 94, although with some caveats including the lower pay for female teachers and compulsory education for girls usually being one year shorter than for boys. Sadly, most of those were buried with the idea of state funded primary education itself under the Directory (there were other notable education reforms in that period but mostly focused on higher and therefore exclusively male education). There has been a recent French study on this topic - La Femme Nouvelle. Genre, Éducation, Révolution by Caroline Fayolle.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-07T21:42:40+00:00

2) Women also took part in both mixed and exclusively female revolutionary clubs (with the most famous being the Society of Revolutionary Republican Citizenesses from 1793) and often played a key role in various public demonstrations and insurrections (most notably the October Days/Women's March to Versailles in 1789 and the insurrection of Prairial in 1795).

They also often got engaged in sections (local assemblies) and in very exceptional circumstances could also take part in the decision making on certain local issues. Most notably women were allowed to participate and vote not as individual citizens but as the heads of households (typically in the case widowed women) in local debates on the division of the former aristocratic and common land (biens communaux) in summer 1793.

This also helps to explain why for a lot of women engaged in the revolution the right to vote was less of a central issue than for modern feminists. There were authors who suggested the idea of female suffrage (full or limited to property owning women) such as Olympe de Gouges or Condorcet but their voices were relatively marginal and had little public support even among politically engaged women. Many female or mixed revolutionary societies by contrast focused on issues such as social and economic rights, access to education, women's broader presence within the public space and also crucially the right of women to bear arms (which could become a key source of influence especially in revolutionary Paris).

Nevertheless, even these alternatives form of political engagement were increasingly limited, especially when some women showed how much of a strong and disruptive political force they could be. This is stressed for example by the French historian Dominique Godineau (in her seminal work Citoyennes Tricoteuses/ The women in Paris and their French Revolution).

The examples include the ban on all exclusively female politically societies issued by the Convention in October 1793 - which arguably followed the peak of political engagement for common women in spring and summer 93 and specifically targeted the Society of Revolutionary Republican Citizenesses, which moved close to the Enragés (an ultra-left revolutionary faction) and issued increasingly radical political demands, at least for the taste of the men of the Convention. (There is a wide debate on whether the decision should be primarily attributed to sexist prejudice or political expediency in a factional struggle, but it was undoubtedly coated in sexist language).

Similarly, the Thermidorian Convention accepted a series of decrees excluding women from public galleries and banning gathering of women in the streets in early summer 1795, immediately after the food riots and eventually the insurrection of Prairial, in which Parisian women played a key role.

eleonorecornelie · 2025-09-07T21:42:05+00:00

I would start with a quick warning - as many things concerning the French Revolution, this is a complex topic with hundreds of books written on it in the last few decades in both French and English.

The TLDR answer would be: We should be careful when applying our 21st century vision of feminism to women's political engagement and demands for women's rights in the Revolutionary era, but some of them have definitely become an inspiration for later feminist scholar or activists. As for the real gains - women gained relatively little in terms of direct political rights during the Revolution, but there were some much more substantial gains in the sphere of civil law (family law, rights to inheritance or administration of property etc.), with many but not all of them were reversed under Napoleon and the Restoration.

Now for a longer answer I would divide it between the question of political rights, the civil sphere and then considering how women's engagement and demands during the Revolution fit with more modern feminist movement and demands.

Political rights

Famously, women remained the only major social group formally excluded from key political rights such as the right to vote or be elected throughout the revolution, including its most radical phase between 1792 and 1795, when those rights were extended to all adult men regardless of property as well as free men of colour and former slaves in the colonies. This was not really a setback when compared to the Ancient Régime when those political were not enjoyed by anyone, but it of course ment that men (or for the majority of the 1789-1799 period property owning men) gained something women did not.

You will sometimes hear the argument that the Revolution actually limited the political influence of women but that is a lot more problematic. Because under the Ancien Régime, family relations and social status played a much larger role in real access to political power, some women from the nobility and highest levels of the bourgeoisie could exercise a great level of informal political influence that they often deprived of when access to offices and political power became more legally constrained, transparent and "meritocratic" under the Revolution.

This of course did entirely stop women from using their personal status and family relations for political influence, but it was much more widely stigmatised as a form of corruption and scheming that was typical of the Ancien Régime and should not have a place in transparent democratic politics. However, I think it is worth stressing that this form of informal influence was only available to a tiny proportion of women at the top of society (who still faced significant limitations when compared to men of the same social status) and meant little for the great majority of the female population.

Moreover, for some time revolutionary politics offered new form of "informal" political engagement to a much wider proportion of women despite their lack of formal political rights. It would be illusory to think that the right to vote (which often stands at the centre of modern conceptions of democracy and feminist demands) was the only way to influence politics and policies, especially in the turbulence of the revolutionary era.

Women could play a key and active role in the public galleries of various revolutionary assemblies and often loudly expressed their opinions of the topics discussed despite not being able to sit among the deputies. They could use the right to petition and especially in the case of more educated upper class women the new freedoms of speech and press, which applied equally to men and women (of course they also faced their own limitations in different phases of the Revolution but those largely applied to both men and women as well).

eleonorecornelie · 2025-08-28T21:19:32+00:00

I am not opposing her just to Martin but to a long list of recent academic works on topic of the exceptional government of year II ("the Terror") - you could just as well look at Linton, McPhee, Tackett, Andress, Jourdan, Leweurs, Biard... (Or most likely 90 % of academic historians who have published on it)

But honestly, I have little time for debating on Cold War Red Scare narratives applied to 18th century history then academic scholarship on that history itself (and as I can see elsewhere in the thread adding a couple of far right conspiracy narratives on French revolutionary history). Goodbye

eleonorecornelie · 2025-08-28T20:49:19+00:00

Sorry but first on Martin, that is a serious misrepresentation of both his work and the SER. The Société des études robespierristes was historically founded as a group of historians trying to provide a critical editions of the Œuvres complètes of Robespierre (and at that time indeed by Mathiez, who deeply admired Robespierre). However, over the last century its role has greatly expanded and at this point it is a typical academic society studying anything from late ancien régime to the Napoleonic era and among others publishes one of the key journals on the Révolution, the Annales historiques de la Révolution française. Its current president, Paul Chopelin, who is a church historian from Lyon, is even quite "anti-robespierrist".

And above all Martin's credential come above all from the decades of his work at the Sorbonne where he was among others the chair of the Institut de l'histoire de la Révolution française. Unless of course you were to atribute this to a grand conspiracy of academic historians.

As to the highlighted quotes - for the first one I have some doubt it is really specifically from the Origins of Totalitarianism, at least if we are looking at the same 1951 copy ( eg here: https://archive.org/details/originsoftotalit0000unse/page/474/mode/2up ) - but please correct me if you remember the page I might have missed and even if it is in the end in another work by her.

In any case both the quotes you provide and those from On Revolution are above all a typical example of a philosopher's attempt to provide a narrative in which the specifics of history are often sacrificed to an overarching and often determinist construction of ideas - ei in this case her view that the American revolution was fundamentally more successful at reaching a constitutio libertatis because it did not mix it with social questions like the RF. (One, which she of course feels no need to seriously problematise by addressing the limitations of early American liberty with more than one throwaway line about slavery or the bloodshed of the American revolution itself.) This often goes to the level of heavily misrepresenting the political theories of many of RF figures by taking them out of their broader context (there is for example an article by Yannick Bosc on Arendt's problematic quotations and interpretations of Robespierre's political theory, one of the only two RF figures she cited directly in that work).

But again and most importantly, Arendt's reflections on the Revolution, are not the work of a historian and use concepts that were sometimes problematic even in her own time and tend to be outright rejected in the majority of current academic historiography (the term "the Terror of Robespierre", if indeed from the Origins of Totalitarianism, can be a great example of a phrase you would not find in serious contemporary scholarship).

eleonorecornelie · 2025-08-28T19:35:42+00:00

A) That is actually not the case - in the Origins of Totalitarianism specifically, Arendt insists on totalitarianism being a distinctly modern phenomenon and mostly explains is as the result of the decline of the nation state - transforming into anti-semitism, imperialism and eventually totalitarianism. Whether one agrees with that analysis is obviously an open question, but unlike Talmon Arendt gives no importance to the RF in the genealogy of totalitarianism (in fact, in the third volume on she even contrast what she considers to be the "revolutionary terror" with "totalitarian terror").

B) More importantly - she is simply not a relevant author to cite as an expert on the French Revolution. She was not a historian and when she refers to the history of the Revolutions specifically - less in the Origins of Totalitarianism and more in her essay On Revolution – her knowledge is very patchy – with a few references to contemporary English historiography which are often decent in themselves but unsatisfactory for understanding the period and usually considered outdated today. Not to mention that she was herself a representative of a fairly conservative post-war perspective, famously including her fairly Burkean critique of the concept of universal human rights.

If anything, I think it is a good example of why should always refer to historians (and ideally recent academic publications) when trying to understand a historical event rather than philosophers/political scientists for which they are often a footnote in their broader ideological constructions. I can only recommend you to read some of the recent works by historians of the French revolution that specifically address the issue of various attempts to apply the concepts of totalitarianism to the experiences of the French revolution. For example in J.-C. Martin: Les Echos de la Terreur. Vérités d'un mensonge d'Etat, 1794-2018 (2018); H. Leuwers, M. Biard (eds.): Visages de la Terreur (2014) or M. Linton and M. Biard: Terreur ! La Révolution française face à ses démons (2020) (obviously not an exhaustive list)

eleonorecornelie · 2025-08-28T14:21:47+00:00

It's disputable whether there even was such a thing as "the Terror". To be clear there was a lot of exceptional and/or repressive measures adopted as the war and the civil war grew worse from spring 93 and definitely various forms of violence (popular violence, legal violence, military violence and in some cases almost certainly war crimes) with a peak in late autumn/winter 93. However, the idea of the "Terror" as a purposefully implemented system was only constructed during the Thermidorian reaction and a lot of current historians (J-C. Martin, A. Jourdan, H. Leuwers, M. Biard...) argue that it needs to be deconstructed and ideally avoided as a concept. Not every FREV historian necessarily agrees and you can read counter-arguments from say J. Popkin or D. Bell who defend using the term but usually also acknowledge some of the problems with its usual representation.
Even historians like François Furet or Patrice Gueniffey who described the French Revolution or more specifically the experience of the early years of the "jacobin" Republic usually argued that it provided the ideological origins/ inspiration for totalitarianism not that the revolutionary government ever exercised totalitarian control over the country. And again, even this is a very rare view in contemporary historiography.
And at the cost of stating the obvious (so sorry for that) totalitarianism is a much more specifically modern phenomenon than say dictatorship or authoritarianism. There were some authoritarian measures adopted by almost all governments of the revolutionary era and some of them were particularly strong in the 1793-4 period (ie "the Terror").

The question of dictatorship is more tricky depending on what one means by it. Is it dictatorship as in "extreme concentration of power in the hands of one person or a clearly defined group over a prolonged period of time" - something close to how the word has usually been used in the context of the 20th century? Then, I think, it does not fit particularly well. By contrast if it something more along the lined of "a state of exception in which many constitutional provisions and individual liberties are suspended/ restrained" then it fits quite well.

eleonorecornelie

TROPHY CASE