Book Description

This study challenges the assumption that an indictment and discarding of history formed the only strand of the French Revolution's discourse about the past. A consideration of debates and speeches in the Constituent Assembly (1789--1791) and the Legislative Assembly (1791--1792) reveals that engagement with the national past was part of the revolutionary experience. During 1789--1791 deputies in the center and on the left looked back to the examples of pre-Bourbon representative assemblies and Christian antiquity. Deputies periodized the past into distinct eras, agreed that despotism made its appearance in the early seventeenth century, and skipped over the Bourbon era to return to what was valuable in the political practice of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. These deputies were influenced by pre-Revolutionary ways of thinking about the past, while also injecting modern invocations of national will and sovereignty into their evocations of past ages. They constructed competing historical narratives and used history in several ways, sometimes simply searching for examples or parallels but sometimes establishing a deeper connection or continuity between the Revolution and the past. This study further argues that the Revolution did break with the past, but that this did not occur until the lifetime of the Legislative Assembly and was fueled more by circumstances than by revolutionary ideology. This is when Lynn Hunt's "new men for new times" came to the fore: these deputies, younger than those to the Constituent Assembly and radicalized by their experience of Revolution and counter-Revolution, did eventually abandon history. In 1792 the long struggle with non-juring priests and emigres--as well as the king's ill-advised vetoes of legislation directed against them--finally cut off the Revolution from the national past. In emphasizing how the break with history reflects a break in the Revolution and drawing distinctions between these two assemblies and two periods of the Revolution, this study sides with Timothy Tackett and Michael Fitzsimmons in challenging Francois Furet's tendency to view the Revolution en bloc and to argue that the Terror unfolded from the principles of 1789.