"Actualité de la Terreur. L'apport des émotions à l'étude de l'histoire de la Révolution française" Actualité de la Terreur En Fr

Résumé En Fr

The Terror, the eighteen months of the year II revolutionary government generally considered to have lasted from March 1793 to July 1794, is probably the period of the French Revolution that most resists interpretation. The implication, not to say the passion, that drove the search for causes and accountability by its contemporaries and potential victims was of an intensity that showed no signs of waning in the nineteenth and even the twentieth century—this time among historians. The recent historiography of the Terror, some of which is analyzed here, is quieter in tone. Despite ongoing disagreements, a consensus has emerged around emotions as a determining factor in the actors’ radical choices. These choices were not simply rational ones made under duress and dictated by circumstances, nor do they reveal a consistent political vision or a matrix of totalitarian thought. Rather, they reflect the adjustments that individuals are forced to make if they are to remain consistent with the “emotional communities” to which they belong. Emotions are not a new paradigm; Lucien Febvre insisted on their importance to historians in the late 1930s. Applied to the Terror in both French and English-language scholarship, they are giving rise to a new history of elites. But can emotions, by themselves, explain the exceptional state of war that existed in France during those months?

Actualité de la Terreur. L'apport des émotions à l'étude de la Révolution Française À paraître dans Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales avec modifications et compléments de notes en bas de page.