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Full download Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth of the Modern World David A. Bell file pdf all chapter on 2024
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Rethinking the Age of Revolutions
Rethinking the Age
of Revolutions
AN D
YA I R M I N T Z K E R
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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To Robert Darnton and Keith Michael Baker
CONTENTS
List of Contributors ix
Introduction xiii
David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker
Index 273
CONTRIBUTORS
David A. Bell (co-editor and contributor) is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus
Professor in the Age of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University.
A winner of Guggenheim, ACLS, and NEH fellowships, he is the author
of six books, including The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing
Nationalism, 1680–1800 (2001); The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe
and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (2007); and the essay collection
Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present (2016). His
books have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.
His Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions, is forthcoming with
Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
D AV I D A . B E L L A N D YA I R M I N T Z K E R ■
In 2009 Lynn Hunt, one of the preeminent living historians of the French
Revolution, declared that the subject had run into an “interpretive cul-
de-sac.” Despite the obvious centrality of the Revolution to any under-
standing of the modern world, its study in the early twenty-first century
seemed to have ground to a halt. Hunt lamented the absence of a new
explanatory “paradigm,” and spoke of widespread “dissatisfaction” that
while older paradigms had been discredited, nothing had arisen to take
their place.1 It was a depressing judgment, but it elicited broad agree-
ment from Hunt’s colleagues. Indeed, what Hunt wrote about the French
Revolution might well be applied to the “Age of Democratic Revolutions”
as a whole. Historians have recently been devoting much time and en-
ergy to surveying the Western revolutions of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, placing previously ignored localities such as Haiti
at the center of the picture, and tracing out transnational connections.
1. Lynn Hunt, “The Experience of Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (2009),
pp. 671–78.
xiv Introduction
2. This work remains inspired by R.R. Palmer’s classic The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A
Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, two vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1959–64); and Jacques Godechot, La grande nation: L’expansion révolutionnaire de la
France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983), originally published in
1956. See more recently Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History
(New York: New York University Press, 2009); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in
Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Janet Polasky, Revolutions
Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2015).
3. Classics of the older social scientific tradition include Barrington Moore, Social Origins
of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative
Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jack
Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991). A more recent approach to the subject, taking a political culture
approach, is Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical
Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2015).
4. See Alan Gibson, Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates over the Origins
and Foundation of the American Republic (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2006).
Introduction xv
6. Ibid. The key work here was François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris:
Gallimard, 1978).
7. The most important works building on Furet were Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class
in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Keith Michael
Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For discussion of the “political
culture paradigm,” see Suzanne Desan, “What’s After Political Culture?,” French Historical
Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2000), pp. 163–96; David A. Bell, “Words and Tumbrels,” in Shadows of
Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016),
pp. 157–73.
xvi Introduction
8. The phrase is Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s. See his “Connected Histories: Notes towards
a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3 (1997),
pp. 735–62.
Introduction xvii
9. For further reflections on these themes, see David A. Bell, “Inglorious Revolutions,” in
Shadows of Revolution, pp. 395–405.
10. See, on this subject, Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth
(New York: Crown, 2017).
xviii Introduction
civil wars—that they are more than contingent episodes of violent turmoil;
that they can bring new forms of society permanently into being and act as
motors of coherent, progressive historical change. From the perspective of
the early twenty-first century, Soviet Communism and Maoism look like
brutal and unsustainable experiments—even like cruel illusions—rather
than the new civilizations their supporters hailed them as.11 It is worth
remembering that the former Eastern and Central European dissidents
who came to power in 1989 with the collapse of the Communist bloc de-
liberately refused the label of “revolutionaries” for themselves.12 And it is
no coincidence that one of the most prominent historians of the age of
democratic revolutions, David Armitage, now maintains that “every great
revolution is a civil war.”13
This disillusionment has had very clear consequences for historical
scholarship. The very idea of a “paradigm” for understanding an event
like the French Revolution presupposes that the event had a unique inner
logic and dynamism that governed its action, and that these resembled
the inner logic and dynamism of other, similar events—other revolutions.
With historians less confident about the existence in our own time of a
single, coherent model for revolutions, driven by such inner logic, they are
less likely to approach complex and confusing events in the past with the
assumption that they, too, must have had some powerful, dynamic logic
behind them. Thus, they are less likely to look beyond Marxist theory,
or Tocquevillian “political culture” approaches, for a paradigm of similar
explanatory force.
As a result, the most interesting recent work on the age of democratic
revolutions has not attempted to explain how these revolutions worked as
motors of historical change, driven by a coherent inner logic, but instead
11. See Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
12. Ibid., p. 401.
13. David Armitage, “Every Great Revolution Is a Civil War,” in Baker and Edelstein,
Scripting Revolution, pp. 57–68. See also David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas
(New York: Knopf, 2017).
Introduction xix
14. Key works here include Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the
French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to
Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1995); Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and
the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the
Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 117–38; Carla Hesse, The
Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
15. See Steven L. Kaplan, Adieu 89 (Paris: Fayard, 1993).
16. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Dan
Edelstein, “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 86, no. 3 (2014),
pp. 566–602.
17. See especially Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights
of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 1–56.
18. See Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French
Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina
Press, 2004); Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves: De la colonization aux abolitions,
1620–1848 (Paris: Grasset, 2007).
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