Category Archives: MLA Annual meeting 2014

Why the Revolution Matters to Me, by Julia Douthwaite

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One thing you should probably know:  I come from a political family.  My dad, “G.K. “Jeff” Douthwaite, was a state legislator (Democrat, Washington State, 43rd district) for three terms during my adolescence and I was deeply involved in all three campaigns.  I have fond and somewhat bizarre memories of the Soul Food dinners we attended in church basements and the Hell’s Angels types who occasionally filled our house to help stuff envelopes.  This was during the Civil Rights movement, the beginning of the Green movement, and a heady time was had by all.  (Interestingly, historian Lynn Hunt also comes from a political family; her mom was a long-time city councilwoman.  Also a Democrat.)  For me, then, the French revolution is not just a subject of study, it is a vocation.

I really enjoyed doing the research that went into this book and which lasted about a decade.  After tracking down and reading the 300-some fictions which constitute my final corpus, it took about 10 months to structure the material into a coherent book.  I had to leave out one chunk that exists in article form instead, on the Festival of the Federation, because it did not leave any traces in the afterlife of the Revolution.  My wilfully speculative Codas are an attempt to disprove Francois Furet’s oft-cited comment that the Revolution is over.  On the contrary, I seek to show that the revolution was not over on “Thermidor” year II (when the Terror supposedly ended with the execution of Robespierre). And that it was kept alive, ridiculed, admired, satirized, and otherwise memorialized in later years, from 1794 up to 1904. Ultimately, each generation keeps the memory of the Revolution alive, as Mary Shelley, Honoré de Balzac, and Helen-Maria Williams did for theirs.

The one thing that feels unfinished about my book, however, is the label that I gave my method in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek moment: “new positivism.”  This irreverential moniker unleashed a little flurry of objections at last year’s convention of the French Historical Society in Cambridge and has raised a question or two among the book’s reviewers too, so I’d like to take this opportunity to start clarifying what I mean.  (A longer article is in the works.)

New positivism is a neologism that joins two opposing concepts: novelty or innovation and one of the most old-fashioned and unpopular forms of scholarly study.  A targeted attack on positivism can be found in the masthead of the book series, “Flash Points,” which was founded and launched at the UCPress by a group of English professors in the California system.  As the editors declare in their mission statement:  “The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength.  We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history, and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism.”[1]  The opposition posited there—between a theoretically-informed and engaged historicism, on the one hand, and an uncritical positivism on the other hand—should give us pause.  Positivism may be more fact-oriented and less philosophical than some might like, true.  But it is erroneous to assume that positivism was ever unconnected from the world of politics; indeed Auguste Comte invented positivism specifically to usher in what he hoped would be a broad-ranging, political platform intended to explain laws of human conduct and ultimately free people from prejudice and hatred.[2]

However, Comte is less an inspiration than his successor, Fustel de Coulanges, whose ‘positivism of the document’ had no such liberating claims, except in the realm of fact-producing.  In his History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France, Fustel de Coulanges argued:  “[if] one may hope to succeed in the matter, it can only be by a patient study of the writings and documents that each age has left of itself.” [3]  Coulanges’s model of a scientific kind of history-writing was close to that of a group of scholar-politicians whose desire to emulate the German example had been increased markedly by the shock of the 1870-1871 defeat,” writes Ernest Breisach, “They aimed at wresting dominance away from the amateurs or littérateurs who gave stirring lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne.” Similarly, my model of a positivist literary history aims to wrest influence away from social sciences largely writ. I argue that literary documents—when triangulated with the press and historiography of a given time and place—can shed new light on socio-political developments and furthermore can engage with audiences in lively and inspiring ways.  This involves embracing Coulanges’ rigor but paired to a more playful attitude about the stories we tell and the reader’s engagement with them.

I am not the first person to embrace positivism in our time; indeed Foucault and Habermas both adopted some kind of positivism in their famous works.  Like Foucault in The Order of Things, I made this move because of disappointment with my field.  Literary studies in French have fallen into a self-induced irrelevance since the 1980s because of an over-investment in philosophy, and especially deconstruction.  This has produced some scholarship that may appear innovative on first sight but which fails the test of time.  The stakes are even higher in the revolutionary period, when words were invented and allegiances changed from month to month.  Literary scholars who have ventured into the revolutionary period without requisite knowledge of political history have committed some embarrassing errors.  Historians have also committed some lapses, by integrating literary documents into their explanations without considering the importance of genre or the author’s biography.

So I use the term positivism as shorthand for strict attention to the textual universe of a work’s time and site of origins.  I am trying to figure out what an imagined middle-of-the-road, politically moderate reader might have understood during the initial life of the books in question. I attain that goal by reading of newspapers, biographies, and book reviews, mainly, as well as other print materials—pamphlets, caricatures, artwork, some songs and speeches.  I admit that I am borrowing only certain tenets from the founder of positivism Auguste Comte and other proponents of the 19th century, but I prefer positivism over the term philology, for instance, because I like the distant echo of positivism’s utopian ethos and combative stance.  My next project will study how novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries created relevance for their stories by incorporating current events and human interest stories related in the press.

Conclusion

Each of us who writes or teaches the French Revolution does so for different reasons, and those reasons are rooted in our own situation.  My 22 years of teaching at a wealthy Catholic institution situated in a poor, working-class city may have something to do with it, as well as my political views inherited from childhood.  Many scholars aspire to a dispassionate and even censorious attitude toward the revolutionary past.  This is unsurprising, especially as in the case of Astbury’s book or Marisa Linton’s latest work, Choosing Terror, which relates the deadly infighting amongst the Jacobins in Years I and II.  When describing a family in mourning or an imminent threat, an attitude of worried concern and disapproval make sense.  “Trauma ” may be a blunt instrument to describe it, but it is certain that events of 1793-94 caused widespread and negative emotional impact on some parts of the French citizenry.

But for me, it is the accomplishments of the Revolution that ultimately win out and merit our friendly concern.  When I think about the persona I’d like the reader to take away from The Frankenstein of 1790, it is that of a story-teller and long-distance sympathizer.  I’d like the reader to enjoy the great stories and larger-than-life characters of this period and be intrigued to look around and see what else carries on their legacy today.  That’s the “newness” of the positivistic approach I’m endorsing.

Hybrid and marked by their own provenance, as all books must be, my work could be considered as arising from the same spirit of Pierre-Francois Palloy, the man who excavated and then repurposed the stones of the Bastille into an entire industry of miniatures, toys, and souvenir items of political memory.  As described by Richard Taws in his new book The Politics of the Provisional, Palloy’s contributions need to be appreciated in two ways: 1) as deeply rooted in the original sources; and 2) as constantly involved in the process of making themselves anew.   Taws argues that Palloy’s work is important “for its troubling insistence on the persistence of the past in the revolutionary present; for complicating the straightforward division of objects, histories, and people into new and old; and for forcing reflection upon the paradoxical conditions of materiality in 1790s France.”[4]

May we all aspire to such a feat!

[1] Founded by Catherine Gallagher (English, UCBerkeley) and Judith Butler (Rhetoric, UC-Santa Cruz), the series now operates out of Northwestern UP.  The editorial board includes Ali Behdad, Edward Dimendberg, Jody Greene, Susan Gillman, and Richard Terdiman.

[2] For more on Comte’s intentions, see Larry Laudan, “Towards a Reassessment of Comte’s méthode positive,”

Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Mar., 1971): 35-53.

[3] Cited in Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 276.

[4] Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 107.

Revolutionary Afterlives, by Mary McAlpin

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I’ll briefly address the two books under discussion today, then turn to the question of raised by the title of this panel: Why do we continue to care about the Revolution?

First to the books. Julia and Kate’s studies come together by virtue of a shared interest in “politically inflected” literary texts from the post-Revolutionary period. I have borrowed the term “politically inflected” from the introduction to The Frankenstein of 1790, because I find it so very useful in describing the texts at the heart of these two studies. As both Julia and Kate emphasize in their introductions, the fiction produced during and immediately after the Revolution has some claim to the status of “most neglected literary corpus in French history.” And yet, it is eminently reasonable to assume that this body of literature has something important to tell us about the Revolution; for how could an event of this magnitude, incorporating so many reversals, and so much violence, NOT be omnipresent in the cultural imagination of the time, and thus in the fiction of the period? And so both Kate and Julia argue for an “inflection” in these texts toward the Revolution, in the etymological sense of “bending toward,” with all this implies of a certain plant-like tropism, as if the Revolution were exerting an inexorable pull on the authorial imagination of the time.

The manner in which Kate and Julia argue for the revelatory power of this inflection makes these two studies very much deserving of the attention we are giving them at this panel. Nevertheless, to the extent that these works are problematic for me, these concerns grow out of the need that each author feels to convince her readers that the literature of this period has something, and something important, to say about the Revolution. I’ll start with Julia’s book, which I had the pleasure of reviewing.

One of the most striking aspects of Julia’s study is the variety of the material she addresses. Julia mentions in her introduction that in preparing to write this study, she examined some 300 works of fiction, and in a sense, the very volume of texts taken into consideration negates the question of their literary value—they act as a data set, rather than as individual works of art. But Julia of course does offer interpretations of some of these obscure works, using a theoretical framework she labels “new positivism.” This interpretive philosophy can be summarized as follows: One must posit a literal meaning for a text; but one must simultaneously accept that this “literal” meaning is subject to change over time.

It would be easy to dismiss this approach as an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too—that is, to keep one’s postmodernist credentials intact, while simultaneously ignoring the greater claims to skepticism implied by postmodernism’s openness to undecidability. I however very much appreciate Julia’s willingness to make interpretive claims, based on textual evidence, within a particular historical context. As is always the case, the more unexpected the interpretive claims, the greater the satisfaction when the reader accepts their validity, and in this respect The Frankenstein of 1790 most certainly does not disappoint. In particular, Julia demonstrates a breathtaking openness to arguments of influence. She traces, that is to say, intertextual connections over time based on what might seem at first glance to be very tenuous similarities. I’m referring here to the coda to each chapter, in which Julia links the quite obscure texts she has discovered to later works. The most striking claim to parentage, at least in my eyes, comes in chapter three, in which Julia argues that Louis XVI morphs, over time, into le Père Goriot.

But what I like most about these codas is that, in accordance with the interpretive openness she values, Julia makes no attempt to erase or gloss over the occasional fragility of the connections she makes. And although I was in each case quite convinced by the links Julia made, I am nevertheless interested in her argument for the interpretive validity of her codas, beyond the test of reader response. I’m thinking in particular of the work she references in her title, François-Félix Nogaret’s Le Miroir des événements actuels. One of the characters in this text, an inventor of automatons named Wak-wik-vauk-on-son-frankénsteïn, is of course read in Julia’s coda as an ancestor of the famous scientist from Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818—but  Julia acknowledges that she has found no direct parentage between the two Frankensteins. And so my questions for Julia are the following: To what extent would the discovery that Shelley had read Nogaret reinforce the validity of her claims concerning the link between the two texts? And secondly, to what extent does the Frankenstein of 1790 deserve to be resuscitated, independently of Shelley’s masterpiece?

On to Kate, who begins with a methodological nod to Robert Darnton, who in the Forbidden Bestsellers of Revolutionary France advised critics interested in the relationship between Revolutionary life and literature to look for disparities, rather than continuities. This method proves quite fruitful for Kate, who notes that some of the works she considers achieved best-selling status in the post-Revolutionary period, and therefore MUST have been speaking, in some significant way, to the cultural consciousness of the day, despite what previous critics have argued. I especially like Kate defense of fiction as a privileged mode, even in, or rather especially in, periods of great political and cultural upheaval. Chaos compels us, she argues, to seek to make sense of our world-turned-upside-down and of our personal experiences with this reversal, or revolution. The often horrific experiences associated with the Revolution leads us into trauma theory, although Kate is interested not as much in individual trauma as she is in communal trauma—a fascinating concept in and of itself.

Kate observes evidence in the body of literary texts she has examined of a process of return and delay. Return, in the sense that, in the initial period of the Revolutionary aftermath, Ancien Régime tropes, settings, and characters dominate, to a surprising degree, in the works of both proponents and opponents of the Revolution. Kate interprets this return to the known—to stability—not as an absence, but rather as an active response to trauma. In this way, she pushes back the date at which literary treatments of the Revolution can be said to begin. But Kate also insists on the presence of a delay, namely in writing about personal experiences of Revolutionary events, as in the émigré novels that would be become so popular. This theory of coping with trauma by means of an initial sentimental return to the relatively stable past, followed by a subsequent movement toward a horror that is, by that time, already receding into the past, is fascinating. But my question for Kate involves esthetic value in relation to trauma theory : a difficult, perhaps impossible question, but on to which I returned several times in reading her study. My question is : Given the inflection of this body of literature toward the trauma of the Revolution, does this compulsion imply an esthetic wound as well as a psychic wound? Put more simply, are these works “bad” for the most interesting of reasons?

Finally, I’ll turn to the vast, somewhat frightening question posed by our panel’s title : Why do we continue to care about the Revolution? In answering this question, I decided to take the cowardly scholar’s way out, that is, to turn, once again, to etymology. The first entry in the OED for “care, noun,” is : Mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble. This obsolete sense of the word is certainly associated with the study of the French Revolution, but I imagine that the meaning intended by the organizers of this panel is rather number 3.a of the OED entry : Serious or grave mental attention; the charging of the mind with anything; concern; heed, heedfulness, attention, regard; caution, pains. Entry 4 also seems appropriate in this context: oversight with a view to protection, preservation, or guidance. Hence to have the care of , etc. to take care of : to look after.

One of the most admirable traits of the two studies under discussion today is that they do “care” very much—that is, take seriously, look after, seek to preserve—a much neglected body of literature, at a time when literary studies, like the humanities in general, is itself much neglected, or at least underappreciated. But it is important to note that for both Kate and Julia, what makes this literature of critical value is its relationship to the Revolution. It is the Revolution that returns these texts to readability—brings them back to life, if you will, à la Shelley’s monster. In a certain sense, then, one can argue that the Revolution takes care of us, with “us”—or rather the “we” of the panel’s title—understood to be scholars of eighteenth-century French literature. The Revolution gives a continuing relevance, a sense of analytical urgency, to our field, a relevance that might otherwise be difficult to evoke, especially in the eyes of our students. In any case—and I’ll end here—we have no choice but to “care” about the Revolution, if only in the diluted sense of “to take heed of.” We inflect toward this event, so to speak, to the extent that resisting the teleological pull of 1789 is one of the principal challenges of working on Ancien Régime France. We are in a state of mutual care and dependence with the Revolution, and we benefit greatly from this relationship, as these two excellent monographs demonstrate.­

On ‘Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution,’ by Katherine Astbury

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My book on Narrative Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution (Legenda, 2012)  aimed to widen the canon of French novels from the Revolutionary decade while offering a new theoretical and methodological approach to the reading of those texts. It was based on what I call the forgotten sentimental novels of the 1790s – best-selling texts which appear to retain the tropes and settings of the ancien régime but which, when read in context, reveal cracks in the narrative and a collective response to the trauma of the events of the Revolution. Re-incorporating these novels has thrown new light on our understanding of literary engagement during the period. Far from confirming Henri Coulet’s view that there is a refusal to respond to the political upheavals in the novels of the period,[1] this reassessment of fiction of the Revolution instead echoes Madame de Staël’s comment: ‘qui peut vivre, qui peut écrire en ce temps, et ne pas sentir et penser sur la révolution de France?’ [who can live, who can write in these times and not feel and think about the Revolution in France?][2]

One of the starting points for the monograph was the column space devoted to the notion of a post-9/11 novel in the British Press in 2005. While there can be no close comparison between the events of 11 September 2001 and the French Revolution, I was struck by the fact that British and American novelists tried to respond to the way in which a collective world view was turned upside down overnight by an attack on American soil. Some of the questions about the purpose of fiction at such a time carried echoes of debates around the novel during the Revolution. Initially novelists were anxious that ‘in the present circumstances, fiction was either irrelevant or incapable of offering a convincing representation of a new changed world’.[3] While V.S. Naipaul complained as late as 2005 that ‘no novels have yet engaged with the post-September 11 era in any meaningful way’,[4] writers such as Ian McEwan and Jay McInerney, who have spoken openly about writing fiction in the aftermath of 9/11, have suggested that it takes time for the effects to be interiorised and sublimated into fictional form, and that despite the time lag, people have come to realise that fiction is ‘uniquely suited to conveying certain kinds of emotional truth and metaphoric equivalents for our recent trauma’.[5] And yet at precisely the time that authors finally felt able to bear witness to a collective experience of seeing the 9/11 attacks unfold, there was also a reaction against political fiction growing amongst novelists. Howard Jacobson is just one writer who has complained that ‘if a novel isn’t politically au courant, if it isn’t ratified by events outside itself, we have trouble reminding ourselves what it’s for’.[6] The dismay at fiction’s delayed response to the tragedy and the rebellion against politicised fiction that we see in these debates from 2005, almost four years after 9/11, are reminiscent of the debates, both contemporary and modern, surrounding the fiction of the French Revolution’s apparent inability to engage with events. If in a cynical, post-modern, post-Freudian world it is still ‘stories, not facts […] we turn to when we want to make sense of chaos and complexity’,[7] then is it not also possible that those experiencing the upheaval of the Revolution might have had the same reflex?

The process of coming to terms with the upheaval of the French Revolution is, I believe, a gradual one, and there are consequently a number of stages in the literary responses to it.

The early phase 1790-92 is marked by an initial taking stock followed by an optimistic engagement with the changes that the Revolution was causing in society. This period is dominated by writers who want to provide models of behaviour for the new, regenerated France. The strong neoclassical tendency and a predominance of moderate standpoints are unsurprising given the nature of novel writing and publishing and may, in some cases, have been a deliberate strategy to get into print. Writing a novel and getting it published was a much less immediate way to respond to events than pamphlets, prints, or plays, and this discouraged radical posturing. The extent to which the novels of the initial, optimistic phase of the Revolution endorse the constitutional monarchy perhaps also reflects booksellers’ worries about the viability of texts espousing extremes. Carla Hesse’s work on the book trade confirms publishers’ needs to find texts that will sell as the literary market shrinks.[8] By falling back on ‘established’ names from the immediate pre-Revolutionary period, publishers in fact propagated a series of novels and tales reinforcing a sense of hierarchy and social order. These established writers, from across the political spectrum, were largely positive about the Revolution, though increasingly concerned by the direction it was taking. My work sheds new light, therefore, on Jacques Rancière’s view that a new concept of literature was developed by ‘les tenants de la troisième voie, entre la révolution jacobine et la contre-révolution aristocratique’ [those exponents of a third way, between the Jacobin revolution and the aristocratic counter-Revolution].[9]

It is but a small step for the novel to become a vehicle for the expression of loss and trauma as writers were overtaken by the speed of political change. The period 1792-94 is marked by the increasing rarity of moderate literary engagement with the Revolution. Increasingly, Republican writers come to the fore but we find that other writers feel compelled to write despite or because of the circumstances. There is, however, a significant shift in narrative production post-Thermidor. On the one hand, those who have kept silent during the early years of the Revolution resume their literary careers but the apparent continuity of Ancien Régime tropes, settings and characters is in fact an indication of their traumatised response to the Revolution. On the other hand, certain writers who had initially supported the Revolution now reveal their responses to the Terror. For many of the sentimental writers of the period, the narratives of trauma do not lead to resolution. Significantly, it is the writers who would go on to be the avant-garde of the Romantic movement in France who succeed in working through their responses to the Revolution, while lesser writers remain trapped in the repetitive cycle of reliving the trauma without fully acknowledging their memories.

Emigration acts as a key catalyst to artistic and aesthetic development. Judith Herman has shown how ‘creative energy is released when the barriers of denial and repression are lifted’;[10] this suggests that it is because Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand can find a way through writing to recover from the trauma of the Revolution and reconnect with ordinary life that they are able to spearhead a new French aesthetics. My work confirmed and extended Deborah Jenson’s view that ‘the origins of French Romanticism are linked to the traumatic memory of the Revolution’.[11] The process of coming to terms with the Revolution is, however, not complete by the end of the 1790s, and traces of trauma can be found well into the nineteenth century. Its impact on writers and the novel in France and on the development of Romanticism cannot be underestimated.

The reintegration of the sentimental novel into an understanding of the literary market and the collective psychology of the period has implications for other genres too. This session is called Revolutionary afterlives and takes us beyond 1799 into the Napoleonic period. The crossover between narrative fiction and theatre and their shared traumatic responses deserve further investigation. I’m currently looking at French theatre of the Napoleonic era thanks to funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and there is plenty to say about the development of melodrama as a response to the trauma of the Revolution, especially as the early successful melodramas were adaptations of novels which clearly bear the hallmark of post-Terror trauma. Pixerécourt’s reputation as a dramatist is made by adaptations of two Ducray Duminil novels, Coelina and Victor, ou l’enfant de la forêt, which are amongst the most important examples of trauma literature of the decade. Thinking of French theatre of the First Empire as exhibiting traces of trauma is potentially very fruitful and I wonder if there is also scope to take the notion of trauma and spectacle beyond the stage to events such as Madame Tussaud’s waxworks exhibition tours in Britain during the first part of the 19th century.

I’d like to end with some points of convergence between my work and Julia’s: over the last decade we have both been chipping away at the large number of fictional texts of the revolutionary decade and the two monographs represent a significant broadening of our knowledge of texts of the period. We both also share a belief in the importance of contextualisation as crucial for an understanding of texts at a time of considerable political upheaval. We also concur in seeing the Terror as the turning point for novels of the decade.

So what are the implications of our two monographs for future research and teaching? – one of the most obvious aspects to come out of the comparison of our research is that a cross-disciplinary approach is key for unlocking the Revolutionary decade – pamphlets inspire prints which draw on theatrical references themselves taken from novels – those at the time wouldn’t have concentrated on just one source and neither should we! We have a responsibility to rain our students to excavate analogies that would have been evident to contemporaries.

[1] ‘Quelques aspects du roman antirévolutionnaire sous la Révolution’, Revue de L’Université d’Ottawa/ University of Ottawa Quarterly, 54 (1984), 27-47 (p. 28)

[2] ‘De L’Influence des passions’, Œuvres complètes, I, p. 113.

[3] Jason Cowley, ‘A New Life for the Novel’, The Observer, 7 August 2005.

[4] New York Times, quoted in the Observer, Jay McInerney, ‘The Uses of Invention’, 17 September 2005.

[5] Jay McInerney, ‘The Uses of Invention’, The Observer, 17 September 2005.

[6] Howard Jacobson, ‘The Joke’s on us’, The Guardian, 9 September 2005.

[7] Robert McCrum, ‘Want to know what’s happening? Read a novel’, The Observer, 4 September 2005.

[8] Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary France 1789-1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

[9] Jacques Rancière, La Parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998), p. 47.

[10] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 2.

[11] Trauma and its Representations: the Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001), p. 25.

Line-up of speakers: change

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We are sad that historian Ronen Steinberg (MSU) cannot attend MLA, due to a family emergency, and delighted to welcome Biliana Kassabova who will take his place on our panel. A doctoral candidate at Stanford University, Biliana focuses on French literature and history of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her dissertation, entitled The Tribune and the People: Revolutionary leadership in 19th century France, addresses the question of how French practitioners and theorists of revolution of the 19th century have struggled to define the relationship between popular sovereignty and representative leadership. Biliana is the graduate student coordinator for the French Culture Workshop and the web manager of CMEMS. She is also part of the Mapping of the Republic of Letters, a collaborative digital humanities project.

The two books: a friendly rivalry

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Douthwaite_J_Frankenstein_9780226_c_NS (3)Narrative responses

Our session juxtaposes two books published in 2012, written by scholars far-flung (in the UK and the USA) and who did not know of the others’ book until after the fact.  In a spirit of friendly rivalry and intellectual sparring, we hope to share our excitement for revolutionary studies… even if we do not agree on how it should be studied!

We put the book covers here to pique your curiosity, and if you want to get a sense of their differences, various reviews are available on-line in French Studies and other journals.  Looking forward to a lively discussion in January!