In the shadow of the guillotine: the question of collective memory in post-Revolutionary France

Abstract

It is tempting to picture nineteenth-century France as being ‘in the shadow of the guillotine’: the killings and executions of the French Revolution, the Terror, the bloodshed, all seem to have plunged the country into a dark and fearful imaginary – political as well as literary – of which Paris was the symbolic as well as literal capital. Yet we can question the epistemological value of such a causal reading, just as we need to question the concept of collective memory: to what extent can the (re)construction of Revolutionary memory attempted by nineteenth-century historians be considered as collective memory properly speaking? Sociologists and historians seem to disagree on the matter, yet both propose valuable and promising tools that provide insights into this elusive field.