“Noisy Pleasures” and “Noisy Evil[s]”: The Political Dimensions of Sound in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

260 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxv + 186pp. US$27.50. Claudia Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel is a participant in two lively and expanding critical projects. One is the attention being given recently to eighteenth-century women writers, and thus to Jane Austen not as the initiating point of a single "female tradition" but as the heir to a century of exploration, by hitherto marginal and unknown authors, of the possibilities of female-centred fiction. The other is a revisionary movement within Austen scholarship itself. Fed by the concerns of feminist scholars challenging received canonical wisdom, Austenians have been questioning the (largely male) critical adulation based on the modesty of their subject's choice of subject matter, her feminine disdain for politics, and her artistic wisdom in refusing to argue for a particular position or set of ideas within that properly male domain. Johnson's principal argument is with the conservative Austen of Marilyn Butler 's provocative Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas. But she wittily works against the critical grain in all political directions, commenting that "whatever the station to which Austen is assigned," be it Tory apologist or subversively resentful old maid, "she is not held to entertain an opinion independent of it. She is the 'parson 's daughter' or the 'sailors' sister,' and the mere identification of her kinship relationships to the men in her family is judged enough to warrant the inference that her social opinions affirmed [or automatically reacted against] theirs as a matter of course" (pp. xvii-xix). Austen's contemporaries did not draw the line, Johnson reminds us, between fiction and polemic that we assume to be normative and laudatory. Johnson's method is historical, drawing on the critical thinking that constructs historical periods from a variety of narrative sources, including (for the 1790s, the formative period of Austen's writing) the treatises of Burke and his radical opponents, the debates over female education and the value of novels and romances , including the popular Gothics. Her positioning of Austen in the "middle rank" along a continuum of her female contemporaries moving from Jane West and Hannah More on the extreme right, through Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney , Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, and Mary Brunton, to Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft, allows her to contrast Austen's six novels with the work of really conservative writers, and to show how deeply her strategies question and undermine theirs. Conservative ideologues, drawing on the writings of Burke, "met the threat posed by the revolution in France and the voices of reform in England by reasserting the political momentousness of the family" (p. 50), she observes in the chapter on Sense and Sensibility. Novelists of the same stripe upheld the patriarchal power of the gentry, manifesting itself in a benevolence that provokes, in tum, undying gratitude on the part of those who depend on it. Against this ground, the figures in Austen's fiction, and those in her two least popular novels in particular, show up as quite other than the apologists REVIEWS 261 for reaction that readers have usually found them to be. Thus in Sense and Sensibility the family tends to be the locus of "venal and idle habits," habits which are cast into relief by a likeable scoundrel like Willoughby but which are shared by a host of other privileged male characters in this and other novels. Similarly, it is because of Austen's exposure of the manipulations of patriarchs like Sir Thomas Bertram that the "conventionally happy ending which ensconces Fanny [in Mansfield Park], indispensable at last and still adulating now enervated figures whose discernment has been radically impeached, sustains rather than settles the problems the foregoing material has covered" (p. 116). By neither claiming Austen for the progressive tendency in the fiction of the 1790s nor criticizing her harshly for defecting from this stance, Johnson can argue that Austen's political reticence makes possible a critique of fictional oversimplification that is all the more profound for its lack of programmatic focus. Every one of the novels is illuminated by Johnson's rigorous, informed...

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction J.Batchelor & C.Kaplan PART I: AUTHORSHIP AND PRINT CULTURE Woman's Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sara Scott J.Batchelor Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose? N.Clarke Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park K.Halsey Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited J.Hawley Ivory Miniatures and the art of Jane Austen J.Todd Mansfield Park - What did Jane Austen Really Write? The Texts of 1814 and 1816 B. Southam PART II: HISTORY AND POLITICS 'Thou monarch of my Panting Soul': Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Behn's Love Letters H.Thompson British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a 'Feminine Orient' F.A.Nussbaum 'Tied to Their Species By the Strongest of All Relations': Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility: M Rickman Hannah More and Conservative Feminism H.Guest Chawton House: Gathering Old Books for a New Library I.Grundy Index

This study employs Lucien Goldmann’s Genetic Structuralism approach to dissect the treatment disparities experienced by the upper and lower echelons of society within Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park.” Utilizing textual analysis, the research scrutinizes instances delineating differential treatment, including condescension and exclusion, towards characters belonging to distinct social strata. The findings delineate the prevalent class-based prejudices, revealing the societal dichotomy ingrained within the novel’s narrative. In examining the treatment disparities within Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” through Lucien Goldmann’s Genetic Structuralism approach, this study delves into the intricacies of societal divisions and class-based prejudices. Goldmann’s method allows for a nuanced exploration of the upper and lower echelons of society as depicted in the novel, revealing subtle nuances of condescension and exclusion. Through meticulous textual analysis, the research identifies instances that illuminate the societal dichotomy present in the narrative. By applying this theoretical framework, the study not only brings to light the inherent class biases but also contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between social structures and individual experiences within the world Austen crafted in “Mansfield Park.”

Reviewed by: Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes, and: The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 by Deborah Weiss Anne Chandler WOLLSTONECRAFT'S GHOST: THE FATE OF THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, by Andrew McInnes. London: Routledge, 2017. 198 pp. $155.00 cloth; $52.16 ebook. THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER AND HER AFTERLIVES: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, THE BRITISH NOVEL, AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF FEMINISM, 1796-1811, by Deborah Weiss. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 291 pp. $119.99 cloth; $119.99 paper; $89.00 ebook. Though methodologically different, Andrew McInnes's Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period and Deborah Weiss's The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 share the assertion that Mary Wollstonecraft, through her authorial personae and the posthumous remembrances of her husband William Godwin, acquired the status of an archetype that underwent revision in the fiction of other feminist writers. McInnes and Weiss each see "the female philosopher" as a conceit enabling successors to endorse aspects of Wollstonecraft's social critique while distancing themselves (and their novelistic heroines) from the taint of bohemianism Godwin inadvertently fostered following Wollstonecraft's death. Both authors find that women novelists of the Romantic period—Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and others—took care to distinguish between dangerous and safe forms of feminist philosophy and to re-shape Wollstonecraftian feminism into a gradualist, politically liberal enterprise. Whereas McInnes sees the trope as allowing subversive revisionings of feminism under the cover of separate-spheres ideology, Weiss emphasizes the gradual subsumption of Wollstonecraftian radicalism by that ideology, as later novelists assessed what women could realistically do within the still-protective framework of marriage. The two studies' tight focus on "the female philosopher" leitmotif is sometimes limiting. The coinage derives from recent scholarship rather than from direct usage by Wollstonecraft or her contemporaries. In spotlighting "the female philosopher" as a metonym for cultural anxiety about Wollstonecraftian feminism, McInnes and Weiss seek to provide a unified through line on a set of writers whose politics are difficult to classify. In both books, though, the term is in constant need of qualification, and one sometimes sees a gap between the metacritical and characterological levels of its application in chapters. McInnes begins Wollstonecraft's Ghost by historicizing the trope in two phases, first through earlier eighteenth-century understandings of the French Enlightenment's femme philosophe and the British bluestocking (each subject to feminist and misogynist inflections), and then through [End Page 161] 1790s debates over the French Revolution, whose early objectives Wollstonecraft defended as beneficial to women. In the British anti-Jacobin backlash of the middle 1790s, McInnes argues, "female philosophy" became aligned in simpler ways with Franco-and gynophobia. Always "a rhetorical figure" expressing ideological tension, "the female philosopher" now signified women who should be kept out of public life for their own and others' good (pp. 6, 11). Observing that any Romantic-era response to Wollstonecraft was affected by these phases of public discourse, McInnes describes "a Habermasian double bind" for early feminists: whereas the "literary public sphere" was open to them, the political one was off-limits despite a widespread belief that the two were contiguous in British culture (pp. 14-16). Inasmuch as Wollstonecraft attacked both "stereotypical representations of the female reader in literature" and "the related divisions between public and private spheres," later novelists were able to reference her "on a metatextual level" in modeling for their own readers what women's intellectualism should look like (p. 16). This case is best made in McInnes's first chapter, "Imagining Mary: Representations of Wollstonecraft in the Works of Mary Hays and William Godwin." Hays was a protégée of both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, so McInnes uses correspondence and incidental writings toward critical readings of Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1798) and St. Leon (1799). The dynamics between autobiography and political fiction in the novels are...

Even though French Revolution is more firmly rooted in contemporary events than any of Blake's other Prophetic Books, most critics have considered the poem's political content as little more than a backdrop for his evolving philosophical system. For instance, in one of the most extended readings that the poem has received, John Beer casually dismisses its revolutionary context: begin with the poem is written in favor not of revolution but of liberty. distinction is important. Blake was no headlong supporter of political revolution.' And recently, Barton R. Friedman has presented a more sophisticated, more historically informed version of this same argument, identifying French Revolution as an example of Universal History: The use of one nation's experience -here specifically the American and French Revolutions and the agony they cause Albion -as a microcosm ... of the whole cosmic design. 2 But while Blake undoubtedly thought the French Revolution an event of potentially cosmic significance, he 3 was also keenly aware of its specific social and political ramifications. In contrast to Blake's later, more thoroughly mythologized narratives, French Revolution provides a detailed, if somewhat inaccurate, account of early stages of the Revolution, and, with few exceptions, its characters are larger-than-life versions of the actual historical figures. In fact, rather than an otherworldly prophecy, I believe that French Revolution is essentially a political tract in epic form that represents Blake's most public attempt to enter the ongoing English debate over the French Revolution. Writing in 1791, Blake -like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine -seeks to counter the chief conservative voice of the time, Edmund Burke, whose 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France had eroded much of the initial English sympathy for the revolutionary movement. What results is a poetic dialogue in which Blake challenges the underlying assumptions of Burke's counterrevolutionary text.4 At the heart of this dispute is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the French Revolution. To Burke, the Revolution represents a tremendous upheaval in the course of human history, a total inversion of the natural order:

Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama. Matthew S. Buckley . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. vii+191.

Jane Austen’s canon has been expertly combed through for its moral implications, whether radically feminist or extremely conservative. Writing during the Napoleonic Wars, Austen was no stranger to politics, the military, or the implications both had on her life and her role in society. In the paper that follows, I posit that Austen channeled many of her opinions on England’s state of affairs through her male characters, who were the acting socio-political agents of the day. Through various caricatures of masculinity, Austen portrays masculine ideals and failures, both of which were rapidly evolving during her time. This research focuses on Austen’s portrayal of the “self-made man,” a form of masculinity which emerged following the American and French Revolutions, and grew to prominence in England following the Napoleonic Wars. These men quickly made places for themselves in society, particularly through the British Navy. They grew to rank and status through their own merit and skills, instead of high birth and landed title. Their increasing prominence threatened the very foundations of British society as Austen knew it. However, as this paper explores, Austen took care to present these men - and the changes they brought - in a positive light, showcasing the value in their revolutionary social movement. In the following essay, I demonstrate how, in doing so, Austen’s later novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, act as political tools which reveal how Austen’s opinions about England’s fragile state were revolutionary.

The representation of Austen’s moral world is especially complete in Mansfield Park; the reader must take the concerns, the assumptions, the moral judgments, even the descriptions of the countryside, at face value, for they are precise representations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. The perspective is that of the respectable, morally centered upper class. When we recognize the accuracy of Austen’s portrayal of her society, the book no longer seems a problem novel, or even an inexplicable departure from the real Jane Austen, as so many critics over the years have labeled it, but it takes focus as an extraordinary depiction of social history. The morality at its center is the root of social and domestic concern for Austen’s class. The exploration of moral motivation, especially as it shapes social conduct, is typical of Austen’s peers, as expressed in their letters, in the periodicals (think Samuel Johnson), in both conservative and radical novels, in the ubiquitous conduct books, and even in the political writing so popular in Austen’s youth. It is central to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Age of Reason.KeywordsMoral MotivationReligious ObservanceLarge IncomeModern ReaderMoral StanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

A recent denigrating essay on Jane Austen1 rehearses charges more or less forgotten in her recent recrudescence as an ironic icon of ‘popular culture’. The tally of points against suggests that if ...

Chronology Introduction Claudia L. Johnson 1. Mary Wollstonecraft's letters Janet Todd 2. Mary Wollstonecraft on education Alan Richardson 3. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications and their political tradition Chris Jones 4. Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution Tom Furniss 5. Mary Wollstonecraft's literary reviews Mitzi Myers 6. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft's feminism Barbara Taylor 7. Mary Wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction Vivien Jones 8. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the woman writers of her day Anne K. Mellor 9. Mary Wollstonecraft and the poets Susan J. Wolfson 10. Mary Wollstonecraft's novels Claudia L. Johnson 11. The art of travelling in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Mary A. Favret 12. Mary Wollstonecraft and the sexuality of genius Andrew Elfenbein 13. Mary Wollstonecraft's reception and legacies Cora Kaplan.

Book reviewed in this article:Corruption: Ehtics and Power in Florence, 1600–1770. By Jean‐Claude Waquet.Four Cheshire Townships in the Eighteenth Century. By Charles F. Foster.The Making of Johnson's Dictionary 1746–1773. By Allen Reddick.The First Women Actresses: Women and Drama 1600–1700. By Elizabeth Howe.Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru. Edited by John R. Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe and Anthony McFarlane.The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787: the Enlightenment Debate on Toleration. By Geoffrey Adams.The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. General Editor: Paul Langford.Revenue and Reform. The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773. By H. V. Bowen.A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, 1791 and 1991. Edited by Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen.The Sociable Humanist. The Life and Works of James Harris, 1709–1780. By Clive T. Probyn.Heder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment. By Robert E. Norton.Ossian Revisited. Edited by Howard Gaskill.Jane Austen. By Meenakshi Mukherjee.The Language of Jane Austen. By Myra Stokes.Reading Character in Jane Austen's Emma. By Marjet Berendsen.Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen's Fiction. By Glenda Hudson.Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon. By Jane Austen.Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion. Edited by Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells.Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth‐Century English Novel. By Madeleine Kahn.Rhetorics of Order / Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature. Edited by J. Douglas Canfield and J. Paul Hunter.The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth‐Century Verse Epistle. By William C. Dowling.Chracter and Consciousness in Eighteenth‐Century Fiction. By Elizabeth Kraft.Seductive Forms: women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. By Ros Ballaster.Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825. Edited with an introduction by Jeffrey N. Cox.The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 1771–1772, 1773–1776, 1777–1781. The Hyde Edition. Edited by Bruce Redford.Silence and Sound: Theories of Poetics from the Eighteenth Century. By Richard Bradford.Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art. By Ruben Quintero.Designs on Turth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock‐Epic. By Gregory G. Colomb.The Dream of my Brother: An Essay on Johnson's Authority. By Frederic V. Bogel.Samuel Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales. Edited by Gwin Kolb.Dr Johnson: Interviews and Recollections. Edited by Norman Page.A Dr Johnson Chronology. By Norman Page.Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism. By Edward TomarkenThe Eighteenth‐Century Short Title Catalogue (microfiche edition).Reading william Blake. By Stephen C. Behrendt.Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. By Jon Mee.Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. By Lorraine Clark.Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan: ‘The Intelligencer’ Edited by James Woolley.Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteeth Century, 275.Le Cæur et la Raison. Recueil d'études sur le dix‐huitième Siècle. By Roland Mortier.Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 278.Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Séville. By John Dunkley.Journal d'observations sur les principaux hôpitaux et sur quelques prisons d'Angleterre (1787). By Jacques Tenon.Dictionnaire des Constituants. By Edna Hindie Lemay and collaborators.Correspondance générale d'Helvétius, volume III. Edition critique préparée par Peter Allan, Alan Dainard, Marie‐Thérèe Inguenaud, Jean Orsoni et David Smith.The Press in the French Revolution. Edited by Harvey Chisick.Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics. By Lesley Sharpe.Vernunft als Weisheit: Studien zum späten Lessing. By Ingrid Strohschneider‐Kohrs.Early Modern Germany, 1477–1806. By Michael Hughes.Gelehrsamkeit und Leidenschaft. Das Leben der Ernestine Christine Reiske 1735–1798. By Anke Bennholdt‐Thomsen and Alfredo Guzzoni.Romanticism and the Sciences. Edited by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine.Clergé et pastorale en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle: le diocèse de Londres. By Viviane Barrie‐Curien.The Scottish Interior. Georgian and Victorian Decor. By Ian Gow.Hogarth. By Ronald Paulson. ‘Modern Moral Subject’ 1697–1732.‘The Virtuous Tribe of Arts and Sciences’: Studies in the Eighteenth‐Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts. Edited by D. G. C. Allan and John L. Abbott.Discourses on Art. By Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by Pat Rogers.Allan Ramsay 1713–1784. By Alastair Smart.Recollections of R. J. S. Stevens. An Organist in Georgian London. Edited by Mark Argent.

This article makes three important assertions: it explains Austen's famous comment that Mansfield Park is about "ordination"; it shows that thematically the book is an anti-slavery novel; and it shows how Austen codifies her solution to the English anxieties of the French Revolution by implementing reforms in the institutions of the state, the military, and the church. The paper uses the Burkean terms of modeand substance to prove Burke's assertion that an estate, as well as a state, "without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

From its inception, the French Revolution was experienced as an unprecedented spectacle, received by many with overwhelming enthusiasm but also by waves of panic and terror. Among the supporters of the Revolution who rushed to Paris after 1789 were two women writers who have left an important mark in literary history: Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827), a poet, novelist and war correspondent ante litteram, author of the bestselling series of Letters Written in France, published in London between 1790 and 1796, which offered first-hand accounts and testimonies written in a captivating, personal style that contrasted with the anti-Jacobin sentiment of the leading English newspapers; and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), journalist and philosopher, author of the famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), now considered a foundational text of modern feminist thought, and of the historical work A Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1795), which remained unfinished. This essay will assess the significance of both writers’ reflections on revolutionary violence, the reign of terror and personal fears, placing them in the wider context of the relation between sensibility and rationality, philosophical and political thought and literary writing which distinguishes the work of both writers. Wollstonecraft and Williams characterise the terror in multiple ways, not only as a negative emotion but also as a noble, energizing and even beneficial sentiment. In their pages, the aesthetics of sensibility and the taste for the sublime meet the extraordinary and gruesome events of the French Revolution, opening up daring new perspectives on gender relations and on the Revolution itself.

When the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 signaled to the world that something extraordinary was taking place in France, Mary Wollstonecraft was already in a position, intellectually and socially, to respond with enthusiasm. From 1784 to 1785 she had lived in Newington Green, where she came under the influence of the Dissenting preacher Dr. Richard Price, then in his sixties, who was one of the leading radical intellectuals of the day. In 1787 she began working as a writer and translator for Joseph Johnson, a Dissenter and radical publisher whose home and bookshop at St. Paul's Churchyard was a focal point for London Dissenters and radicals. As a kind of surrogate daughter to Johnson, Wollstonecraft became part of one of the most forward-looking intellectual circles in Britain. Members of Johnson's circle hurried to Paris in the summer of 1789 and returned with enthusiastic accounts, hoping that a similar revolution might take place in Britain. The joy occasioned by the French Revolution's early phase bound this circle together, as Claire Tomalin puts it, “in the certainty that they knew the truth and that it was bound to prevail.”

If more people knew more about the French Revolution, their views could serve as a measure of their politics—as, say, views of the Russian Revolution once did. The history of the French Revolution is difficult to separate out from its impact on political theory and on the fault lines between Left and Right. Political thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx were keen interpreters of the Revolution’s historical significance. The account each one chose to embrace indicated where he or she stood on the political spectrum. For a time, Marx was the triumphant interpreter, and preeminent historians of the Revolution, figures such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, relied on a Marxist class analysis in order to explain the course of events. The Revolution secured a central place in the Left’s heritage. The Marxist approach lost its dominance in 1978 with the publication of François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution. Although others before him had challenged the Marxist account (notably George Taylor and Alfred Cobban), Furet succeeded in shifting the discourse on the Revolution away from class and material conditions toward the discussion of political ideas and languages. Furet’s achievement was not only to define a new research agenda for the Revolution. By overturning the Marxist interpretation, with its emphasis on the rise and politicization of the bourgeoisie, Furet deprived many leftists of what had been for them the source and origin of modern radical politics. In turn, if the Revolution could no longer be justified by reference to the emancipatory aspirations of the bourgeoisie (and the nascent proletariat), critical attention could be drawn to the Reign of Terror. Furet’s new reading of the Revolution was well timed, occurring just as French intellectuals became increasingly aware of, and critical of, the Russian Revolution’s culmination in Stalinism. Now the French Revolution could be reinterpreted as the founding event of left-wing totalitarianism. It is against this backdrop that French historian Sophie Wahnich’s In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution enters into the politicized debate over the Revolution’s legacy.