September Massacres Research Articles

Jean-Lambert Tallien and his Political Path

Jean-Lamber Tallien (1767–1820) was a controversial figure of the era of the French Revolution, who rose from the lower classes, quickly made a successful political career, and just as quickly lost it. He encountered the Revolution at the age of twenty-two and became enthusiastically involved in the unfolding events, perfectly navigating the ever-changing environment. Tallien Tallien joined the Jacobin Club, organised a society for political education, began publishing his own newspaper, and was soon elected to the National Convention, becoming one of the youngest deputies in the new legislature. This was followed by a succession of assignments as a representative on mission to different regions of France, an escalation of the conflict with Robespierre, and the Thermidorian Reaction, which was truly Tallien's finest hour. However, after the overthrow of Robespierre, his career suffered a serious setback. Some facts of his biography, such as his participation in the September Massacres, his too soft policy in rebellious Bordeaux, his relationship with the Spanish Thérésa Cabarrus, gave his political opponents, and later historians, reason to accuse Tallien of bloodthirstiness, corruption, and royalism, which led to the permanent loss of his influence and credibility. His last attempt to reverse his fortunes was Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition, which, however, ended miserably not only for Tallien, but also for the great majority of its participants. The author highlights the main milestones of Tallien's biography, as well as summarises the reasons for and the essence of the “black legend” about him that has developed in historiography.

Vigilante, Brigand, Terrorist: Staging Popular Justice in Revolutionary Times

This article examines the many rewritings of a single story: the adventures of a brigand vigilante, first told in Schiller's Die Raüber, adapted by Lamartelière into the 1792 hit Robert, chef de brigands, and updated over the next decade through new endings and sequels. The evolving nature of this vigilante – from noble brigand to popular insurrectionist to merciful judge to Terrorist – reflects the anxieties produced by the shift from a conception of justice as a transcendental force, originating in God's will and flowing through the king and his courts, to an immanent model resting on the notion that all humans possess an innate sense of right and wrong and thus the ability to judge. The manifold revisions of Schiller's story open a window onto the shifting sands of Revolutionary justice, revealing the impact of such events as the September Massacres, Louis XVI's trial, and the institution of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Emmet Kennedy. Abbé Sicard’s Deaf Education: Empowering the Mute, 1785–1820.

Emmet Kennedy’s Abbé Sicard’s Deaf Education: Empowering the Mute, 1785–1820 is a slim volume that examines the life and works of Roch-Ambroise Cucurron, Abbé Sicard (1742–1822). Sicard was the director of the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets in Paris for thirty years and during that time developed foundational methods for the education of the deaf, publishing numerous works on grammar and education. Just that accomplishment would be sufficient to justify a book-length treatment of his activities, but Sicard was also politically active and an influential member of Parisian academia during the revolutionary period and beyond, so his story has extensive historical ramifications. Sicard entered a teaching order and became a priest as a young man, and although he soon left the order, he remained a priest for the remainder of his life—and a refractory one at that. In 1792 he was arrested but escaped execution during the September Massacres, allegedly because some of the sansculottes recognized that he was the famous teacher of the deaf, and thus indispensable to the state. A year later he was still performing the mass and was arrested again; due in large part to heartfelt letters from his students, he was released. These were the first of many escapes, either lucky or engineered, that saved Sicard through the Terror, the Directory, and the Napoleonic era, until the Restoration period, when he was able to act with less political interference. Throughout the period, Sicard continued to publish his educational treatises and could be found holding positions in the most prestigious academic institutions of the time. Political and educational leaders, as well as men and women from the highest ranks of Europe’s aristocracy, came to Paris to meet with Sicard and visit his school, where he gave them demonstrations of his students’ abilities to communicate through sign language. Many of these leaders then returned to their own states to establish similar schools for the deaf. Sicard was also visited by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, one of the founders of deaf education in the United States. The question of the day, and one that still engages practitioners of deaf education presently, is whether sign language is preferable to lip reading and oral communication. Under the influence of Sicard, sign language began to be seen as the preferred method. Although Sicard did not entirely invent the sign language that he taught, he certainly expanded and popularized it; without his influence, deaf education would likely look quite different today.

Сентябрьские убийства 1792 г. в политической карьере Ж.-Л. Тальена

Сентябрьские убийства 1792 г. в политической карьере Ж.-Л. Тальена

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tackett

Reviewed by: The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tackett Nigel Aston The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. By Timothy Tackett. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2015. Pp. xxi, 463. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-73655-9.) The Terror is the terrible stain on the record of the French Revolution, the uncomfortable presence that defies scholarly explanation even as it invites it. Timothy Tackett is the latest historian to make the attempt. Much might be hoped for from the author of the authoritative assessment of the response to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (September 1790)—Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1986)—and an expert on the work of the National Assembly, 1789–91, Becoming a Revolutionary (Princeton, 1996). Tackett does not disappoint; insisting that violence emerged out of the Revolutionary process itself, he makes a major contribution to historians’ understanding of the Terror and his judgment will be an essential marker for those that will surely follow him. His judgment and his scholarship are sound, for this text is based on an exhaustive survey of those writing about events as they happened, especially the correspondence (much of it unpublished) of deputies and Parisians that he has read and collected from across France. Tackett’s work is chronologically driven, not confining the Terror to the period between the fall of the Girondins in June 1793 and the overthrow of Robespierre in July 1794, but regarding those thirteen months as the culmination of a phenomenon that was already in train. He attempts to be even-handed, admitting [End Page 845] the “darker side” (p. 69) of 1789 and noting the periodic explosions of popular violence across the country that year. Public expectations of the reforming work to be undertaken by the Estates-General were so fervent that any obstacles to its progress—the Crown, the aristocracy, and the clergy—soon became emblems of obstructionist self-interest that invited retribution. These identifications only intensified over time once the War of the First Coalition began, a republic was declared, and the Revolution turned into a cult of itself. Part of the problem was the speedy collapse of royal authority in Paris and the provinces in 1789–90, which allowed for all sorts of experiments in civic freedoms at a juncture when, Tackett argues, the limits of liberty were “fundamentally untested” (p. 77). Outbreaks of violence did not occur in isolation. In rural areas, inhabitants freed from tithe payments and manorial dues saw tax payments as a logical next step, and trying to rebuild among them a spirit of subordination to property owners and the government only invited resistance. Perceptions of treachery and conspiracy became universal from 1791, and events like the king and queen’s botched Flight to Varennes intensified pressures to the point of generating an “everyday terror” (p. 135). Tackett does not mince his words. There arose a “metastasis of fear and suspicion” (p. 154) among all political classes, and it would not be dispelled as long as the Revolution lasted. Readily persuaded by a public rhetoric freighted with exhortations to seek out traitors (often those deemed to be using “patriotism” as a mask), young men who were used to casual violence became more prevalent. The September Massacres of 1792 were, as Tackett shows, generally presented as a necessary evil; so was the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, a major precipitant of Terror intensification. Rationalization of Revolutionary action was easily to hand, for had not Marat himself said: “To shed a few drops of impure blood so as to avoid spilling buckets of pure blood is to be humane and just”? With exterminate growing in popularity in patriotic vocabulary in 1793–94, Tackett’s account moves forward to take in the Federalist and Vendée Revolts; the vicious in-fighting among Jacobins that saw both Enragés and Dantonistes sent to the guillotine; and the coming of the Great Terror following the Law of Prairial, when whole categories of men and women were executed on the basis of their public status before 1789. It was a time when, as the bookseller Nicolas Ruault...

Romanticism, Terror and "The Terror": "Sleep no more!"

There is much that William Wordsworth does not have in common with George W. Bush, American President (2001-2009). Here is just one: Wordsworth, in political context, is remarkably chaste in his use of word terror. Recalling his visit to fierce metropolis of Paris in 1793, just after September Massacres, Wordsworth resorts (in climactic tenth book of The Prelude) to a relatively sober vocabulary of fear and dread. (1) is invoked, but only as emotion felt by foreigners invading France who had shrunk from sight of their own task, and fled/ In (10: 1920). The young republic here inspires terror in its enemies, which is more or less in line with self-descriptions of French themselves, and indeed of Robespierre faction, for whom terror outward companion of virtue. The 1850 text mentions that after Robespierre's downfall Terror had ceased (11: 2), but that is total of Wordsworth's use of word in his most densely attentive account of events leading up to and including occupying months between August, 1793, and July, 1794. Robespierre's violence is attributed not to innate evil but to clumsy desperation (1805, 10: 546). Unlike Francois Furet and his followers, Wordsworth does not suggest that is a culmination of necessary logic of Revolution, and thus sinister truth behind its claim to democratic ideals, but rather a deviation from a trajectory established in 1789 and restored to its direction after fall of Montagne. He thus delivers a strong endorsement of philosophical Enlightenment as core of revolution, a view recently endorsed once again by Jonathan Israel. (2) In this view is not only not product of inner logic of 1789 but also an absolute deviation from it; its populist (and hypocritical) claim to enact will of people involved an anti-intellectualism entirely at odds with Wordsworthian (and rationalist) faith in the virtue of one mind (10: 179) as able in principle to provide a solid birthright to state along lines devised by ancient lawgivers (10: 186, 188). It is important to notice these carefully modulated judgments because Wordsworth is, of course, on popular record as something of a turncoat on these matters. But his core position here is that did not turn him against Revolution; that would come later, with invasion of Switzerland rise of Napoleon. Wordsworth is here distancing himself, retrospectively, of course, from patriotic hysteria of mid-1790s. If he were committed to a faith in a single paramount mind to come, whoever that might be, as best hope for setting French politics in positive directions, he is not in business--yet--of demonizing Robespierre. He is rather more in business, in fact, of demonizing William Pitt, thereby adding his voice to those who found Britain significantly responsible for bringing on in France. (3) And it is entirely characteristic of this most self-conscious of writers that he would understand and confess to mediated nature of his responses to events that he did not, after all, witness himself. Recall that, at sight of drowned man of Esthwaite, poet invokes power of books, shining streams/ Of fairyland, forests of romance (5: 476-77), as what protected him from trauma, whether immediate or recollected. Reading about something prepared him for sight of death and softened its effects--one of Rousseau's arguments against literature. (4) So too in Paris, in 1792, poet avers that whatever he felt of immediate dread, something more and perhaps something other was conjured up from tragic fictions/ And mournful calendars of true history (10: 66-68). He had, in other words, been reading about it, and that reading influenced his feelings to point that he could not say what portion of them (if any) might have derived from his own punctual experience. …

English

Charles Dickens (1812 to 1870) is a foremost representative novelist of the Victorian era, a great story-teller and social reformer. A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of his most popular and best-loved novels. It is the second attempt on historical fiction by Dickens and French Revolution is his subject. Always interested in the interaction between individuals and society, Dickens was particularly inspired by Thomas Carlyle's history, The French Revolution. He saw similarities between the forces that led to the Revolution and the oppression and unrest occurring in England in his own time. Although he supported the idea of people rising up against tyranny, the violence that characterized the French Revolution troubled him. In the preface to his novel he says “to add something to the popular and picturesque means understanding that terrible time”. The story is set in London, Paris and the French countryside at the time of French Revolution. The book is sympathetic to the overthrow of the French aristocracy but highly critical of the reign of terror that followed. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine-tumbrels thundering to and fro and the bloody knives. Actually, these scenes occupy only a few chapters, but they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. That is why everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A Tale of Two Cities. Again and again, he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution, the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, and the frightful blood lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob, for instance, the crowd of murderers struggling round the grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in the September massacres outdo anything. These are the events in the history of France which form the flaming background of A Tale of Two Cities. Its interpretation of the French Revolution has strongly shaped the British views of national identity and political legitimacy. At the same time, it offers a powerful melodramatic plot pitting private individuals against political systems.  Key words: Charles Dickens english novel, french revolution and Shakespeare.

Post‐Traumatic Tress Disorder: Obama, Palin and Marie‐Antoinette

Post‐Traumatic Tress Disorder: Obama, Palin and Marie‐Antoinette

Réforme politique et éducation: un dialogue Godwin-Helvétius sur perfectibilité

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the relation between Godwin (1756–1836), Republican and author of Politcal Justice (1793), and French philosophers, particularly Helvétius. Both Godwin and Helvétius were in favour of a political understanding of the theory of knowledge as opposed to an intellectual treatment of policy. They continually questioned the links between policy, history of the human understanding, and moral science from the perspective of the question of education. After the September Massacres (1792), Godwin's thought changed radically and began to revolve around the notion of perfectibility. The final disagreement marked a distinction between French reformers, who advocated state control, and English writers, influenced by dissent and reformation, who held the idea of perfectibility.

A Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre and European Drama

This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions of French sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante) and experimentations with the evolving form of drama (drame). Inchbald’s adaptation of Gresset’s The Villain (Le Méchant) into a farce, Young Men and Old Women, demonstrates techniques applied to The Massacre and Every One Has His Fault. The paper concludes with a comparison of The Massacre to its source, Louis‐Sébastien Mercier’s drama, Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux (1773), the first documentation of this once‐uncertain genealogy. This comparative analysis shows that Inchbald’s tragedy critiques the comic improbability that women stand to lose their femininity if they involve themselves in public issues.

Anatomy of a Massacre

This article describes the massacre of 35 women in the Paris Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in September 1792. The killing of the women in the city's largest prison-hospital complex for women was a unique event in the French Revolution's history because it was the only all-female institution targeted during the September Massacres. Using archival documents, the author explores what the violence against women in Salpêtrière suggests about gender and punishment at the dawn of modernity.

Carlyle and The Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in The French Revolution by Mary Desaulniers

of this emergent domestic direction; and is able to see little pedagogic utility in some more recent developments (such as feminist literary theory). But — with its respect for individual, reflective student response, as exemplified in the detailed teaching unit provided by Ian Underhill — neo-Diltzianism has merit as a form of resistance to the circulars and directives currently being produced by the provincial Ministry of Education, where “English” is principally conceived as an element of workplace training. Lambert’s and Gutteridge’s studies, like most work on the discipline of English studies in Canada to date, are confined to Ontario. While they have a broader applicability and relevance — both as examples of detailed and analytical institutional histories, and because of the influence of Ontario in setting curricular directions for English Canada— one hopes for similar studies for other provinces and areas in the near future, and at various levels of analysis (schools, figures, publics, and policies). Only then will the true diversity — and possible future directions — of the discipline become fully apparent. h e a t h e r Mu r r a y / University of Toronto Mary Desaulniers, Carlyle and The Economics of Terror: A Study of Re­ visionary Gothicism in The French Revolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). x, 140. $44.95 cloth. Thomas Carlyle in his first great history The French Revolution (1837) dealt with an historical period in which the velocity of change overwhelmed the participants, in which the event was greater than the men. Influenced by the theories of Saint-Simon, Carlyle believed history advances through al­ ternating periods of expansion and concentration. In a period of expansion, the intuitions of a heroic leader attract the loyalties of disciples who give the Social Idea institutional forms in the state, church, and judiciary. Each new era so begins. But success and consolidation may lead to inertia and a loss of the organic inner spirit. In a period of concentration, the inherited institutional fabric is found wanting and is destroyed. Such a critical period is marked by turbulence and loss of control: “it is the black desperate bat­ tle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment — a battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror” (Carlyle 2: 294). Carlyle quotes the Girondist Vergniaud for an emblem of such a period: “the Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children” (2: 291). It is the antithesis of history as the biography of great men. As Carlyle saw the revolution as a negative phenomenon, it is driven by “Transcendental despair ... though not consciously so” (2: 294). 471 It is as if the Revolution were anthropomorphized, a great feverish body passing through what Carlyle in Sartor Resartus called “the Everlasting No.” The three parts, “The Bastille,” “The Constitution,” “The Terror,” chart the move from immobility to frenzy. The first part covers twenty-five years, from the death of Louis xv at Versailles to the forcible removal of his son Louis xvi and family from Versailles to Paris. “The Constitution” describes the attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy, which ended with the storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. The final part, “The Terror,” opens with the September massacres. Fearful that the numerous royalist prisoners would rise in support of the Duke of Brunswick’s army march­ ing on Paris, a Parisian mob executed many of them. The panic killings ceased when the French patriot army stopped the invasion at Valmy and the Legislative Assembly reestablished its authority. In the new National Convention, power had shifted, however, toward the men of the mountain, the Jacobins, best represented by the incorruptible lawyer from Arras, Max­ imilien Robespierre. In the face of domestic insurrections in the Vendée, Lyons, and Toulon, and with the entry of Britain into the war as part of the coalition against France, “the goaded land waxed mad” (Wordsworth [1850 version] 10.336). Louis Capet and his queen, the Girondist deputies, Hébert, Danton, and Desmoulins — all were beheaded as the guillotine cut at an ever more frenzied pace, until July 1794 when the Convention turned on its Committee of...

Gibbon's unfinished History: the French Revolution and English political vocabularies

AbstractOn Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick. This article explains why Gibbon began this work, and why he laid it aside. Beginning by describing the nature and purpose of literature on Hanoverian genealogy in the earlier eighteenth century, and proceeding to relate the content of the Antiquities to the politics of Blackstone and Hume, the article identifies the Antiquities as a distinctively ancien régime defence of British political life and institutions which was elicited from Gibbon by the early months of the French revolution. The abandonment of the Antiquities is then explained as part of Gibbon's shocked response to the deepening gravity of events in France after the September massacres. In the polarized political atmosphere which ensued, the literary finesse of the Antiquities ran the risk of being confused with disaffection. That risk was increased when Gibbon and The decline and fall began to be used by radicals as auxiliaries in their attack on England's ancien régime. The textual history of the Antiquities allows us to perceive the rapidity with which the connotations and ownership of certain political vocabularies in England changed during the early 1790s.

Misogyny, the Great Man, and Carlyle's "The French Revolution": The Epic as Pastiche

If we were to reconstruct the basic question to which Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History is an answer or solution, we might come up with the following main concern of his text: how is the horrifying chaos of history to be represented? Carlyle felt that there was something unreal, something counterfeit in the French Revolution as an event, something he could never conceive as reality. In his frenzied descriptions of the September massacres or the purge of the Gironde, reality seems to collapse into a nightmarish vision that takes on a hallucinatory intensity. For in the turbulent social convulsions of revolutionary France, history is experienced as false and unreal: the familiar characters of the Revolution are depicted as mechanical puppets or automata that are manipulated from above by the puppet master of a sinister death's dumb show. This strange and disturbing nineteenth-century text has a surprising resemblance to contemporary postmodernist schizo-discourse or ecriture. Its dominant stylistic conventions bring to mind some of the characteristic motifs of postmodernist writing: the dissolution of the subject, the

The Royalist Press in the Reign of Terror

The revolutionary journee of August 10, 1792, which toppled the French monarchy, also marked the end of the royalist newspapers that had defended the king's cause against the rising tide of republicanism. Leading royalist journalists who had not previously fled the country were either killed or arrested, and the victorious revolutionaries banned all further royalist propaganda.' Neither the imprisonment and subsequent execution of the king nor the repressive measures against journalists, however, prevented the reappearance of a royalist press shortly after the September massacres, and some of the papers founded in this period survived well into 1794. Previous historians of the revolutionary press have taken this very survival as proof of these publications' insignificance. Alma Soderhjelm, whose Le Re'gime de la presse pendant la Revolution fran aise remains fundamental for this subject, claimed that these journals took no part in the fight, the way the aristocratic papers had before August 10, they were neither frank nor outspoken like those papers, they stayed on the sidelines, trying to mask and disguise their opinions as much as possible, and avoid attracting attention.2 Indeed, some formerly monarchist publications did restrict themselves to a monotonous diet of officially approved news until thermidor allowed them to show their true colors again. But there were