The unique decline of mortality in revolutionary France

This article seeks to draw historians' attention to a neglected reconstruction of the French population and its mortality rates developed by the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques in the 1970s. The reconstruction shows a sharp decline in French mortality rates, beginning in the 1790s and continuing through the 1820s. This conflicts with recent historiography stressing the negative effects of the Revolution. This article contends that the reconstruction is plausible and that the French mortality decline was unique in Europe in this period. In turn, this suggests that the Revolution had a much more favorable impact than many historians would have us believe.     

History of a renegade revolutionary: revolutionism and betrayal in colonial India

This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the role of people who sat on the fence, displayed ambivalence, or at times played an active role in wrecking, damaging and sabotaging resistance against the state. Such people appear, if at all, in popular parlance as ‘traitors’ and in academia as ‘collaborators’, labels which carry a categorical moral bias. By examining nationalism through the lens of betrayal, this paper engages with a methodological question – is there a way of broadening the scope of the history of anti-colonial nationalism which incorporates acts of collaboration (e.g. spying, informing, perfidy, denunciation), without the implicit moral judgment embodied in each term? To tackle this question, this paper reconstructs the history of one renegade revolutionary, Hans Raj Vohra (1909–1985), a government witness who testified against his comrades, the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial (1929–30). This paper contextualizes Hans Raj Vohra's decision to become an ‘approver’, or a government witness, demonstrating the difficulties in framing his perfidy as a form of collaboration.     

A fertile mother Russia: pronatalist propaganda in revolutionary Russia

The Soviet consultation with its attendant propaganda, visiting nurses, and vacation homes attempted to set science and the doctor as the ultimate authority in matters of child rearing in place of old authorities, deny the contention that motherhood was a natural ability of women, and take over the father's place in the home. Soviet health care policy bridges pre- and postrevolutionary thought, blurred the boundaries between public and private, and mirrored international natalist policies. However, the application of these policies conformed to Soviet concepts of citizens' duties and state imperatives.     

French adventures in solidarity: revolutionary tourists and radical humanitarians

This article uses the adventures in solidarity of French tiers-mondistes and sans-frontiéristes to introduce these two movements and indicate their position within the intellectual paradigm shift that occurred in France during the 1970s. Focusing on the case of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), it draws attention to the important position of humanitarianism during and following the decline of revolutionary frameworks in French intellectual and public life. The study posits that a fuller appreciation of humanitarianism's relationship to political engagement will be necessary to better understand its contribution to internationalism and contemporary activism.