Staging Battles: Representations of War in the Theatre and Festivals of the French Revolution

Prefiguring twentieth-century experiments, the French revolutionaries represented the war in which they were engaged after 1792 by staging military spectacles in the theatre and in civic festivals. Both plays and festivals were highly allegorical in nature, representing the war as a conflict between rival ideologies and providing stereotypical caricatures of enemy villains. Military plays won little acclaim from theatre critics, who objected to their implausibility and lack of originality. Audiences limited their enthusiasm to plays that brought romance and patriotism together. Allegorical representations spoke neither to the realities of war nor to the psychological needs of spectators. The involvement of soldiers in staging and witnessing military spectacles, however, underlines their significance in representing and helping to produce the nation-in-arms.

résumé:?Tout comme le font certains mouvements au vingtième siècle, les révolutionnaires français représentent la guerre dans laquelle ils se trouvent engagés au moyen de pièces de théâtre et de fêtes civiques. Dans ces spectacles allégoriques, avec leurs symboles et leurs personnages stéréotypés, la guerre prend l'aspect d'un conflit idéologique. Ces spectacles ne plaisent guère aux critiques dramatiques qui y désapprouvent le manque de vraisemblance et d'originalité. Quant aux spectateurs, eux, ils applaudissent seules les pièces où se trouvent à la fois la sentimentalité et le patriotisme. Les représentations allégoriques, divorcées des réalités de la guerre et sans rapport avec les conflits personnels occasionnés par le patriotisme, ne répondent pas à leurs besoins psychologiques. C'est surtout le fait que les soldats ont participé aux spectacles militaires qui fait que ces derniers doivent être reconnus comme ayant non seulement représenté mais aussi inspiré la nation en armes.     

Between Discourse and Experience: Agency and Ideas in the French Pre‐Revolution

Experience has recently reemerged as an important analytical category for historians of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. Reacting against the perceived excesses of discourse analysis, which made political language independent of any social determinants, certain post‐revisionists are now seeking to contextualize political language by relating it to the experience of those who use it. Political agency, in these analyses, is understood to be the effect of particular formative experiences. This article suggests that the search for an experiential antidote to discourse is misconceived because it perpetuates an untenable dichotomy between thought and reality. Access to the phenomenon of historical agency should be pursued not through experience or discourse but through the category of consciousness, since the make‐up of the subject’s consciousness determines how he/she engages the world and decides to attempt changing it. After a brief discussion of an important study that exemplifies both the allure and the functionality of the notion of experience, Timothy Tackett’s Becoming a Revolutionary, the article focuses on the evolving political consciousness of a man who became a revolutionary agitator in 1789, J.‐M.‐A. Servan. Analysis of his writings between 1770 and 1789 shows that the way in which his perspective was constructed, rather than the lessons of experience per se, determined the shape of his revolutionary intentions in 1789.     

Complexity and diversity: domestic material culture and French immigrant identity in early modern London

Abstract

The French immigrants of early modern London are recorded as having been a clearly recognizable community with similarities in language, religion, occupation and material culture. However, analysis of the excavated and documentary evidence of their domestic artefacts reveals few differences when compared with their English counterparts. Although isolated artefacts may reasonably be linked to an immigrant identity, the majority of refugees do not appear to have commonly expressed their group identity through their domestic material culture in historically identifiable ways. This may indicate that the nature of French immigrant identity was more complex and varied than contemporary accounts imply.