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.     

Unsocial Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment: Ferguson and Kames on War,Sociability and the Foundations of Patriotism

Summary

This article reconstructs a significant historical alternative to the theories of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘liberal’ patriotism often associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead of focusing on the work of Andrew Fletcher, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume or Adam Smith, this study concentrates on the theories of sociability, patriotism and international rivalry elaborated by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782). Centrally, the article reconstructs both thinkers' shared perspective on what I have called ‘unsociable’ or ‘agonistic’ patriotism, an eighteenth-century idiom which saw international rivalship, antagonism, and even war as crucial in generating political cohesion and sustaining moral virtue. Placing their thinking in the context of wider eighteenth-century debates about sociability and state formation, the article's broader purpose is to highlight the centrality of controversies about human sociability to eighteenth-century debates about the nature of international relations.     

Strange Legacies of the Terror: Hegel,the French Revolution,and the Khmer Rouge Purges

Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be explained by theories of mass violence in the current literatures on genocide or state terror. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we show how key features of a theory of limitless, exterminationist, and ultimately self-destructive violence are contained within G.W.F. Hegel’s obscure analysis of the Terror of the French Revolution. Second, this Hegelian theory of exterminationist violence with a particular model of modern consciousness at its heart, can account for the transformation of typical forms of revolutionary violence into limitless self-annihilation. By drawing on Party documents, speeches, and radio broadcasts, we show that this theory can explain the shape and sequence of the internal purges of the Khmer Rouge.     

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.