Seminar Reading: Week 9

A Revolution of Emotions

The 'cultural turn' in history writing in the 1980s turned attention to symbols rhetoric, attitudes and every-day social practices. By the late 1990s, it was broadened to encompass the analysis of emotions as well -- collective and individual. Whereas Marxists had framed the Revolution around class struggle and revisionists (inspired by Tocqueville) focused on ideology, cultural historians between the late 1990s and 2010s focused on how emotions -- especially fear, hope and anger -- shaped revolutionary ideas, such as human rights, and actions, such as violence and terror. There is some debate, though, on how to study the emotions and the causal weight historians can reasonably put on them. Can we really know what people felt? Do emotions shape ideas and action or do ideas and actions shape the experience of emotions? And if revolutionary violence is attributable to emotions over which people had little control, should we see them as responsible for their violence? Do people make their own history through conscious choices or do their emotions make it for them?

Core primary reading

E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, passage about Marie-Antoinette.

J. Ménétra, Journal of My Life, passagesLink opens in a new window about the French Revolution, pp. 217-238 [copies in library - library use only].

Core secondary reading

L. Hunt, 'Torrents of Emotion' in Inventing Human Rights (2007), pp. 35-69. (See Moodle)

T. Tackett, ‘Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792’, American Historical Review 105: 3 (2000), 691-713.

Background:

Popkin, A Short History of the FR, chapter 4

Questions

1. What links do you see between the emotions and values or principles in Burke's anti-revoutionary passage in Reflections on the Revolution in France? How do these links differ from those appearing in the sans-culotte Jacques Ménétra's journal? (Hint... think of emotions and honour.)

2. What connections does Sophie Wahnich find between the emotions, ideas and revolutionary action? Are emotions incidental or crucial to the realisation of revolutionary principles?

3. Do you accept the argument that empathy was essential to the invention of human rights? Or would you empathy to the advent of humanitarianism instead? And what, if any, differences are there between the two?

4. Are the emotions historical or transhistorical phenomena? How helpful are they for understanding major historical events such as the French Revolution?

Department of History