Is the French Revolution synonymous with Terror? Is it, perhaps, inevitable that every revolutionary endeavor ends in authoritarianism? Annie Jourdan targets the classical positions on the Revolution and proposes a new interpretation of Terror. No, the author argues, Revolution and Terror are not synonyms. No, not every ambitious ideological plan for the transformation of society necessarily leads to authoritarianism, "forcing people to become free," in Rousseau's wording.
The classical positions against which Jourdan hurls her arrows certainly have their roots in the years of the Revolution, but they were rephrased by François Furet and his students in the 1970s and 1980s, ultimately forming the dominant interpretation of the French Revolution at the end of the 20th century. Today, however, they are being questioned. Many historians, agreeing with Annie Jourdan, attribute revolutionary violence to collective passions, the dislocation of the state and institutions, and the context, but not to revolutionary ideology.
To understand revolutionary violence, Jourdan argues, we must see the French Revolution as it truly was: a civil war. Revolutionary violence was not something exceptional. It manifests in all revolutions of that period, including the American one. Terror is not limited to the sans-culottes and the Jacobins. All warring parties resort to it. Initially, revolutionaries fight against counter-revolutionaries and then, from 1791 onward, revolutionaries fight among themselves.
Charles Walton La Vie des idées
Annie Jourdan was born in 1948 in Alès, France. She studied philology at the Universities of Montpellier and Amsterdam. Influenced by Maurice Agulhon and Mona Ozouf, she turned to history, particularly the history of the French Revolution, which was also the subject of her doctoral thesis. She taught for many years at the University of Amsterdam and as a visiting professor at the Universities of Sussex and Florida, as well as at Paris I.
She has published, among others, the following books:
- Les monuments de la Révolution: Une histoire de représentation
- Napoléon: Héros, Imperator, Mécène
- L’empire de Napoléon
- La Révolution, une exception française?
- Amsterdam en révolution, 1795-1798: Un jacobinisme batave?
