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It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political
resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of
popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has
been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and
as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book
examines why. More so than historians, it is philosophers that have
played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in
French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s
placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The
most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul
Sartre and Claude Levi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault.
Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution?
Ranciere, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help
answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history.
These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of
identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering
Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what
democracy and emancipation mean for us today.
For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican
tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats,
defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its
enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in
sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of
historical necessity but rather by "timeless" standards of
morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how,
contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror
sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violence-in Danton's
words, to "be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be
so"-and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war. The Terror was
"a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only
alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty."
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