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Marisa Linton, Mary Ashburn Miller. A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 600–601, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.2.600
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On June 15, 1794, Vesuvius exploded in a full-scale eruption that devastated the town of Torre del Greco and showered ash on the city of Naples. Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac of the Committee of Public Safety described the eruption for the benefit of the National Convention, using it to demonstrate his point that nature itself was on the side of the French Revolution: “Nature, from the heights of Vesuvius, has just commanded Naples not to release its fleet that was going to join the English on the shores of the Mediterranean” (p. 161). The collusion of violent disruptive nature and revolution is the theme of Mary Ashburn Miller's book.
Miller makes two principal arguments. First, she develops the idea of the violence of nature as regenerative through a close study of Enlightenment accounts of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and thunder and lightning, and shows how these were conceived as a traumatic but ultimately beneficial means of progress and evolution. She then discusses the considerable impact of the idea of dramatic nature reflecting political upheaval on the imaginations of French revolutionary deputies, above all the Jacobins. She gives many examples of political discourse in which the violence of nature was used as a metaphor for revolutionary violence. The second argument of the book sees Miller grappling with ways to understand the impact of rhetoric about nature on that perennial problem of the French Revolution, the causes of the Terror. She makes the original claim that the deployment of the language of nature made terror more acceptable.
