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David Andress, Peuples en Révolution; d’aujourd’hui à 1789, French History, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2015, Pages 258–259, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crv022
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Extract
This collection follows in a long line of endeavours from the circle of researchers congregated around the university of Aix-Marseille, and it contains many good examples of the flow of original work that continues to be done on the French Revolution, in that southeastern nexus and elsewhere. The contribution by Hervé Leuwers, on the 1791 lynching in Douai known as the ‘affaire des Goulottes’, is exemplary in its use of investigative judicial records to probe the complexities, contradictions, and determined agency of the individuals who strung up on two consecutive days a National Guard officer, and the unpopular merchant he had been trying to protect. That by Laurent Brassart and Maxime Kaci on collective action in the northern departments usefully illustrates how the opposed concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘plotting’ had become so generalised by 1792 that they could become rallying-cries for the forces of social order in the months before the fall of the monarchy. Ironically, the force of that juxtaposition enters unnoticed into some of the other discussions, so that for example Alessandra Doria’s effort to recapture the mind of a middle-aged female ‘militante’ from Nice is left parsing a series of reported public comments, and later petitions, which are essentially variations on that exact theme—she is a patriot, she denounces plotters, when she is denounced, it is by plotters, her patriotism will out. What the substantive basis of her political action is, she does not say, and we do not know. Perhaps most troublingly, here and in other contributions, such discourse is labelled as the unproblematic fruit of an ‘apprentissage politique et démocratique’ given to the ‘milieu populaire’ by the Revolution.
