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SoSe 20: French Revolution

Cornel Zwierlein

Information for students

Digital formats will be used; further information will be provided via email/Blackboard. I will try to give a second stream version of the lecture in English as download option.

Comments

The French Revolution belongs to the large events in World History which is claimed by early modernists and by nineteenth century specialists on equal terms as part of ´their period´: One could not understand the Early Modern Period without that point of culmination and transformation at its end. And one could not let start the nineteenth century with Napoleon as one famous German Historian once did ("In the beginning there was Napoleon") without explaining the rise of this little army officer from Corsica within the new frameworks of enhanced mobility across the barriers of estates within the army completely altered and changed by the revolutionary process. Already Alexis de Tocqueville was guiding his historical analysis of the revolution by the question about continuity or difference between the Ancien Régime and Modernity. Maybe the revolutionaries had been successful to end monarchy and the monarch´s life by the guillotine, but was the revolution not very successful, on the other hand, just to centralize and always strengthen the state´s powers towards its citizens more than any monarch could have dreamt? What were the relationships between revolutionary France and the colonies, which got lost now, how was the revolutionary process transferred to the central colony St. Domingue (Haiti)? How did relate revolutionary France to its neighbors in Europe, to the ´sister republics´ in Italy, the Netherlands and Germany? How were those neighboring countries serving also as places of refuge for the ´victims´ of the Revolution (priests, nobles)? - Research on the history of the Revolution is strong and classic fields like the terreur, the Vendée reaction, migration, on leaders like Robespierre and Tayllerand is always ongoing, however, in recent years the entanglements of impact and perception of the Revolution with and within Europe and on a global scale in an ´Age of Revolutions´ have come to the fore in the last years. The Napoleonic order was transforming the results of the revolutionary process into a hybrid which consisted, on the one hand, of a liberal bourgeois concept of revolutionary state and citizenship, on the other hand, of elements of refeudalization and empire building: perhaps a first ´liberal Empire´. close