Plus jamais la même: À propos de quelques interprétations récentes de la Révolution française

This essay is a discussion of three recent and important books on the French Revolution: Timothy Tackett’s The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution; Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre; and Haim Burstin’s Révolutionnaires. Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française. All three volumes are characterized by a welcome return to general interpretations based on new theoretical approaches and consider the revolutionary process from multiple points of view: the first uses the historiographical tendency known as the “new history of emotions” to explain the contemporary obsession with conspiracies and thence the Terror; the second proposes a new approach based on the traditional history of ideas, considered capable of explaining the so called “hard facts”; the third envisages the revolutionary experience from an anthropological perspective, constructing a typology in order to characterize it. Nevertheless, all three are united by a reluctance to analyze the political structure itself, in other words, to investigate the concrete workings of political institutions during the Revolution.