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Historians have long used biography and life narratives as a means of understanding the French Revolution, as classic studies on major figures such as Robespierre and Napoleon attest. At the current moment, however, many of the most creative such studies are focusing on relatively minor revolutionary figures. Such work, which combines the techniques of classic biography and microhistory, reveals how the great political, social, cultural and religious transformations of the revolutionary era were refracted through the prism of individual experience. This work often links to research and writing taking place in adjacent disciplines, notably around the ideas and practices of life-writing. These studies, themselves often grounded in the history of emotions, resist the 'biographical illusion' that an individual's essence can be inferred unproblematically from their words and actions, and they also transcend the tendency to see those words and actions as merely symptoms of broader political processes. By focusing on individual life stories in their own right and insisting on the slipperiness of individual identity, this book explores emergent forms of subjectivity.
List of contents
Chapter1:Introduction.- Chapter2:Race, Revolution, and Celebrity: the Case of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George.- Chapter3:Ourika and the Chevalier de Boufflers.- Chapter4:The Revolutionary Rebirth of Jean-Paul Marat.- Chapter5:Navigating the Emotional Storm of 1791: The Lamarque Family in Paris, the Landes, and Saint Lucia.- Chapter6:A Jacobin Itinerary: The Biography of a Parisian Printer.- Chapter7:A 'Muslim Jacobin'? Ahmad Khan and the Eurocentric Pitfalls of 'Inclusive' History.- Chapter8:Money, Manhood, and Revolutionary Biography: The Limits of Voluntary Selfhood.- Chapter9:Time and the Duchess: Revolution and Temporality in the Letters of the Duchess d'Elbeuf, 1788-94.- Chapter10:Economic Lives in the French Revolution. A Tale of Three Cousins.- Chapter11:The Vengeance of a Province: Alexandre Rousselin and his Accusers.- Chapter12:Tocqueville, Napoleon, and the Writing of Biography in a Democratic Age.
About the author
David A. Bell is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor at Princeton University, USA.
Colin Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London, UK and Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, USA.
Report
Revolutionary Lives will serve scholars seeking new paths through an era that we know to have been more dynamic, more heterogeneous, and more replete with challenges from below and from abroad than once thought. Revolutionary Lives underscores just how much politics matter. It is a book for the desk and the classroom, and perhaps also for the bedside table, as we reflect on how to restore the best of the revolutionary past to the present. (Laura Mason, H-France Review, Vol. 25 (64), September, 2025)
