Chief Editor
Gülru Çakmak, University of Massachusetts Amherst (gcakmak@umass.edu)
Associate Editors
Christine Adams, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Kate Griffiths, Cardiff University
Rebecca Scales, Rochester Institute of Technology
Originating in 2009, H-France Salon is a multimedia journal of French Studies in its broadest sense, encompassing history, literature, cinema, art history, theory, and culture. Salons have included debates and collective reassessments of critical, methodological, and professional issues in our fields, tributes to influential individuals, recordings of conference presentations, webinars, and innovative blog projects. We welcome proposals that build on these initiatives or take us in new directions. Please contact us with ideas. (gcakmak@umass.edu)
Volume 16, Issue 5
Surviving the French Revolution: Strategies and Meanings
Edited by:
Jeff Horn and Mette Harder
Many of the Revolution’s great figures never lived to see the rise of the Consulate, much less the Empire or the return of the monarchy. Yet even though they made only partial witnesses, those who died from the Revolution have occupied center stage in its accounts. By contrast, this H-France Salon seeks to explore the lives of some of the survivors, their strategies, and the meanings of their survival across the Age of Revolution. Our approach has its origins in a session of David Andress’ virtual seminar on the French Revolution in June 2022 that led to a conversation on the nature of survival and how it can function as a frame for biographies of revolutionary figures. This discussion resulted in two panels at the joint Society for French Historical Studies/Western Society for French History meeting in October 2022, which became the basis for the Salon. Its articles are divided into two sections: 1) Strategies of Survival and 2) Meanings of Survival.
Contrary to traditional narratives, for many contemporaries the need to survive did not just apply to the year of the “Terror” but to the entire revolutionary decade and beyond. Nor was survival limited to escaping the guillotine: it encompassed enduring politically, socially, financially, morally, and emotionally. All the participants in this Salon therefore took a broader focus on survival. In the first part of the Salon, they explored how contemporaries adapted to rapid political, social, economic, and cultural change. What backgrounds and approaches heightened, or lessened, one’s chances of surviving the revolutionary decade and its aftermath? The second part of the Salon investigates survivorship not only as a practical necessity, but also as a vital part of political discourse, activism, memory, and culture. How did revolutionary contemporaries remember, interpret, and narrate their stories of survival? What place did such stories occupy in their own lives and in the Revolution’s history? Collectively, the contributions to this Salon highlight the experiences of a cross-section of French revolutionary society and encourage us to pay greater attention to continuities between previously strictly defined periods such as “Terror” or “Reaction.”
A collection of similar papers, discussions, etc. published on H-France as “Occasional Papers” are available here.