A Natural History of Revolution

by Miller, Mary Ashburn

• ISBN13: 9780801449420
• ISBN10: 0801449421
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-16
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau's writings to Old Regime protest tactics. A Natural History of Revolution suggests that it is perhaps on a different shelf of the Enlightenment library that we might find the best clues for understanding the French Revolution: namely, in studies of the natural world. In their attempts to portray and explain the events of the Revolution, political figures, playwrights, and journalists often turned to the book of nature: phenomena such as hailstorms and thunderbolts found their way into festivals, plays, and political speeches as descriptors of revolutionary activity. The particular way that revolutionaries deployed these metaphors drew on notions derived from the natural science of the day about regeneration, purgation, and balance. In examining a series of tropes (earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes) that played an important role in the public language of the Revolution, A Natural History of Revolution reveals that understanding the use of this natural imagery is fundamental to our understanding of the Terror. Eighteenth-century natural histories had demonstrated that in the natural world, apparent disorder could lead to a restored equilibrium, or even regeneration. This logic drawn from the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. If thunder could restore balance in the atmosphere, and if volcanic eruptions could create more fertile soil, then so too could episodes of violence and disruption in the political realm be portrayed as necessary for forging a new order in revolutionary France.

Table of Contents

List Of Illustrations	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Ordering a Disordered World	p. 19
Natural Historians Confront Disorder	p. 20
A History of Natural Violence: The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and the Messina and Calabria Earthquakes of 1783	p. 26
Terrible Like an Earthquake: Violence as a ôRevolution of the Earthö	p. 43
The Glacière Massacres: Avignon, 1791	p. 46
The September Massacres: Paris, 1792	p. 58
Lightning Strikes	p. 72
Lightning in the Atmosphere	p. 74
The Scepter from Tyrants: Lightning and Sovereignty in the Revolution	p. 82
The Utility of Destruction: The Victims of Lightning	p. 88
The Saltpeter Initiative: Forging Thunderbolts in Backyards	p. 94
Lightning in Crisis: The Explosion of Grenelle	p. 100
Pure Mountain, Corruptive Swamp	p. 104
The Natural and Political Mountain	p. 106
The Virtuous Montagnard	p. 114
The Sublime and the Sacred Mountain	p. 117
Nature Returned to Itself: Purging the Marais	p. 123
The Festival of the Supreme Being: A Theology of Terror	p. 133
ôMountain, Become a Volcanoö	p. 139
Volcanoes In Scientific Inquiry	p. 140
Volcanic Volatility	p. 146
Passion, Terror, And Virtue: The Volcano in Year II	p. 149
The Terrible after the Terror	p. 160
Conclusion: Revolutionary Like Nature, Natural Like a Revolution	p. 164
Notes	p. 173
Bibliography	p. 205
Index	p. 223
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