Conspiracy in the French Revolution

by Campbell, Peter R.; Kaiser, Thomas E.; Linton, Marisa

• ISBN13: 9780719082153
• ISBN10: 0719082153
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-01
• Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR

Summary

Conspiratorial views of events abound even in our modern, rational world. Often such theories serve to explain the inexplicable. Sometimes they are developed for motives of political expediency: it is simpler to see political opponents as conspirators and terrorists, putting them into one convenient basket, than to seek to understand and disentangle the complex motivations of opponents. So it is not surprising to see that just when the French Revolution was creating the modern political world, a constant obsession with conspiracies lay at the heart of the revolutionary conception of politics.

Author Biography

Peter R. Campbell is Senior Lecturer in History at Sussex University. Thomas E. Kaiser is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Marisa Linton is Senior Lecturer in History at Kingston University.

Table of Contents

Introduction * Conspiracy from the Old Regime to the Revolution: issues and debates--Thomas E. Kaiser, Marisa Linton, & Peter R. Campbell  * Conspiracy at the end of the Old Regime--Peter R. Campbell * Conspiracy thinking in the Constituent Assembly: Mirabeau and the exclusion of deputies from the ministry--Barry Shapiro  * The real and imagined conspiracies of Louis XVI--John Hardman * ‘Horrible plots and infernal treasons’; conspiracy and the urban landscape in the early Revolution--David Andress  * Conspiracy in the village? French revolutionary authorities and the search for “subverters of public  opinion” in the rural south-west--Jill Maciak Walshaw * ‘Do you believe that we’re conspirators?’ Conspiracies real and imagined in Jacobin politics, 1793-94--Marisa Linton * The emigrés and conspiracy in the French Revolution, 1789-1799--Simon Burrows * Never was a plot so holy: Gracchus Babeuf and the end of the French Revolution--Laura Mason * Conclusion. Catilina’s revenge:  conspiracy, revolution, and historical consciousness from the  Old Regime to the Consulate--Thomas E. Kaiser