For many of us, the grisly image of the guillotine stands for the French Revolution itself.  But the guillotine cannot begin to answer the question “what was so revolutionary about the French Revolution?”  Why do so many historians consider the French Revolution to be the decisive rupture with the past and the origin of our political present?  The French Revolution was the first time that ordinary people played a central role on the stage of history. We will study the Revolution’s upending of political structures (the end of the monarchy and the creation of the first modern mass Republic) as well as its invention of new democratic cultural and social forms.  We will study the Revolution’s effects on the family, religion, art, and even on language.  We will try to understand what the Terror was through our study of primary texts, images, and secondary readings. We will read revolutionary speeches, newspapers, plays, and poems. 

We will also devote significant time and attention to the Haitian Revolution.  We will seek to understand the relation between the two revolutions, and we will study the Haitian Revolution on its own terms as an autonomous world-historical event.

Students will conduct individual research on primary materials (either digitized or in the Doe or Bancroft libraries) from the revolutionary era.