The French revolution in cultural history

Abstract

A cultural approach to the study of the French Revolution took off in the 1980s as a result of the coincidence of new intellectual and political currents with celebrations of the Revolution’s bicentennial. By the turn of the new century, both the study of cultural phenomena (theatre, art and architecture, fashion, etc.) before, during, and after 1789 and an approach to social and political upheaval that stressed symbolism and the production of meaning had thoroughly remade mainstream understandings of this vital period in modern history. But a backlash was already underway. This article explores, first, the emergence and flourishing of the so-called cultural turn in French revolutionary studies between the 1980s and the present, including recent work on the study of race and gender, emotion, experience, violence, and conspiracy thinking. It then investigates the equally recent critiques that this approach has generated, especially among those interested in rethinking economic questions from a post- or modified Marxist perspective and/or decentering France in conceptions of modernity. The author hypothesizes that contemporary challenges to democracy in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere around the globe should, and will, lead to new questions both about what happened in France at the close of the eighteenth century and about how we should write about this moment of upheaval going forward.