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Book SynopsisHow 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
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Miller... does offer a convincing argument, demonstrating how tropes from the natural world—earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes—were used as political propaganda, to justify the violence and eventual regeneration wrought by the Revolution. In short, she examines scientific, literary, and political texts to prove the importance of language in shaping and propagating revolutionary thought from 1789 to 1794. Her acute selection of thirteen period illustrations, like the one on the jacket, enriches her discussion, further proving that communication may be just as effective whether expressed through written or visual images.
-- Ivy Dyckman * New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century *
Miller Ashburn Miller succeeds in breathing new life into the topic. Part of her success is owing to her demonstration of how much these rhetorical gestures owed to recent advances in science and natural history. But Miller also offers an intriguing narrative of the rise and then sudden decline of a specific strand of revolutionary rhetoric, which put a set of violent natural occurrences—earthquakes, lightning strikes, volcanoes—to ideological use as metaphors for social and political events. The upshot of the story, Miller claims, bears directly on our understanding not just of revolutionary violence but of the Reign of Terror itself.
-- Johnson Kent Wright * The Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Ordering a Disordered World
Natural Historians Confront Disorder
A History of Natural Violence: The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, and the Messina and Calabria Earthquakes of 17832. Terrible Like an Earthquake: Violence as a "Revolution of the Earth"
The Glacière Massacres: Avignon, 1791
The September Massacres: Paris, 17923. Lightning Strikes
Lightning in the Atmosphere
The Scepter from Tyrants: Lightning and Sovereignty in the Revolution
The Utility of Destruction: The Victims of Lightning
The Saltpeter Initiative: Forging Thunderbolts in Backyards
Lightning in Crisis: The Explosion of Grenelle4. Pure Mountain, Corruptive Swamp
The Natural and Political Mountain
The Virtuous Montagnard
The Sublime and the Sacred Mountain
Nature Returned to Itself: Purging the Marais
The Festival of the Supreme Being: A Theology of Terror5. "Mountain, Become a Volcano"
Volcanoes in Scientific Inquiry
Volcanic Volatility
Passion, Terror, and Virtue: The Volcano in Year II
The Terrible after the TerrorConclusion: Revolutionary Like Nature, Natural Like a RevolutionNotes
Bibliography
Index
