Description
Book SynopsisThe Afterlives of the Terror explores how those who experienced the mass violence of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. Focusing on the Reign of Terror, Ronen Steinberg challenges the presumption that its aftermath was characterized by silence and enforced collective amnesia. Instead, he shows that there were painful, complex, and sometimes surprisingly honest debates about how to deal with its legacies.
As The Afterlives of the Terror shows, revolutionary leaders, victims'' families, and ordinary citizens argued about accountability, retribution, redress, and commemoration. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and the scholarship on the major traumas of the twentieth century, Steinberg explores how the French tried, but ultimately failed, to leave this difficult past behind. He argues that it was the same democratizing, radicalizing dynamic that led to the violence of the Terror, which also gave rise to an unprecedented interrog
Trade Review
Steinberg's excellent new book looks at the aftermath of the Reign of Terror in France through the modern lens of transitional justice.
* Choice *
Steinberg's engaging history will profitably engage French Revolutionists and scholars of trauma and mass violence.
* American Historical Review *
Steinberg's book imaginatively brings together different themes and sources, from property disputes to ghost stories, public trials to medical disputes. It also engages with multiple historiographies, including those on secularization, the centrality of violence to the revolution, the history of emotion, and the dynamics of transitional justice. The book as a whole is particularly effective in unsettling any sense of neat divisions between the Revolution and the historical moments that preceded and followed it.
* Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Approaching the Aftermath of the Terror
1. Nomenclature: Naming a Difficult Past after 9 Thermidor
2. Accountability: The Case of Joseph Le Bon
3. Redress: Les Biens des Condamnés
4. Remembrance: he Mass Graves of the Terror
5. Haunting: The Ghostly Presence of the Terror
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
