French Revolutionary Lives

Historians have long used biography and life narratives as a means of understanding the French Revolution, as classic studies on major figures such as Robespierre and Napoleon attest.

Historians have long used biography and life narratives as a means of understanding the French Revolution, as classic studies on major figures such as Robespierre and Napoleon attest. At the current moment, however, many of the most creative such studies are focusing on relatively minor revolutionary figures. Such work, which combines the techniques of classic biography and microhistory, reveals how the great political, social, cultural and religious transformations of the revolutionary era were refracted through the prism of individual experience. This work often links to research and writing taking place in adjacent disciplines, notably around the ideas and practices of life-writing. These studies, themselves often grounded in the history of emotions, resist the 'biographical illusion' that an individual’s essence can be inferred unproblematically from their words and actions, and they also transcend the tendency to see those words and actions as merely symptoms of broader political processes. By focusing on individual life stories in their own right and insisting on the slipperiness of individual identity, this book explores emergent forms of subjectivity.