The afterlives of the terror: Dealing with the legacies of violence in post-revolutionary France, 1794-1830s

The subject of this dissertation is the legacies of state violence in post-revolutionary France. It examines how those who had lived through the Reign of Terror struggled to define its effects on themselves as well as on others, and to come up with adequate responses. What specific dilemmas arose in the aftermath of the Terror in France and how were these related to the revolution? What cultural, intellectual and legal frameworks were available to contemporaries in order to address the legacies left in the wake of an event of mass violence?;The dissertation examines these questions by looking closely at four cases: the trials of key functionaries of the Terror; the restoration of property to widows of victims; the construction of expiatory monuments on burial sites of victims of the Terror; and, finally, medical and scientific texts that articulated new ways of understanding the effects of terror -- both the event and the psychological experience -- on individuals as well as on society as a whole. Chronologically speaking, these cases traverse the period leading from the fall of Robespierre to the July monarchy.;In struggling to come to terms with the moral, material and cultural consequences of the Terror, contemporaries of the revolutionary decade faced novel dilemmas such as what is the appropriate level of accountability after mass crime? How far back should one go in trying to remedy the damage inflicted on citizens by state actions? What place was there to commemorate a difficult past, one that evoked disagreement and horror rather that glory? These dilemmas were novel because they could only arise in a political and social space that has been revolutionized: they would have been unthinkable under absolutism.;The process of dealing with the legacies of state violence in post-revolutionary France was particularly modern. Men and women who had experienced the violence of 1793-4 engaged in pioneering efforts around what present-day scholars refer to as transitional justice. Physicians and men of science conceptualized the effects of extreme fear and shock on the human constitution as well as on collectivities in ways that bring to mind, yet are distinct from, modern notions of trauma. The research in this dissertation shows that in contrast to claims that the years after the Terror were characterized by efforts to institute amnesia, many in French society engaged in painful and at times surprisingly honest debates about the legacies of revolutionary violence. Indeed, the very publicity of the debates around these issues, the fact that they were seen as concerns for society as a whole, is what made them particularly modern.;The overall argument of the dissertation is that the problem of dealing with the effects of mass, and particularly state, violence is one of the unpredictable legacies bequeathed by the French Revolution to political modernity. The revolutionary Reign of Terror in France was certainly not the first case of state violence in history. But the legacies of such violence first became a subject for public concern -- that is, they acquired political and social significance -- in the course of the revolutionary decade. The concerns about how post-revolutionary society should deal with its violent past could only arise in the context of a political culture that has, to a large extent, embraced the principles of popular sovereignty and national representation. In other words, the emergence of the modern problem of "coming to terms with the past" was directly related to the democratizing thrust of the revolution.