Living with the Dead in Postrevolutionary Paris, 1795-1820s

This dissertation examines the different ways that Parisians used the dead to process and respond to the disruption of the French Revolution in its aftermath. It focuses on a series of civic projects that the post-revolutionary population designed and used to contain the dead after the Terror, such as cemeteries, catacombs, and museums. Academics, artists, and ordinary Parisians used these new spaces to resolve some of the most difficult legacies of the French Revolution, including collapsed social networks, ambiguous moral authority, and fractured historical knowledge. Moreover, the political divisions that characterized France during the Revolutionary decade only hardened in the nineteenth century as the nation lurched from Republic to Empire to Restoration and back to Revolution in 1830. In this climate of discord and instability, secular death rituals and new burial spaces (above and below ground) helped Parisians construct a socially cohesive culture of the dead that reinforced emotional and social connections among the living. Rather than focusing on long-changing attitudes towards death and dying, as scholars like Philippe Aries have traditionally done, this dissertation interprets the dead as a passive, but important group that helped Parisians work through the trauma of the Revolution after the Terror. It argues that seemingly mundane activities like inscribing a tombstone or touring the Paris Catacombs were actually significant acts of integration that responded directly to the violence and conflict of the revolutionary era...