The politics and poetics of history in the French Revolution, 1787-1794

The notion of historical "rupture" has been one of the few enduring points of concord within the historiography of the French Revolution. This dissertation seeks to revise our understanding of revolutionary political culture by reappraising its purported anti-historical qualities. The Revolution sundered political legitimacy from historical precedent; it did not, however, deny the cultural importance of history. In a variety of contexts--the debate over the Estates-General, the Constitutional projects of 1789, the birth of the Republic and the execution of the king, the factional struggles of "Girondins" and Montagnards--history was politically relevant not because of its foundational qualities, but because of its exemplary and cautionary attributes. From Sieyes to Marat, from Brissot to Robespierre, historical rhetoric supplied a forensic vocabulary by which conspiratorial and usurpatory threats could be identified and revealed, while historical metaphors and allusions retraced threats and incarnated warnings.;The rules of practice for revolutionary political culture were inscribed within historical contestation. The demise of liberty, the dilemma of popular lassitude, the burning hatred of coalised tyrants--such problems made sense only within the metahistorical frame of an eternal struggle between liberty and despotism, a contest incessantly replicated in event-histories, political discourses, and symbolic practices. From 1787 through 1794, revolutionaries frequently extrapolated future threats according to historically-diagnosed readings of usurpatory politics.;Revolutionaries embraced a complex dialectic of effacement and recollection as they attempted to fashion a legacy which could deter kings, educate peoples, and redeem posterity. Such ambitions were not the product of a desire to discard history, but precisely the result of an intensely "historical" consciousness--albeit an unusual and contradictory one. The articulation and manipulation of a cautionary historicity produced forensic narratives designed both to warn contemporaries and to inform posterity; the revolutionary obsession with uncovering conspiracy derived not simply from the imperative of transparency, but also from the stigma of history. In its exemplary and cautionary attributes, history remained relevant despite the apparent proclamation of rupture. Revolution political culture engaged in a contradictory and anxious dialogue with history, continually asking how to construct, narrate, and propagate the Revolution's meaning and discern its likely trajectories.