| In recent 20 or 30 years,the history of emotions obviously has been a new direction of research in the French Revolutionary history.In fact,the rise of the emotional history is by no means accidental,because it has a long and tortuous process of exploration in the history of the French Revolution.To be sure,historians of the Revolution have never completely ignored the role of emotions in the revolutionary process.No matter the historians of 19th century such as Jules Michelet,Alexis de Tocqueville and Hippolyte Taine or of 20th century Georges Lefebvre,Michel Vovelle,they have all took into account the emotional elements in their diverse interpretations of the Revolution.Therefore,the thesis has two main aims.One aim is to survey the historiography of emotions in French Revolutionary history.How have historians treated emotions in French Revolution history?Is there any difference between the previous studies especially for the history of mentalities and the new emotional history?Moreover,is there any consequent connection between them?A second aim is to rethink the prosperity of the emotional history of the French Revolution.Why does it spring up in this period?Are there any problems to be unsettled in recent studies?The whole thesis can be divided into five parts.First,the introduction briefly explains why the French Revolutionary history is chosen as the object of my study,and introduces the situation of relative research in academic circles at home and abroad.Next,the first chapter of the thesis is devoted to discussing how Michelet and Tocqueville who contributed to the subject of emotions treated the emotions in the Revolution as well as what effects their studies had on the later studies.The second chapter and the third are the core of this thesis.In the second chapter,the author reinterprets the mentality from the perspective of history of emotions,trying to clarify the relationship between emotion and mentality,and discuss how the historian Vovelle illustrated the Revolution and emotions under the paradigm of the history of mentalities and his dilemma.The following chapter illustrates the reasons why the emotional history of the French Revolution spring up in the new period,its characteristics,sources and problems.Lastly,the fifth part,as the conclusion of the thesis,is a summary of the whole.All in all,by the study of the emotional history of the French Revolution,what we want to illustrate is that not only emotions have a history,but the history of emotions also has a history.Although the study of emotional history has made remarkable achievements,there are still some problems unsettled.Therefore it is still in exploration. |
