Conspiracy in the French Revolution

Peter R. Campbell, Thomas Kaiser, Marisa Linton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781526183828
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la France

Conspiratorial views of events abound even in our modern, rational world. Often such theories serve to explain the inexplicable. Sometimes they are developed for motives of political expediency: it is simpler to see political opponents as conspirators and terrorists, putting them into one convenient basket, than to seek to understand and disentangle the complex motivations of opponents. So it is not surprising to see that just when the French Revolution was creating the modern political world, a constant obsession with conspiracies lay at the heart of the revolutionary conception of politics. The book considers the nature and development of the conspiracy obsession from the end of the old regime to the Directory. Chapters focus on conspiracy and fears of conspiracy in the old regime; in the Constituent Assembly; by the king and Marie Antoinette; amongst the people of Paris; on attitudes towards the peasantry and conspiracy; on Jacobin politics of the Year II and the 'foreign plot'; on counter-revolutionary plots and imaginary plots; on Babeuf and the 'conspiracy of equals'; and finally on fear of conspiracy as an intellectual impasse in the revolutionary mentality. Inspired by recent debates, this book is a comprehensive survey of the nature of conspiracy in the French Revolution, with each chapter written by a leading historian on the question. Each chapter is an original contribution to the topic, written however to include the wider issues for the area concerned. There is an emphasis throughout on clarity and accessibility, making the volume suitable for a wide readership as well as undergraduates and advanced researchers

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: conspiracy in the French Revolution –issues and debates
• Chapter 1 Perceptions of conspiracy on the eve of the French Revolution
• Chapter 2 Conspiratorial thinking in the Constituent Assembly:Mirabeau and the exclusion of deputies from the ministry
• Chapter 3 The real and imagined conspiracies of Louis XVI
• Chapter 4 'Horrible plots and infernal treasons’: conspiracy and the urban landscape in theearly Revolution
• Chapter 5 Conspiracy in the village? French revolutionary authorities and the search for ‘subverters of public opinion’ in the rural south-west
• Chapter 6 ‘Do you believe that we’re conspirators?’: conspiracies real and imagined in Jacobin politics, 1793–94
• Chapter 7 The émigrés and conspiracy in the French Revolution, 1789–99
• Chapter 8 Never was a plot so holy: Gracchus Babeuf and the end of the French Revolution
• Chapter 9 Conclusion: Catilina’s revenge –conspiracy, revolution, andhistorical consciousness from the ancien régime to the Consulate
• Index