Historians have long used biography and life narratives as a means of understanding the French Revolution, as classic studies on major figures such as Robespierre and Napoleon attest. At the current moment, however, many of the most creative such studies are focusing on relatively minor revolutionary figures. Such work, which combines the techniques of classic biography and microhistory, reveals how the great political, social, cultural and religious transformations of the revolutionary era were refracted through the prism of individual experience. This work often links to research and writing taking place in adjacent disciplines, notably around the ideas and practices of life-writing. These studies, themselves often grounded in the history of emotions, resist the 'biographical illusion' that an individual’s essence can be inferred unproblematically from their words and actions, and they also transcend the tendency to see those words and actions as merely symptoms of broader political processes. By focusing on individual life stories in their own right and insisting on the slipperiness of individual identity, this book explores emergent forms of subjectivity. Contents Notes on Contributors Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Race, Revolution, and Celebrity: The Case of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George Chapter 3: Ourika and the Chevalier de Boufflers Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Rebirth of Jean-Paul Marat An Offering to the Nation An Offer to the King Uncertain Days An Impatient Observer A Declaration of Rights A Constitution in Sight? The People’s Friend L’Ami du peuple Chapter 5: Navigating the Emotional Storm of 1791: The Lamarque Family in Paris, the Landes, and Saint Lucia Chapter 6: A Jacobin Itinerary: The Biography of a Parisian Printer Chapter 7: A ‘Muslim Jacobin’? Ahmad Khan and the Eurocentric Pitfalls of ‘Inclusive’ History The Meanings and Practice of Revolutionary Hospitality A Muslim or a Victim of British Tyranny? ‘Emotional alignment’ with the Revolution? A Jacobin? The Persian Translation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man Chapter 8: Money, Manhood, and Revolutionary Biography: The Limits of Voluntary Selfhood 1792, or the Cost of Liberty Ordinary Extraordinary: Living the Year II The Great Mascarade: Economic Collapse After Thermidor Conclusion Chapter 9: Time and the Duchess: Revolution and Temporality in the Letters of the Duchess d’Elbeuf, 1788–94 Chapter 10: Economic Lives in the French Revolution A Tale of Three Cousins Etienne Martial Jeanne Revolutionary Lives Economic History Chapter 11: ‘The Vengeance of a Province’: Alexandre Rousselin and His Accusers Revolutionary Lives Reconsidered Terror and Reaction in the Department of the Aube Denunciation and Vengeance After the Terror Conclusion: The Meaning of a Revolutionary Life Chapter 12: Tocqueville, Napoleon, and the Writing of Biography in a Democratic Age Index
