How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau's writings to Old Regime protest tactics. A Natural History of Revolution suggests that it is perhaps on a different shelf of the Enlightenment library that we might find the best clues for understanding the French Revolution: namely, in studies of the natural world. In their attempts to portray and explain the events of the Revolution, political figures, playwrights, and journalists often turned to the book of nature: phenomena such as hailstorms and thunderbolts found their way into festivals, plays, and political speeches as descriptors of revolutionary activity. The particular way that revolutionaries deployed these metaphors drew on notions derived from the natural science of the day about regeneration, purgation, and balance.

In examining a series of tropes (earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes) that played an important role in the public language of the Revolution, A Natural History of Revolution reveals that understanding the use of this natural imagery is fundamental to our understanding of the Terror. Eighteenth-century natural histories had demonstrated that in the natural world, apparent disorder could lead to a restored equilibrium, or even regeneration. This logic drawn from the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. If thunder could restore balance in the atmosphere, and if volcanic eruptions could create more fertile soil, then so too could episodes of violence and disruption in the political realm be portrayed as necessary for forging a new order in revolutionary France.

About the Author

Mary Ashburn Miller is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College.

Reviews

Miller... does offer a convincing argument, demonstrating how tropes from the natural world-earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes-were used as political propaganda, to justify the violence and eventual regeneration wrought by the Revolution. In short, she examines scientific, literary, and political texts to prove the importance of language in shaping and propagating revolutionary thought from 1789 to 1794. Her acute selection of thirteen period illustrations, like the one on the jacket, enriches her discussion, further proving that communication may be just as effective whether expressed through written or visual images.

-- Ivy Dyckman * New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century *

Miller Ashburn Miller succeeds in breathing new life into the topic. Part of her success is owing to her demonstration of how much these rhetorical gestures owed to recent advances in science and natural history. But Miller also offers an intriguing narrative of the rise and then sudden decline of a specific strand of revolutionary rhetoric, which put a set of violent natural occurrences-earthquakes, lightning strikes, volcanoes-to ideological use as metaphors for social and political events. The upshot of the story, Miller claims, bears directly on our understanding not just of revolutionary violence but of the Reign of Terror itself.

-- Johnson Kent Wright * The Journal of Modern History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801449420
Author Mary Ashburn Miller
Format Hardback
Page Count 248
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm