This collection of broad-ranging essays is published in response to what its authors see as a decline in public interest in the French Revolution in France today. The Revolution can seem curiously marginalized in a world increasingly concerned with internationalism and globalization and a France less confident in its republican roots. It appears less frequently in school history curricula and seems less popular with students at university, too. And with a diminishing presence on the shelves of France’s bookshops it is easy to get the impression that the subject is in terminal decline. Following a highly contentious public debate at the time of the Bicentenary in 1989 – a debate which, at least in the media, the anti-revolutionary lobby felt they had won - popular histories have tended to focus on resistance and counter-revolution, championing the royalists of the Vendée or seeking to equate the Republic with terror and the gulag. Is the Revolution, as François Furet opined, at last finished, with public interest all but extinguished?

Pierre Serna and his colleagues at the Institut d’histoire de la Révolution Française (IHRF) at the Sorbonne dismiss the judgement as palpably false. They note that in Paris and a few provincial centres their students are again turning to the Revolution for inspiration, and believe that it is time to showcase some of the new research that is being undertaken around the topic. The Revolution, they insist, cannot be reduced to trite images of guillotines and political intolerance, any more than can the many social movements across the world that have taken their inspiration from it. This book has as its central premise that the French Revolution is not over. Revolutions are not banished to the archival stacks; they are as relevant today as at any time in the past, and they do not have to be violent or blood-soaked. They are concerned with rehabilitating the idea of revolution – but revolution of a positive, liberating kind. As they define it, a revolution is not a simple military coup or a violent seizure of power, but a movement enjoying genuine public support, aimed at “overturning the powerful and inventing regimes that they judge to be more just for the majority of citizens” (pp. 16–17). The overthrow of Soviet-styled communism in the so-called ‘coloured’ revolutions after 1989, or the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, all held out the promise of social justice without political violence, the values of 1789 without the terror that followed. As a consequence, our views of the French Revolution may also change. There is a crusading quality about the essays in this volume, which introduce some of the many new research questions to which revolutionary historians are now turning.

If the book is principally directed at a French audience – an audience of schoolteachers in French secondary schools, the category most likely to have missed out on these new directions of research – it is of interest to French Revolutionary specialists across Europe, too, as a useful guide to some of the more innovative trends in research today. It is also something of a prospectus for topics that are currently the subject of research programmes in the IHRF, which during the twentieth century had come to be closely associated with the classical school of revolutionary history. It represents the collective work of colleagues at the IHRF today, and is something of a wake-up call to those who still identify the Institute with the era of Albert Soboul, or with the insistence that the Revolution could be understood in terms of France alone. Here the emphasis is on posing new questions, disturbing old orthodoxies, and diversifying the focus of research. It is about internationalizing the Revolution and getting rid of lingering notions of French exceptionality. It calls on French researchers to resist the polemical arguments of the recent past. And it challenges them to shun isolationism and engage with the concern of historians elsewhere, in Europe and North America in particular, whose approach to the Revolution has been inspired by some of the broader questions of gender, race and ethnicity that guide historical research more generally and which, in many instances, reflect the concerns of the world today.

Pierre Serna argues that it was not just the decade after 1789 that was revolutionary, but the half-century from 1770, in Europe, in the Caribbean, and in the Americas, and he calls on scholars to look again at ideas of an Atlantic, or global, revolutionary movement in this era. Anti-slavery was a key issue here, and he suggests that revolutions in Europe, and even in France, can usefully be seen as wars of liberation against oppression, as anti-colonial movements in their own right. The colonies are also at the centre of Frédéric Régent’s discussion of French colonial policy in the Revolution, and of the influence that colonial policy had on the thinking of politicians at home, through their fears of violence, of loss of trade, of British machinations in the Caribbean. By 1802 Napoleon would abandon France’s commitment to the abolition of slavery in reaction to the trauma among the planters caused by the insurrection in Guadeloupe and what he termed “the dreadful use which the Blacks of Guadeloupe had made of liberty” (p. 74). Guillaume Mazeau and Jean-Luc Chappey examine afresh the politics of the Republic that led to Terror in 1793, and both emphasise the links between the state and the people. For Mazeau the Revolution offered modernisation and different forms of emancipation, from aristocratic power, from royal autocracy, and from the control of the Church. State violence he sees as a way of dealing with opposition to such emancipation, a response that mirrored a long European tradition of state violence. But it was also, he insists, the government’s way of stopping the people from resorting to violence of their own. Chappey discusses the public discourse of the Republic, noting how the language of the revolutionary elites was increasingly appropriated by the people and used for their own ends. The Republic emphasized regeneration; in this sense Terror can be interpreted as “a privileged moment of republican modernity” (p. 130). Finally, Bernard Gainot focusses on the republican – some would say neo-Jacobin – concept of political economy under the Directory, where he notes the emergence of a strongly mutualist line of argument that would link to the Saint-Simonian and early socialist ideas of the early nineteenth century. Political figures like Marc-Antoine Jullien argued that it was necessary to tax the rich to protect the poor, with the debate framed as a contest between the interests of the individual and the interests of society. Revolutionary republicanism was far from dead. Nor, clearly, is revolutionary scholarship.

All in all, this collection offers a timely reflection on the state of revolutionary research in France today and on some of the issues that can galvanise the interest of the next generation.