Conference Abstracts

Ever since Hannah Arendt's influential if controversial Cold War tract On Revolution, it has become a commonplace to starkly contrast the American Revolution ("triumphantly successful") with the French Revolution ("ended in disaster").  Indeed, too much discussion of arguably two of the most important topics in French and American history continues to bear the impress of mid-20th century ideological struggle.  Our paper interrogates four of the most prominent theses of this Cold War inheritance concerning the nature of historical change, the proper forms of government, the hegemony of liberal constitutionalism, and the trajectory of modernity.  By holding some of this conventional wisdom at bay and by paying closer attention to what the American and French revolutionaries were actually "doing" (as opposed to what they were "saying"), this essay unearths some surprising commonalities in the conduct of these two revolutions, from the centrality of committees of safety to the creation of popular assemblies to the day-to-day administration of public and necessary governance.  Our revision thus attempts to return questions of law, statecraft, administration, and most importantly democracy to center stage in the interpretation of these historic modern revolutions.

I propose to present new research at the crossroads of intellectual history and the history of emotions to update the Tocquevillean account of how the American and French revolutionaries understood, experienced, and shaped in/equality. Having been long neglected in comparison to its counterpart, liberty, historians are finally giving equality its due, while key works in the growing subfield of the history of emotions have reframed how we think about the outbreak and course of the Age of Revolutions. I bring these areas of scholarship together in this comparative history of how a subset of American and French revolutionaries experienced equal and unequal treatment