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SoSe 23: Revolution and Death: Necropolitics in the French Empire around 1800

Daniel Schönpflug

Comments

The years between 1792 and 1815 were among the deadliest in modern history, and the rates of violent death during these years were only surpassed by the two world wars of the 20th century. In France – during the reign of Terror of 1793/4 alone – several hundred thousand men and women died under the Guillotine, in front of firing squads or in brutal civil wars. In the long series of revolutionary and Napoleonic wars on European soil, several Million soldiers and many civilians lost their lives. In Egypt and in the French colonies overseas, that were shaken by uprisings, bloody repression and colonial campaigns, the numbers of victims have not even been estimated. While dying and killing was part of the experience of the revolutionary period, the years around 1800 were also an epoch in which the culture of death was fundamentally transformed. In the 18th century, enlightened thinking had brought about secular forms of thinking death. From the early days of 1789 on “Live free or die” was a popular slogan of French revolutionary activists. To heroically risk one’s own death, i.e. in violent uprisings, was expected from a revolutionary activist, and the radical movements of the revolution saw the killing of enemies as a legitimate political means. As a consequence of these new concepts of death, the period between 1789 and 1815 saw a transformation of the judicial and military infrastructures of the French state, which was the structural precondition of dying on a massive scale: “revolutionary justice”, on the one hand, and a new system of general conscription, on the other, created new conditions for counterinsurgency, for an ever growing army, and for the racial war over the independence of the most valuable French colony: Saint-Domingue. What explains the deadliness of the years around 1800? Was it – as conservative interpretations have claimed – a revolutionary political culture, its radicalism and its understanding of death as a legitimate means of political struggle? Was it the breakdown of established systems of order, that unleashed the violence previously contained by the Ancien Régime? Or did new bureaucracies and infrastructures create conditions for state-induced mass killing and early forms of genocide? The seminar will try to answer these questions consulting theoretical texts (Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Achille Mbembe) and empirical research alike; in doing so, it will also explore the interconnections between events in the metropolis and in the colonial peripheries of the French Empire. close

14 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Tue, 18:00 - 20:00 14 Class schedule

Tue, 2023-04-18 18:00 - 20:00

Lecturers:
Prof. Dr. Daniel Schönpflug