The thread of The Terror: Removing the Stalinist halo from the French Revolution

• Main Author: Ezequiel Sirlin
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Complutense de Madrid 2012-12-01
• Series: Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea
• Subjects: Revisionismo; Revolución Francesa; Terror; Estalinismo; Historiografía.
• Online Access: https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/CHCO/article/view/40097

... The Terror by David Andress suggests a “destalinizing” current of the French Revolution, which could include the cultural studies of Robert Darnton and the integral stories of George Rude and Peter McPhee. This is an empirical turn opposed to that initiated by Alfred Cobban in 1950 and taken to its most brilliant expression by François Furet. That revisionism called for distrust of conclusions that compared of defensive Terror of the jacobins in the face of royal threats with stalinist purges. Instead this new revisionism revalues the “thesis of circumstances”, prioritizing the drama of the factual sequence after the King’s failed flight over the semiotic circuit Furet dominated by the Revolution.