28-29 October 2010 in Paris
Rupture(s) in Revolution
Perceiving and managing ruptures in revolutionary times
Organisers
IHRF-University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual (University of Jyväskylä – Finland)
Associating the notion of rupture to the French Revolution can seem commonplace, as it is usually considered to be a time of transition between the Ancien Régime and modern times. Nevertheless, historiography offering a reflection specific to that notion is quite scarce, most probably because the notion is not easy to grasp. When Jean Baechler – in an article published in the European journal of sociology in 1974 – had proposed to reflect on the notion of rupture, it was in the hopes of re-appraising the issue of the origins of the French Revolution. By doing so, he saw in the revolutionary period one of the symptoms of the crisis of the monarchic system, which led him to consider (just like Tocqueville) the revolutionary rupture in terms of continuity.
This approach of rupture from the point of view of the “causes” – like the capacity to envisage rupture in terms of continuity – reveals the ideological, or even teleological, stakes that are associated with it.
Rupture can indeed conceal a positive content if one considers it to break away from a world perceived as archaic in order to prepare the implementation of a new era of liberation for mankind. It can conversely be interpreted as negative when Revolutions are primarily considered as periods of deep and violent political, social and religious instability. It may also, as stated above, be grasped in a perspective of continuity, if one seeks to erase the radical nature of the rupture to offer an integration of the revolutionary phenomenon in the longue durée of national history. Outside of France, particularly in the sister Republics, the revolutionary rupture appears much more distinctly in traditional historiography, because the French influence is seen to disrupt the continuity of national destinies. Undertakings in historiography thus seek to evacuate the period of foreign intervention, so that the rupture takes on the meaning of a true destabilisation on which it is useless to waste any time. In any event, the notion of rupture is never formally analysed, but rather is present in the background and acts as a pretext for the elaboration of various interpretative strategies.
In the hopes of looking deeper into these interpretative frameworks and of questioning them differently, the workshop would like to propose a tentative reflection around the notion of rupture, both on the scale of practice and on that of the discourse and narratives produced by contemporaries to legitimise their actions or disparage those of their opponents. Various paths of reflection can be pursued, among which the following: to what extent has the notion of rupture been manipulated for political purposes? How was the revolutionary rupture perceived and managed in France and/or abroad? To what extent has the perception and management of rupture encouraged innovation or on the contrary generated a need for continuity?
The workshop intends to focus mainly on the period of the French Revolution but could also benefit from reflection in the field of political science around the theme of rupture and revolution, so as to evaluate the inputs of a theoretical approach v. an approach based on the practice of contemporaries.
One could thus try to measure the gap between their perception and their management of rupture, as well as the possible distance between the interpretations and political uses that developed immediately construct and those that emerged in the longer term.
