Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

La mondialisation de la Révolution française (vers 1930-1960) : origines et eclipse d'un paradigme historiographique

Stammers, Tom

La mondialisation de la Révolution française (vers 1930-1960) : origines et eclipse d'un paradigme historiographique Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

This article sketches an alternative narrative for the origins of global historiography on the French Revolution. It argues that the thesis of an “Atlantic Revolution” put forward by Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot in the 1950s in fact grew out of debates in interwar France. French historians first took a “global turn” with the establishment of the Institut International de l’Histoire de la Révolution Française (IIHRF) in 1936. Its founding members, Philippe Sagnac and Boris Mirkine-Guétzevitch, were committed to making revolutionary historiography an instrument for promoting internationalism in an age of immense diplomatic insecurity. The IIHRF was pioneering for the geographical range, interdisciplinary focus, and extended chronology it brought to studying the French Revolution. It was also, however, profoundly marked by French geopolitical interests and deep-rooted assumptions of cultural superiority connected to the study of “civilization.” The closure of the IIHRF after the Nazi occupation, and its relocation to New York, inaugurated an intriguing new chapter in Franco-American intellectual exchanges. In the wake of the war, however, the diplomatic value of the IIHRF was redundant and its intellectual agenda eclipsed by the rise of alternative ways of conceiving of international history, as well as the challenge of decolonization. The evolution and ultimate failure of the IIHRF raise intriguing questions about the changing significance of 1789 as a political landmark, the different methodologies of “international,” “Atlantic,” and “world” history, and the reshaping of research paradigms at the dawn of the Cold War.

Citation

Stammers, T. (2020). La mondialisation de la Révolution française (vers 1930-1960) : origines et eclipse d'un paradigme historiographique. Annales (English ed. Online), 74(2), 297-335. https://doi.org/10.1017/ahss.2020.10

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 30, 2018
Online Publication Date Jul 23, 2020
Publication Date 2020-06
Deposit Date Mar 8, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Annales, histoire, sciences sociales.
Print ISSN 2398-5682
Electronic ISSN 2268-3763
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 74
Issue 2
Pages 297-335
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/ahss.2020.10

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations