An ordinary man in the midst of great events (on the book by T. Tackett)
Pimenova Ludmila
The essay is devoted to the new book by Timothy Tackett, the well-known American researcher of the French Revolution. The historian continues the study of changes in human views and behavior under the influence of revolutionary events, which he began earlier using the example of deputies of the French National Assembly. The new monograph is a micro-historical study based on 1080 letters stored in the archives of the Indre department, sent from Paris to the province in 1778-1795 by a lawyer A.-J. Colson. The book contains a lot of information about everyday life in Paris in the 1780s and 1790s, and reveals the radical ideological transformation of Colson, who was an elderly man at the beginning of the revolution. Devoted to the king and the monarchy, far from the ideas of the Enlightenment in 1789, he became a supporter of M. Robespierre and the Montagnards in 1792-1793. The material of the book allows us to trace this change under the influence of events, communication with neighbors, reading newspapers and pamphlets, fears of a «counter-revolutionary conspiracy», and attempts to rethink these events as a return to original Christianity. This individual case invites for reflection on the general trends in the dynamics of collective representations in France at the end of the 18th century.
References:
Bell D.A. Lawyers and Citizens. The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France. New-York, 1994.
Chartier R. Les origines culturelles de la Révolution française. Paris, 1990.
Lefebvre G. La Grande peur de 1789. Paris, 2021.
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Tackett T. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790). Princeton, 1996.
Tackett T. The Glory and the Sorrow: A Parisian and His World in the Age of the French Revolution. New-York, 2021.