This essay addresses the perennial question of the relations between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It starts with an attempt to fix the place of both the intellectual movement and the political upheaval within the wider currents of Atlantic history, highlighting the long-term transition to capitalism in Europe and the inter-imperial conflicts that accompanied it. A closer look at the French Enlightenment, in the next section, offers reasons for skepticism about the claim, associated with the work of Jonathan Israel, that in “radical” guise, the Enlightenment somehow “caused” the Revolution. On the contrary, the third part argues, it makes more sense to see the Revolution as having permitted a striking radicalization of Enlightenment ideas and aims, which remain central to any explanation of the way in which the Atlantic revolutions as a whole unfolded. A conclusion then returns to the ways in which the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have remained inextricably linked to one another, within the modern historiographical and philosophical imaginary.

Rachel Ginnis Fuchs, former editor of French Historical Studies and former president of the Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS), died on October 15, 2016, following a very short illness. Rachel had only just retired, after some thirty-two years of teaching at Arizona State University (ASU). But she had no intention of slackening the pace of her professional activities; besides, she missed students. So it was no surprise that she had accepted, with characteristic relish, a visiting appointment in the fall of 2016 as General Mark W. Clark Professor of History at the Citadel in Charleston—treating the cadets to a course on France in World War II, among other duties. Evacuated ahead of Hurricane Matthew in early October, Rachel was soon back at work. But on the 12th she suffered a massive stroke, from which recovery proved impossible. Rachel passed away peacefully, with her family at her bedside, three days later.Most readers of French Historical Studies will already have some sense of Rachel's passionate devotion to the profession and to French history in particular. This was perhaps heightened by the fact that she came to our subfield a bit later in life. Born in Staten Island in 1939, Rachel earned a BA and an MA in history at Boston University in 1959 and 1962. But her initial work was in Russian rather than in French history, a choice inspired in part by Belarusian family background. It was only when she returned to doctoral work at Indiana University, after getting her two children launched in life, that Rachel switched to French history, and to the history of the French family in particular. Having made the move (one in which, she often later allowed, gastronomical and viticultural motives might have played a certain role), she made up for lost time with a vengeance. Rachel earned her PhD in 1980, and her dissertation, supervised by the late Bill Cohen, became her first book, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (1984)—to be followed by, among others, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (1992), Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2005), and Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (2008). Contested Paternity, in many ways the crowning achievement of Rachel's oeuvre, won her no fewer than three important awards, including the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize.As their readers will all know, these books, together with the many articles and essays that accompanied them, were the work of a proud and passionate feminist and deeply principled egalitarian—a “political animal,” as she often described herself—who regarded the recovery of the historical experience of the most exploited and vulnerable members of past societies as a matter of doing them justice, a word Rachel never shrank from using in describing the historian's tasks. But she was no less proud to characterize herself as a quintessential “archive rat,” ever on the lookout for the next unexpected trouvaille or hidden cache. Respect for le temps perdu for its own sake, on its own terms, was a matter of bedrock principle as well. Rachel was far from done with French history. Her premature departure means that at least two more books, for which the research and writing were well under way, will go unfinished. Their working titles suggest how much we have missed: The Angel-Makers of Mission Street: Abortion and Community in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris and Crossing Boundaries: Families in Vichy France.Only slightly less visible than her scholarship, but felt throughout the profession by her colleagues and students, is Rachel's extraordinary record of service over the last thirty years. One side of this was a love of teaching and mentoring that was fully the match of her enthusiasm for research—indeed, the two passions were ultimately as one for Rachel, who, like all great educators, loved learning from her students as much as teaching them. Her service to the profession also included saying yes to a mind-boggling quantity of invitations and solicitations. Unlike most of us, Rachel had no fear of the word committee and served on countless numbers of these, of every kind, both at ASU and beyond it—search, promotion and tenure, award, prize, external review, you name it. But she rarely refused grander and weightier propositions as well: hosting the annual meeting of the SFHS in Tempe in 2000, acting as founding director of the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU in 2005–6, stepping in as editor of French Historical Studies itself from 2011 to 2014. All that is on the record. Unrecorded is a different kind of service to others, whose extent will never be fully measured: the strenuous lengths that Rachel could go to on behalf of individuals, both professionally and personally. In the outpouring of grief and tribute that followed news of her death, her family and her colleagues at ASU have been struck by the number of expressions of gratitude they received for so many acts of kindness on Rachel's part, large and small: helping one person find an apartment, or a job, or a partner; consoling another for illness or heartbreak; or merely treating a colleague's disabled child with dignity and respect.It is also striking how many times the word force has come up in these tributes and at the memorial service her family organized a week after her death. Rachel was indeed a force to be reckoned with, a human dynamo if ever there were one. What was the source of this energy, which seemed unstoppable? Rachel herself sometimes hinted at difficult relations with her parents, suggesting that as a young woman she was very different from the person we later came to know—timid, indecisive, lacking in self-esteem. Le croira qui voudra. But if that was so, it might explain something of the intensity of her devotion to the family she created with her husband, Norman, the high-school sweetheart whom she married in 1959—to their children, Mindy and Dan; to her four grandsons; to her sister, Lynn, and her three sons; to her cousins. It might explain in part how Rachel came to the topic that made her one of the great social historians of her time—the French family—to the study of which she brought the combined virtues of the regard lointain and the regard intime. Finally, it might help explain the trait that linked, umbilically, Rachel's public and private lives: her extraordinary capacity for friendship. As with her multiform acts of generosity and kindness, it is only with Rachel's passing that one starts to get a sense of how absolutely central friendship was to her life—how easily she made so many different friends, with what loyalty and tenacity she clung to them. Historians of France, on both sides of the Atlantic, will always be able to turn to her books and essays; the impact of her teaching and service will long be felt. And no one lucky enough to have been one of Rachel's friends will ever stop missing her.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPenser l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle: Commerce, civilisation, empire. Edited by Antoine Lilti and Céline Spector. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Edited by Jonathan Mallinson. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014. Pp. x+264. $94.00.Johnson Kent WrightJohnson Kent WrightArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 88, Number 4December 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688778 Views: 105Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsA Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794. By Mary Ashburn Miller.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi+231. $45.00.Johnson Kent WrightJohnson Kent WrightArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 85, Number 4December 2013New Directions in Legal and Constitutional History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/672552 Views: 43Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much. Edited by Dan Edelstein. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Edited by, Jonathan Mallinson.Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2010. Pp. x+300. $94.00.Johnson Kent WrightJohnson Kent WrightArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 83, Number 3September 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660308 Views: 37Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution Johnson Kent Wright Dan Edelstein , The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. The past few years have seen a bumper crop of writing on what was once a strangely neglected topic—the origins and character of republicanism in eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. Recent standouts in English include Michael Sonenscher's Before the Deluge (2007) and Sans-Culottes (2008), and Andrew Jainchill's Reimagining Politics After the Terror (2009). But for sheer ambition and verve, there is nothing quite like Dan Edelstein's The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French [End Page 136] Revolution. Offering no less than a new explanation for the Reign of Terror, Edelstein brings to his enterprise a heady combination of disciplinary proficiencies and theoretical tools—alternately wearing "the hats," as he puts it, of "cultural historian, literary scholar, social scientist, and political theorist," while analyzing historical narratives in the manner of White and decoding political "myths" à la Barthes. Not every reader will be convinced that the "enduring mystery" of the Terror has been put to rest by The Terror of Natural Right. Still, Edelstein's dazzling display of historical imagination and energy is certain to unsettle all conventional understandings of the origins and meaning of Jacobinism. Edelstein starts The Terror of Natural Right by announcing the discovery of a new species of republicanism, distinct from the neo-classical variants that John Pocock famously observed in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century North America. Rather than any classical model, the "natural republicanism" of the Jacobins was founded on modern theories of "natural right"—above all, the right permanently to dispose of anyone deemed an "enemy of the human race." That category had a long history behind it, mingling fear of the devil with loathing of all manner of "outlaws," from pirates, brigands, and bandits to tyrants. In the age of revolutions, however, now backed by the philosophical resources of Enlightenment naturalism, the idea of a hostis humani generis had it in it to provide a license for political murder on an unprecedented scale—in France, at any rate. The absence of any comparable episode of political terror in the American Revolution is a preoccupation throughout The Terror of Natural Right. What made the difference? Edelstein is not the first to point the finger at philosophic culprits. But what distinguishes his "secret history of natural republicanism"—to which the first part of The Terror of Natural Right is devoted—is the extraordinary breadth of the dragnet, which omits scarcely a leading figure of eighteenth-century French thought. There is no surprise in encountering Fénelon, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mably, all purveyors of "imaginary republics" of one kind of another. But the ancestors of Robespierre and Saint-Just also include a host of more far-flung visionaries, evoking "gold ages" in the past, insular paradises abroad, or scientific utopias to come—Voltaire, Diderot, even the Physiocrats. All of these, in Edelstein's view, contributed something to the natural-republican [End Page 137] "sensibility" that crystallized in the thought of Sylvain Maréchal, a far more accurate bellwether of revolutionary republicanism than, say, Paine or Condorcet. The origines lointaines of "natural republicanism" thus established, Edelstein turns in the second part of the book to its revolutionary career, focusing on the Reign of Terror above all. He canvasses the traditional explanations for the latter—popular violence from below, the struggle of elites from above, the pressure of counterrevolution from without—and finds them all insufficient to account for the killing spree with which the First Republic began its life. The necessary condition of possibility for the Terror, Edelstein argues, was the trial of Louis XVI, who was executed by a Convention invoking its natural right to rid the world of a hostis humani generis. All that remained was for the Jacobins, once in power, to extend exactly the same treatment the rest of the enemies of the First Republic. Only this can explain why the Jacobin response to resistance was "always death" (179...

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsLes Vies de Voltaire: Discours et représentations biographiques, XVIIIe–XXIe siècles. Edited by Christophe Cave and Simon Davies. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Edited by, Jonathan Mallinson. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2008. Pp. x+478. $152.00.Johnson WrightJohnson WrightArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 82, Number 2June 2010The Persistence of Religion in Modern Europe Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/651637 Views: 4Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

For whatever reasons, the lives of philosophers seem never before to have attracted so much attention, from scholars and popularizers alike—as if biographical context and event were sure routes to philosophical meaning. But what were the odds that two dual-author studies of the famous falling-out between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume would appear in such rapid succession? Given the finite nature of the evidence, there was bound to be a good deal of overlap between The Philosophers' Quarrel and David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment, published in 2006. Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott do acknowledge a debt to their predecessors for one crucial piece of detective work. More interesting, however, are the differences between the two books. Edmonds and Eidinow have now made a cottage industry of zestful accounts of intellectual combat, Rousseau's Dog having been preceded by Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers (2002) and Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine (2005).

Last year, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson published a brief, bold book on a topic from which historians of political thought have tended to shy away, curiously enough—the relations between republicanism and liberalism as political ideologies in the age of the American and French Revolutions.Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Modernsis relentlessly polemical, blaming this neglect on the historians and theorists responsible for resurrecting the early modern republican tradition over the last few decades. Pocock, Skinner, Wood, Petit, and more are assailed for having indulged in what Kalyvas and Katznelson call “republican nostalgia”—that is, for having wrongly presented republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism, rather than its parent and precursor. Instead, the authors ofLiberal Beginningsset out to show the ways in which republicanism evolved into liberalism, in and through the works of a set of leading thinkers—Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, Staël, and Constant. Their story has a happy ending. Whatever was valuable and actual in republicanism was smoothly incorporated into early liberalism, for which they turn the dictionary inside out in search of approbative adjectives—“situated,” “thick,” “sturdy,” “confident,” “open,” “immanent,” “heterogeneous,” and “syncretic.” How persuasive is their account? Not a few readers will detect a hint of protesting too much in this kind of cheerleading. “Thick,” “sturdy,” and “confident” are surely not the first terms to spring to mind in regard to this gallery of thinkers, Staël and Constant least of all. It also seems clear that Kalyvas's and Katznelson's coverage of French thought, confined almost entirely to that pair, is too cursory to sustain their case. At one end, Montesquieu and Rousseau, the titans who together defined republicanism for the revolutionary generation, make only the most fleeting of appearances inLiberal Beginnings. At the other, Tocqueville, acknowledged on all sides as the master thinker of French liberalism, is missing altogether. Nevertheless, the attempt at treating anglophone and French thinkers within a single interpretative framework is in itself a virtually unprecedented feat, for which Kalyvas and Katznelson should be congratulated. For who could doubt that they are on exactly the right path in chasing their prey onto French soil?

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Declaration of Independence: A Global History. By David Armitage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. viii+300. $23.95.Johnson Kent WrightJohnson Kent WrightArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 81, Number 3September 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/649075 Views: 121Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.