ABSTRACT
The French Revolution is frequently presented as the originary point of a distinctively modern world view, in which autonomous subjects wrestle with the issues of individual and collective existence. The Revolution, which engendered the Declaration of Rights, wherein political liberties, at once individual and universal, were for the first time enshrined in a European constitution, and which was based on a perceptibly ‘democratic’ struggle against aristocracy and tyranny, has long stood as the foundation of progress toward self-realization in politics.1 Undoubtedly, nineteenth-and twentieth-century representations of revolutionary change relied heavily on such images, but this chapter will question whether such an account can be wholly applied to the French Revolution itself. To be more precise, these self-realizing processes may have been retrospectively inscribed into the French Revolution as a historical event, but were not necessarily present in the events which made up the decade of the 1790s in France. As historians, it is vital for us to be able to distinguish between the contemporary awareness of an event and its subsequent re-inscriptions, which are also part of history, but the history of a later era.
