Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution
    Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution
    Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution
    Ebook235 pages5 hours

    Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution

    By Barry M. Shapiro

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The opening events of the French Revolution have stood as some of the most familiar in modern European history. Traumatic Politics emerges as a fresh voice from the existing historiography of this widely studied course of events. In applying a psychological lens to the classic problem of why the French Revolution’s first representative assembly was unable to reach a workable accommodation with Louis XVI, Barry Shapiro contends that some of the key political decisions made by the Constituent Assembly were, in large measure, the product of traumatic reactions to the threats to the lives of its members in the summer of 1789. As a result, Assembly policy frequently reflected a preoccupation with what had happened in the past rather than active engagement with present political realities.

    In arguing that the manner in which the Assembly dealt with the king bears the imprint of the behavior that typically follows exposure to traumatic events, Shapiro focuses on oscillating periods of traumatic repetition and traumatic denial. Highlighting the historical impact of what could be viewed as a relatively “mild” trauma, he suggests that trauma theory has a much wider field of potential applicability than that previously established by historians, who have generally confined themselves to studying the impact of massively traumatic events such as war and genocide. Moreover, in emphasizing the extent to which monarchical loyalties remained intact on the eve of the Revolution, this book also challenges the widely accepted contention that prerevolutionary cultural and discursive innovations had “desacralized” the king well before 1789.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPSUPress
    Release dateOct 22, 2009
    ISBN9780271051314
    Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution
    Author

    Barry M. Shapiro

    Barry M. Shapiro is Professor of History at Allegheny College.

    Related to Traumatic Politics

    Related ebooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Excerpt

      Dec 12, 2023

      “The general and accepted meaning of the Enlightenment today is that it was a great leap forward in the capacity of humans to control nature, generate wealth and direct their own destinies. It was, so the story goes, a crowning feat of progress and r

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Origin of Vibes

      Jul 5, 2022

      The same commentators who use vibes today might have reached for charisma. But while charisma was admiring and grand, vibes is noncommittal and irreverent.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Theories Of Conspiracy Theories

      Jun 16, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-History Ronald H Fritze Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 272pp, £20, ISBN 9781789145397 There has been growing interest in recent

      3 min read

    • Article

      Jason Stanley

      May 23, 2019

      Jason Stanley
      3 min read

    • Article

      Progressive? Unh, unh.

      Jun 27, 2019

      Progressive? Unh, unh.
      2 min read

    • Article

      City Hall

      Dec 30, 2020

      City Hall
      4 min read

    • Article

      Wake Up To Reality!

      Oct 28, 2021

      Wake Up To Reality!
      5 min read

    • Article

      Mont Pèlerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society

      Jan 25, 2023

      Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2022. Pp. xxi, 222. $34.95 hardcover. In the late 1930s, during the worldwide Great Depression and as the totalitarian threat loomed large, a group of scholars gathered in Paris to discuss the fate of liber

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Conspirasphere

      Dec 2, 2021

      The Conspirasphere
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Crisis Of Truths

      Jan 27, 2022

      A Crisis Of Truths
      9 min read

    • Article

      Emergence of A Technological Society

      Mar 26, 2020

      The author is professor of politics and director of the International Graduate Program in Politics at East China Normal University in Shanghai The emphasis on developing science and technology and closing the gap that had emerged historically between

      5 min read

    • Article

      For A Cinema Of Bombardment

      Sep 20, 2019

      For A Cinema Of Bombardment
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Myth of Rationality

      Mar 17, 2021

      Many years ago, I worked as a counsellor on a program that provided support to the families of sex offenders. In practice, that usually meant working with the wives of men convicted of child sexual offences. You might expect that my job would have co

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Chicago Boys and the Revival of Classical Liberal Economics in Chile

      Jan 4, 2022

      According to a persistent narrative on the free-market revolution led by the so-called Chicago Boys in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s,1 the country was purely “a laboratory for cutting-edge free market experiments” imported from the United States (Klei

      36 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Traumatic Politics

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Traumatic Politics - Barry M. Shapiro

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1