| This dissertation examines the relationship between violence and the natural world in the public language of the French Revolution. Through analysis of political speeches, government-sponsored plays, festivals, and popular newspapers, this study demonstrates that nature and natural phenomena became a significant way of representing human violence during the Revolution. In placing these representations in the context of contemporary scientific and popular conceptions of nature, this thesis uncovers not only a clearer view of the revolutionary idea of nature, but of their idea of revolution itself, and more specifically of the violence within it. In seeking to understand the violence around them, revolutionaries could turn to philosophy in the Encyclopedie or in d'Holbach's Systeme de la Nature, to natural histories such as Buffon's Histoire Naturelle , or even to their lived experience enduring hailstorms, witnessing lightning strikes, and reading about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Indeed, violent revolutions had their model in the book of nature; the Encyclopedie had defined 'revolutions of the earth' as a simultaneous process of, "destroying, on the one hand, to produce new bodies on the other." And it was to these terrestrial revolutions that French men and women often turned for explanations and justifications of their own political one. Lightning, mountains, volcanic eruptions, and swamps all became metaphors for revolutionary processes of purgation and renewal.;In comparing violence to natural phenomena, revolutionaries were not necessarily explaining it as a rational reaction to specific crimes, but instead were accepting violence as uncontrollable, sometimes irrational, but at the same time, constructive of a positive order. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates that the logic of the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. It gave them a way to acknowledge the fact that revolutionary events often spun out of control, belying the image of the Revolution as a process driven entirely by human 'will' that has been emphasized in recent historiography, while still defending the necessity of these events, and their place in a larger historical pattern. |
