Syllabus for NEH Summer Seminar, “Revolution and the Making of Identities: France and Haiti, 1787-1804”

Director: Jeremy D. Popkin, Dept. of History, University of Kentucky

June 19-July 21, 2006

Last revised: 6 May 2006

Mon., June 19

Introduction to the seminar and the Newberry Library

Wed., June 21

Revolution and Identities: A Conceptual Framework

Issues: How can concepts of personal and collective identity be applied to the understanding of the French Revolution? What contributions to the understanding of identity concepts might emerge from studying a revolutionary crisis?

Readings: Jeremy Popkin, “Revolution and Changing Identities” (unpublished essay); Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of the Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus,” in G. Spiegel, ed., Practicing History, 179-98; William Sewell, “Theory of Structure,” from Sewell, Logics of History 124-51; Mona Ozouf, “Regeneration” from Furet and Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution; S. Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), 821-65.

Thurs., June 22

Social Identities in Old Regime France

Issues: What was the repertoire of public personal identities in the Old Regime in France? Were notions of identity under challenge before 1789, and what pressures were causing these changes?

Readings: Sarah Maza, “Luxury, Morality, and Social Change,” Journal of Modern History , 1997; Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution”, American Historical Review, 1996; William Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure,” Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 109-52; Jay Smith, “Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over noblesse commercante,” Journal of Modern History 2000; Sue Peabody, “Crisis: Blacks in the Capital, 1762,” from There are No Slaves in France, 72-87.

Mon., June 26

Identities in the French Caribbean

Issues: What was the nature of pre-revolutionary society in France’s Caribbean colonies, and especially in Saint-Domingue? How did the divisions in this society compare with those in pre-revolutionary France?

Readings: L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 1-90; O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 35-76; S. Mintz and M-R. Trouillot, “Social History of Haitian Vodou,” in D. Cosentino, ed., Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, 123-47; Sue Peabody, “A Dangerous Zeal: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles,” French Historical Studies 25 (2002), 53-90; Stewart King, “Planter Elites,” from Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue, 205-25; B. Moitt, “Women and Labor: Slave Labor,” from B. Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 34-56.

Wed., June 28

Defining Revolution

Issues: What was the nature of the revolutionary processes that began in France in 1789, and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, and why did they have such a radical impact on the people involved in them? In what ways did these revolutions compel individuals to rethink the nature of their identities?

Readings: William Sewell, “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures,” in Logics of History , 225-70; Keith Baker, “Revolution,” from Baker, Inventing the French Revolution; selection from C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins, 85-117; Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as Non-Event,” in Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Geggus, “Bois Caiman Ceremony,” in Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies; Catherine Reinhardt, “French Caribbean Slaves Forge Their Own Ideal of Liberty in 1789,” in Doris Kadish, ed., Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World (2002), 19-38.

Thurs., June 29

The Haitian Revolution: From Rebellion to Independence

Issues: How did the Haitian Revolution develop from a rebellion against slavery and racial prejudice into a movement for the creation of an independent nation? What was the role of Toussaint Louverture in this process? Was the outcome of the revolution inevitable? Was there a genuine possibility that France and its colonies might have become a multi-racial republic?

Readings: Dubois, Avengers, 91-306; Nick Nesbitt, “The Idea of 1804,” Yale French Studies no. 107 (2005), 6-38

Mon., July 3

Holiday: no seminar meeting

Wed., July 5 Session with Laurent Dubois

First-person narratives as sources for understanding issues of identity

Issues: what special contributions can first-person narratives make to our understanding of how revolutionary crises affect participants’ identities? What special problems are posed by the reading of witness narratives from a revolutionary event such as the Haitian uprising?

Readings: Jeremy Popkin, “Facing Racial Revolution,” unpublished book manuscript.

Thurs., July 6

The Identity of the Citizen

Issues: What new identities did the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen create, both explicitly and implicitly? What old-regime identities did it delegitimize? Who was included in the concept of “citizen”? Was the identity of ‘citizen’ conceivable in the colonial context?

Readings: Declaration of Rights; Etienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Cadava et al., eds., Who Comes After the Subject? 33-57; Michael Fitzsimmons, “The National Assembly and the Invention of Citizenship,” from Renée Waldinger et al., eds., The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship; Joan Scott, “A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer;” John Garrigus, “’Sons of the Same Father,’” in C. Adams et al., eds., Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, 137-54; Vertus Saint-Louis, “Les termes de citoyen et Africain pendant la revolution de Saint-Domingue,” in L. Hurbon, ed., L’Insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue (22-23 août 1791), 75-95;

Mon., July 10 Session with Suzanne Desan

New Identities in the Private Sphere

Issues: How did the Revolution affect the separation between public and private life? Were there changes in the ways individuals defined themselves within the family and in other aspects of their private life?

Readings: Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (all); Michael Sibalis, “Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” in Merrick and Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France.

Wed., July 12

Making a Revolutionary Culture

Issues: What did it mean to create a revolutionary culture, and how did people have to reconceive themselves to make this possible?

Readings: Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (all).

Thurs., July 13

Revolutionary Cultures and Contexts

Issues: How did different groups participate in the new revolutionary cultures of France and Haiti?

Readings: Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, chs. 4-5; P. Jones, “A New Civic Landscape,” in Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France, 119-62; Thornton, “’I am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993), 181-214; Carolyn Fick, “The Blacks React to Freedom,” in The Making of Haiti, 157-82; Ronald Schechter, “Constituting Differences: The French Revolution and the Jews,” from Obstinate Hebrews, 150-91.

Mon., July 17

Art, Literature, and Issues of Identity

Issues: How can art and literature fiction help us understand the way in which revolutions affect identities?

Readings: Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising (selections), Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety (selection); Trouillot, essay on All Souls’ Rising; Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Black Revolution, Saint-Domingue: Girodet’s Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies, 1797”, in Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (2002), 9-63; Laura Mason, Singing the Revolution, pp. 42-60.

Wed., July 19

No seminar meeting

Thurs., July 20

Participants’ presentations (1:30—5 pm)

Fri., July 21

Participants’ presentations and concluding discussion (1:30—5 pm)