Keith Michael Baker - Böcker

The problem of the Terror lies at the heart of any reflection upon the French Revolution and its implications for modern political culture. Contemporaries sought to grasp its meaning immediately after the fact as they struggled to explain an experience which seemed to defy the Revolution's fundamental assumption: that rational human intentions could erase the arbitrariness of history and institute a transparent social order. Since then, historians and philosophers have not ceased to ponder what Benjamin Constant called "that inexplicable delirium known as the reign of the Terror. "For some, the Terror deviated from the rights of man only to preserve them: it was a system of revolutionary government dictated by circumstances that threatened the very existence of the infant French Republic. For others, it revealed a dynamic inherent in the Revolution from the start: a dynamic unleashed by the very effort to refashion society in the light of human reason. For still others, it was a symptom of the fact that the promised transformation of society was still incomplete - and a model for any future revolution that would complete it. This volume has been designed to bring together contributions by representatives of a wide range of historiographical approaches to the French Revolution. It seeks, in the wake of the heated historical debates of recent years, to reopen old questions and to formulate new ones, to suggest how the problem of understanding the Terror is being approached, or might be approached, two hundred years after the event. In a century more than ever aware of the fragility of the boundaries between citizenship and victimization, the topic retains its challenge for historical comprehension - and its profound relevance to the enduring question of the nature and conditions of democracy. Now volume 4 is published. Drawing clear inspiration from the earlier highly acclaimed volumes, Professor Baker has now edited a supplementary volume. It has as its aim to advance, by focusing more precisely on the period of the Terror, the explanation of the nature and implications of the political culture of the French Revolution the early volumes initiated.

A landmark biography of one of the most notorious and controversial protagonists of the French Revolution—Jean-Paul Marat.  Who better to pen an authoritative biography of Jean-Paul Marat (1743–93) than preeminent historian of France Keith Michael Baker? Decades in the making, this monumental work takes readers on a journey through the intriguing, sometimes shocking life of this writer and thinker.  Starting with Marat’s Swiss family and upbringing, Baker then sheds light on his early years in England, his career as an aspiring scientist in Paris, his gradual transformation from impassioned pamphleteer to revolutionary newspaperman, and, finally, his murder and martyrdom. Throughout, Baker offers readers the unique opportunity to reconsider the outbreak and development of the French Revolution through Marat’s eyes and in his own words. To help make sense of Marat’s trajectory, he shows how his violent and incendiary public calls to render unseen forces visible, to inject immediacy into an increasingly abstract modern world, would transform classical republicanism into the language of Terror.  Far beyond a standard rendering of Marat’s life and its milestones, this biography offers readers an opportunity to see the French Revolution as never before, through the perspective of one of its major figures. Baker’s book reveals how someone like Marat could go from translating Newton and engaging with Franklin to calling for an ever-growing number of heads to roll—a transformation as chilling as ever.

How did the French Revolution become thinkable? Keith Michael Baker, a leading authority on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, explores this question in his wide-ranging collection of essays. Analyzing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime during its last decades, Baker revises our historical map of the political space in which the French Revolution took form. Some essays study the ways in which the revolutionaries' break with the past was prepared by competition between agents and critics of absolute monarchy to control the cultural resources and political meanings of French sought before 1789 to reconstitute their body politic; and by the invention of 'public opinion' as a new form of political authority displacing notions of 'representation', 'constitution', 'sovereignty' - and of 'the French Revolution' itself - the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that were to drive the revolutionary dynamic in subsequent years. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies, stimulating renewed reflection on one of the central themes in modern European history.

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions.This volume argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.