2015, Vol., No.33

Korean Review of French History 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.67

pISSN : 1229-702X
https://journal.kci.go.kr/krfh

This book focused on the swordsmanship and the violence caused by the sword rather than the culture of the duel which was widespread in the society of the noble. In particular, three authors, Pascal Brioist, Hervé Drévillon, and Pierre Serna devoted themselves to reveal the ‘hidden face’ of the society of the modern France stained with cruel violence. To get rid of the cover and the silence that covered the world of the sword for a long period, they approached the process of the development of the duel and its terrible result through the unknown documents such as manuals of the swordsmanship and the documents of the public notice on the corpse of the Chatelet. This book began with the cultural materials of the sword and examined the development of the theory of the swordsmanship, then revealed concretely the real nature of the republic of the duel by its result, and finally treated the big match between the republic of the duel and that of the literature in the 18th Century. In the long run, the clash between the ink and the blood was over with the victory of the blood. In addition, the ember of the savage tradition was reignited at the moment of the victory of the Revolution in 1789 and advanced into the fratricidal war in transit to the Counter-Revolution and the Terrors. In summary, this book is a new outcome that showed the continuity of the Ancient Regime and the Revolution by positioning the violence at the epoch of the Revolution in the prolonged line of the violence that prevailed in the society of the Ancient Regime since the 16th Century.

Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, born knight d’Antonelle in 1747, took part in the Revolution, being successively officer of the National Guard, first elected mayor of Arles, deputy in the Legislative, juror of Revolutionary Court in Paris. Under the Directory, he was imprisoned after the failure of the conspiracy of Equals. Out of the prison, he became the editor of the organ of the left opposition and developed the concept of representative democracy. Under the Empire, he retired to a silent dissent, maintaining his jacobin cause as “exceptional invariable” until his death in 1817. Serna place this man, forgotten or ignored until then in revolutionary historiography, alongside with Condorcet, Danton, Robespierre and offers another way of telling Revolution beyond the opposition between ‘marxism’ and ‘revisionism’. Aristocrat, Antonelle suffered from melancholy under the Ancien Regime. He led the autonomous municipal revolution and he was an actively member of the Jacobin but opposed Robespierre. He was different from Babeuf by emphasizing the civil equality of the Constitution of 1793 against the equality of property. Finally, he developed the political system of representative democracy to end the Revolution by building the process of stabilizing it.

This article looks into the new trends in the studies of the French Revolution by a close analysis of La République des girouettes(Paris, 2005), written by Pierre Serna. He chooses the figure of “weathervane (girouette)” embodying political turncoats as a key to reinterpreting French modern political history. His book discovers that this figure, both real and fictional, was omnipresent in nineteenth-century French politics and culture. Serna goes back to the French Revolution to find its origin. Those turncoats became conspicuously visible in political space because a group of elite politicians-cum-bureaucrats continued to hold the executive power in spite of the rise and fall of the successive regimes from 1789 to 1815. They repeatedly turned their backs on what they had said, but kept the high offices in the name of political moderation. Serna labels them as ‘extrême centre’, because they condemned and repressed all kinds of political opposition as anarchism and extremism, which suffocated the newborn democratic parliamentary system. By such an insight, Serna’s book not only provokes important questions about the French Revolution, but also suggests useful comparative perspectives to us.