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This compelling book begins on the 2nd of August 1793, the day Marie Antoinette was torn from her family's arms and escorted from the Temple to the Conciergerie, a thick-walled fortress turned prison.

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.

The experience, and failure, of Louis XVI's short-lived constitutional monarchy of 1789–1792 deeply influenced the politics and course of the French Revolution. The dramatic breakdown of the political settlement of 1789 steered the French state into the decidedly stormy waters of political terror and warfare on an almost global scale. This book explores how the symbolic and political practices which underpinned traditional Bourbon kingship ultimately succumbed to the radical challenge posed by the Revolution's new 'proto-republican' culture. While most previous studies have focused on Louis XVI's real and imagined foreign counterrevolutionary plots, Ambrogio A. Caiani examines the king's hitherto neglected domestic activities in Paris. Drawing on previously unexplored archival source material, Caiani provides an alternative reading of Louis XVI in this period, arguing that the monarch's symbolic behaviour and the organisation of his daily activities and personal household were essential factors in the people's increasing alienation from the newly established constitutional monarchy.

On 17 July 1791 the revolutionary National Guard of Paris opened fire on a crowd of protesters: citizens believing themselves patriots trying to save France from the reinstatement of a traitor king. To the National Guard and their political superiors the protesters were the dregs of the people, brigands paid by counter-revolutionary aristocrats. Politicians and journalists declared the National Guard the patriots, and their action a heroic defence of the fledgling Constitution. Under the Jacobin Republic of 1793, however, this 'massacre' was regarded as a high crime, a moment of truth in which a corrupt elite exposed its treasonable designs. This detailed study of the events of July 1791 and their antecedents seeks to understand how Parisians of different classes understood 'patriotism', and how it was that their different answers drove them to confront each other on the Champ de Mars. DAVID ANDRESS is senior lecturer in Modern European History, University of Portsmouth.

Marie-Antoinette's Legacy: The Politics of French Garden Patronage and Picturesque Design, 1775‒1867 unites four French consorts-queen Marie- Antoinette and empresses Joséphine, Marie-Louise, and Eugénie-to examine how each patron turned to garden patronage to demonstrate her empowerment, celebrity, and agency. The gardens at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison emerge as arenas of exceptional taste and emotivity at the epicenter of court societies. These gardens were liminal zones that profoundly influenced the evolution of French picturesque garden design. This reappraisal of royal and imperial patronage debunks one of the central tenets of garden historiography that casts each consort's gardens as sites of excessive ostentation and frivolity. Instead, consort-patrons privileged garden design precisely because they inscribed their agency onto the French territory and, in so doing, ensured the perennity of their actions. At the crossroads of Enlightenment discourses about corporeality and the senses, French colonial ambitions and plantation slavery, botanical acclimation and naturalism, these women materialized hotly contested issues of sovereignty, gender, and identity politics in their gardens.

Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems.

The trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. This essay describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence's enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

Looking at royal ritual in pre-revolutionary France, Death and the crown examines the deathbed and funeral of Louis XV in 1774, thelit de justice of November 1774, and the coronation of Louis XVI, including the ceremony of the royal healing touch for scrofula. It reviews the state of the field in ritual studies and appraises the status of the monarchy in the 1770s, including the recall of the parlements and the many ways people engaged with royal ritual. It answers questions such as whether Louis XV died in fear of damnation, why Marie Antoinette was not crowned in 1775 and why Louis XVI's coronation was not held in Paris. This lively, accessible text is a useful tool for under- and post-graduate teaching which will also be of interest to specialists on this under-researched period.Looking at royal ritual in pre-revolutionary France,Death and the crown examines the deathbed and funeral of Louis XV in 1774, thelit de justice of November 1774, and the coronation of Louis XVI, including the ceremony of the royal healing touch for scrofula. It reviews the state of the field in ritual studies and appraises the status of the monarchy in the 1770s, including the recall of the parlements and the many ways people engaged with royal ritual. It answers questions such as whether Louis XV died in fear of damnation, why Marie Antoinette was not crowned in 1775 and why Louis XVI's coronation was not held in Paris. This lively, accessible text is a useful tool for under- and post-graduate teaching which will also be of interest to specialists on this under-researched period.

Louis XVI of France, who was guillotined in 1793 during the Revolution and Reign of Terror, is commonly portrayed in fiction and film either as a weak and stupid despot in the thrall of his beautiful, shallow wife, Marie Antoinette, or as a cruel and treasonous tyrant. Historian John Hardman disputes both these versions in a fascinating new biography of the ill-fated monarch. Based in part on new scholarship that has emerged over the past two decades, Hardman's illuminating study describes a ruler possessing sharp insight, uncommon political acumen, andA a talent for foreign policy, yet one whose great misfortune was to be caught in the violent center of a major turning point in history. Hardman's dramatic reassessment of the reign of Louis XVI sheds a bold new light on the man, his actions, his world, and his policies, including the king's support of America's War of Independence, the intricate workings of his court, the disastrous Diamond Necklace Affair, and Louis's famous dash to Varennes.

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