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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 present study examines the speech style of the late Japanese Emperor Hirohito during chihoo jyunkoo—'visits to countryside'—which were conducted to encourage war-defeated Japanese during 1946-54. Speech accommodation theory claims that speakers will attempt to converge linguistically toward the speech patterns of the addressee when they desire social approval from the addressee, given that the perceived costs of so acting are proportionally lower than the rewards anticipated. Documented speeches of the Emperor show that he converged his speech style (often to excess) to that of listeners who were lower in social status. The Japanese people reacted enthusiastically to the way the Emperor spoke and treasured it, although it is unusual for Japanese to treasure lower class speech from upper class people. The analysis of the Emperor's speech style supports the claim of the speech accommodation theory and further suggests that the attribution of the meaning of the message is determined by the listener's evaluation of its appropriateness.