Par Suzanne Levin, Turin Humanities Programme, Fondazione 1563.
In recent years, debates about the “Terror” in the French Revolution have been enriched with several new perspectives. Despite this, the many works attempting to seek the “origins” of the “Terror” often take this inherited category for granted. Some scholars have nonetheless begun to interrogate or even deconstruct the “Terror”: Can we speak of the “Terror” as a unitary system, while recognizing its improvised and variable character?[1] Can we even evoke it as a straightforward reality, when it originated as a post-hoc ideological construct,[2] one meant moreover to discredit not only the violence and repression of 1793-1794, but also its democratic and social experimentation?[3] Might the continued usage of the chrononym “Terror” obscure more than it explains, reifying, among other myths, that of the French Revolution’s exceptionality?[4]
