Gregory S. Brown | The Coming of the French Revolution in Multi-Media | The History Teacher, 34.2

The Coming of the French Revolution in Multi-Media

Gregory S. Brown
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

FRENCH REVOLUTION HISTORIANS have made use of computers in their work since long before the advent of the internet. In the 1960s, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie promoted computer-assisted quantitative methods,¹ and in the 1980s Keith Baker helped pioneer the use of electronic and interactive technologies in intellectual history, with the ARTFL database.² Building on these precedents, French Revolutionary history in the year 2000 enters the age of digital multi-media, with Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, a pedagogical package of a CD-ROM, web site and workbook, edited by Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt.³

As co-associate editor, with Jeff Horn, of this project, I had the opportunity to contribute to its conceptualization and development and to use prototypes in teaching the French Revolution between 1997 and 1999. In this capacity, I read widely in scholarship on multi-media authorship, on multi-media historiography, and on teaching with electronic resources, which I tried always to integrate with knowledge drawn from recent scholarship in print media on the Old Regime and French Revolution. I intend in this paper to mobilize what I have learned to reflect on the role of the historian--as scholar, teacher, and public figure--as the field enters a digital, multi-media and interactive environment. By discussing the first development of our package, then its use in teaching, and finally other web sites on the French Revolution, I shall argue that multi-media continues and enhances, rather than changes, the work we as historians do..

I. Revolutionists venture out on the Multi-Media Frontier

The most immediate problems raised by working in multi-media are, evidently, the need for original sources in a variety of media (i.e., texts, images, and sound) and for the technical expertise and legal authorization to digitize them and then publish them economically, in an easily readable format, to a wide audience. From their earliest conception of this project in 1994, the editors (Censer and Hunt) and producers (Roy Rosenzweig, Stephen Brier, and Josh Brown) negotiated these issues by bringing together two very different and unrelated institutions: the Museum of the French Revolution (MFR) in Vizille, France, and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. In late 1995, the MFR's then-director, art historian Phillip Bordes, granted permission to reproduce digitally a body of valuable sources--300 images in the form of portraits, engravings, and artifacts of material culture, which were selected and digitized the following summer. Thus began the long and arduous process of developing the content, which I shall address in greater detail below. At the same time, they drew on the technical and legal expertise that Rosenzweig, director of the CHNM, had developed through previous work with Brier and Brown, of the American Social History Project (ASHP), on the multi-media, CD-ROM version of Who Built America?⁴ This group then obtained significant grant support⁵ and assembled an editorial team, which began work in summer 1997.⁶

From the outset, we knew that for our use of multi-media, digital and interactive technologies to enhance the scholarly and pedagogical value of our work, we needed to think not only about feasibility but also function--not only what the technology could do but why it should be done. Moreover, given our limited time and resources, we knew that to work collaboratively, we had to share a common vision of what would be our pedagogical priorities. Totally new to such work myself and seeking some guidance, I found it useful to consult journalist Fred Moody's account of how Microsoft's Multi-Media Publications division produced a pedagogical title for school-age children.⁷ I learned about how "professionals" develop an educational CD-ROM, especially the constant tension between "design" (content) and "development" (programming). I quickly learned that we, as historians, would have our own distinct tensions. We would also have about one-hundredth of Microsoft's budget and less than one fourth of its manpower--which of course is made up of full-time multi-media professionals, rather than overcommitted and untrained (in this medium) academics! But this turns out, I would argue, to have been our greatest asset: as historians, we are used to dealing with the sorts of dialectics between source and problem, between pedagogy and student interest, which baffled Microsoft's professionals. Historians, we learned, are by training and instinct well prepared conceptually to work in this environment, and history as a discipline is well suited to benefit from it.

Therefore, in what follows, I shall use our project and the field of the French Revolution to argue a more general point--that digital, interactive and multi-media technologies allow historians to pursue three objectives that have become predominant concerns within the discipline in the past decade: first, a methodological concern with representation, which has led cultural historians in particular to draw on a varied source base to study varieties of individual experience;⁸ second, the concern of history teachers to emphasize skills of historical thinking, by having students work with primary and secondary sources, to identify relevant information, interpret it and communicate it;⁹ and third; an anxiety about how our various audiences--fellow scholars, students, and lay public--appropriate history.¹⁰ To illustrate these points, I'll discuss how the development of our multi-media exploration of the French Revolution emerged from and, we hope, advances these objectives.

II. Representing the Revolutionary Experience

To take first the issue of representation, I'll address three types of problems central to the way historians represent the past--selecting and reproducing sources, contextualizing and interpreting those sources, and constructing narratives. To do so, I'll take examples from three different media--songs, images and texts.

1. Songs: A Book with a Sound Track

The decision to include songs had been made as part of the original conceptualization, as an outgrowth of both the capabilities of multi-media and developments in scholarship concerned with oral culture and popular culture. The most important work in this vein, Laura Mason's Singing the French Revolution, opens with the wish that "were it possible to endow books with soundtracks, this one might begin with a simple, unaccompanied performance of the Marseillaise." Professor Mason's wish (and historical expertise) combined with multi-media technology enabled us to capture not only the words and music of revolutionary songs but the aural element of Revolutionary song culture. We could illustrate to readers the difference between (what she calls) "a twentieth-century conception of revolutionary singing" (such as Jessye Norman's version of "La Marseillaise") and that of the 1790s "sung, in a coarse, full throated voice."¹¹

So, she and I spent an afternoon at the Phonotèque at the Department of Music of the Bibliothèque Nationale, listening to several dozen recordings of Revolutionary songs. We were ultimately able to identify several recordings that satisfied our historical and pedagogical concerns; presumably we had our sources. But since we wanted to reproduce rather than interpret these sources, we had to deal with a variety of difficulties concerning digital reproduction and permissions which eventually became insurmountable. In the end, the decision was made to record the songs digitally ourselves, by finding performers (eventually, the Texas Tech choir and James H. Johnson) who would be both historically sensitive and available for recording. The resulting songs are not, in effect, "originals," since we created and recorded them rather than digitizing period documents; yet, the songs we recorded are more historically appropriate--and engaging for students or lay readers--than mere transcriptions of lyrics and music.

2. Images: Visual Culture and the Question of Medium

In an insightful essay on history in the electronic age, David Staley has observed that "the electronic environment emphasizes visual skill and associative thought as opposed to written skill and linear thought."¹² This change in emphasis, I would argue, has been anticipated by recent developments in French Revolutionary art and cultural historiography, which has explored what Ronald Paulson has called the "reservoir of images" that the Revolutionaries generated by appropriating from classical as well as contemporary sources and modifying visual commonplaces to suit their specific social and political needs as they tried to understand and control the events taking place around them. Revolutionary visual culture, we have learned from this scholarship, is best understood not as merely illustrations of ideas more coherently expressed verbally, but as an iconic vocabulary with its own grammar and structure of meaningful references.¹³

In this sense, the move into multi-media and digital publication by Hunt and Bordes might be understood not as a departure from their past scholarly work because they changed the medium but a natural continuation of their thematic concern with Revolutionary visual culture.¹⁴ Work on political cartoons (by among others Antoine de Baecque) and on political iconography (by Louis Marin) informed our choices in selecting, reproducing and introducing images, such as image essays on the members of the royal family.¹⁵ As with the songs, an aspect of the Revolutionary experience already much under discussion by historians can now be reproduced--and reinterpreted--through multi-media.¹⁶

The technical feasability of reproducing images digitally however only led us to confront a more challenging pedagogical problem--how to frame the students' viewing to facilitate a properly historical encounter? American college students generally can be expected to come to the topic with even less previous exposure to eighteenth-century visual culture than to the narrative of the Revolution, so we would have to not only place these images in social or political but also in art historical context. To do so, the art historian Bordes contributed a short introductory lesson, "How to Read Images," on eighteenth-century iconography--as a voice-and-image QuickTime movie on the CD-ROM and as text on the web site.

Moreover, we knew from recent scholarship on Revolutionary visual culture that we had to emphasize not only the visual vocabulary but also the original medium by emphasizing how much of it appeared as prints and engravings. Rolf Reichardt estimates that over 6000 broadside prints were produced during the Revolutionary decade,¹⁷ and approximately three fourths of the images in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity are reproductions of prints. These images range from neo-classical visual motifs depicting contemporary events to satyrical cartoons.¹⁸ Moreover, the medium of prints as produced in the eighteenth-century--engraved in wood, then printed on presses (in runs that could go as high as 1000) and sometimes hand-colored or aquatinted--raise difficult cataloguing questions. The same engraving often varies from copy to copy, depending on such factors as the paper, the coloring, or the aquatinting of a particular copy. These issues--long a problem for librarians and curators--are at the center of debates currently taking place about digitization of historical artifacts: should digitization emphasize preservation of rare materials or broad access? Should all items in a collection, the rarest, or the best-known be digitalized? If multiple copies exist, which ones should be digitized? Should all digital images be generated in the same format and at the same resolution, regardless of differences in original medium or content?¹⁹

Although ours was not a project in digital preservation, we confronted these and related questions. For instance, given the combination of image and text characteristic of eighteenth-century prints, how could we best display what were created as folio-sized posters, with fine visual details and often text-heavy cartoons, on a computer screen?²⁰ These questions had to have been addressed in other digitization projects concerning Revolutionary prints, notably a virtual exhibit of anti-Napoleonic caricatures, by the Musée Malmaison.²¹

3. Texts: A Multiplicity of Narratives

Hypertext theorists discuss web documents in terms of associations, emphasizing those made by the reader²²--a point which, of course, develops directly out of work in which our field has taken the lead in developing a "history of reading." Inspired by work of Michel de Certeau, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton and many others we have learned to look at reading the appropriation of a text and the generation of meaning from it.²³ This point is made concretely evident in the 1500 pages of translated, edited, and introduced texts that can be read in an infinite variety of combinations. Let us look for instance at the taking of the Bastille. Hans Lusebrink and Rolf Reichardt's recently translated volume, The Bastille: History of a Symbol, explores the premise that "The symbolic significance of the storming of the Bastille is not exclusively located in the historical event itself...it lies...mainly in the...collective perception of contemporaries...the multiplicitous...contemporary patterns of collective perception"²⁴ Yet their book, as does any scholarly work, publishes not the sources but the conclusions reached (in the form of a series of charts analyzing different contemporary accounts of July 14^th). Through electronic technology we can guide the reader--student, scholar or lay--through various narratives and not only allow them to reach their own interpretation but to highlight the very process of interpretation that lies at the heart of what we as historians do when researching and teaching.²⁵

III. Teaching the Revolution in Multi-Media

Not only, therefore, does an electronic, multi-media environment continue developments already present in historiography, it also leads us to integrate these scholarly developments into our teaching. Most evidently, the technology makes available songs, texts and images for use in a classroom. More important, however, it allows us to put students in the position of the practicing historian--reading primary sources and trying to interpret them in light of an already existing body of interpretation.²⁶ In this sense, the archive can be brought to the students--whether individually or collaboratively. I did this by using a web-based demo of our project in teaching the French Revolution (once at GMU and twice at UNLV).²⁷ My experience was consistent with the findings of scholarship on using interactivity in teaching history, that the frequency of student contact with me outside the classroom was markedly higher than in courses in which I did not use such technology.²⁸ At an "urban university" (commuter school) such as UNLV, where office hours are not part of the student culture, this already represents a significant outcome. At the present time, however, much of the interaction was initially of very low quality--several students each semester e-mail me to tell me they appreciate having a web component to the course or to express interest or frustration or request clarification of how to use the materials on the Web. So the goal becomes to use that additional contact to encourage the students to think more about the material by integrating multi-media components and interactivity directly into the syllabus and class assignments. In a student assignment, the topics are linked directly to the relevant primary and secondary sources. Since hypertext is a literal form of "intertextuality," it allows us to guide students more directly in weaving together sources and creating their own analyses.

It is better, of course, to promote debate among the students, and by introducing interactivity through the internet, we can hope to more closely focus this debate on available documents. By using Web Crossing discussion software on a GMU server (WebCT has since become more common at many universities, including UNLV), I broke the class into three discussion groups and assigned each student to post twice weekly--once in response to my study question and again in response to another student.²⁹ This both extends the time available for class discussion and provides greater structure to in-class discussions. By allowing the students to continue to post topics to discussion over the course of the term, they can continue to debate questions as they learn more about subsequent developments. Posting documents and subjects for asynchronous discussion on the Web removes the physical and temporal restrictions imposed by the classroom and class schedule, offering the possibility of opening the discussion more broadly. In the fall 1998 semester, Professor Jeff Ravel of MIT and I combined our two courses on the French Revolution into a single discussion for one week, on the trial of the King. We both lectured on the topic and assigned the same sets of documents from the project demo and distributed (in class and via course web sites and e-mail) the study questions. We found that this can generate detailed and sophisticated debate among the better students and also encourage participation by those students who would not ordinarily speak in class, due to shyness and/or lack of preparation.³⁰

In general, I have found the combination of readily available documents and asynchronous discussion particularly valuable in preparing the students for a more in-depth classroom discussion by posing study questions that inform their reading and structure their own questions or comments offered in the classroom. From this (albeit limited) experience, I would argue that even an off-base or uninformed comment, when offered prior to the class meeting on the discussion list, can provide an opportunity in the classroom for the instructor to reinforce (rather than be detracted from) key points of the lesson plan.³¹

IV. The Revolution and its Publics

A final area in which theorists of history and multi-media have discussed the changing role of the historian as scholar and teacher is in relation to non-academic publics. As the French Revolution enters cyberspace, its historians are brought directly into contact with the lay public, which has actually to date generated more of the material on the French Revolution available on the Web than have academic historians. Most immediately, we encounter the public through requests for information. In response to my course web site and our project's web site, I have received dozens of e-mail requests, of which the following is typical in its directness and its unwitting difficulty:

I'm doing a short paper on the primary cause of the French Revolution....

And actually I don't even understand what the French Revolution was....

Could you explain to me what it was and maybe even...what you think the primary cause was.³²

This is actually one of the more specific and polite requests for information I've received--not counting invitations to join various revolutionary parties! By representing the French Revolution in multi-media and on the Web, we academic historians engage not only with each other and our students (my intended audience, for instance, in creating the course site), but with a community who comes to us from other web sites. Because this community has different standards of discourse and interpretation, interaction with it forces us to address different questions than those we are used to discussing. Anyone coming to the CHNM site (or my or anyone's course site) might be coming from a background informed by such varied resources as: a home-school web site; any number of junior-high or high-school class projects; the Foundation for Economic Information's appropriation of the Revolution in a polemic against "economic...radicalism;" or various lay representations of the Revolution, focusing on particular elements in isolation, such as sites devoted to the guillotine or to Charlotte Corday.³³ This means that people may write to us with queries we would ordinarily consider ill-informed, tendentious or otherwise unworthy of response. However, we as historians may find that by replying to such queries (and also posing our own queries to authors of lay sites), we become engaged with a non-scholarly but interested public.

One lay site worth considering in this light is "The French Revolution Home Page," created by a high school student in Seattle named Peder Larson as a 1995 History Day project.³⁴ It has generated (according to its own counter) nearly 500,000 site hits since June 1996. The site includes significant documents, such as translations of "Declarations of Rights of Man and Citizen" and Gouges's "Declarations of Rights of Woman and Female Citizen" but without citations or commentary. We included both these texts in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and spent a great deal of time sourcing, editing, and annotating--ordinary editorial work for an historian, yet irrelevant to Larson (and presumably his readers). Larson's site also includes his own essay on the king's trial, to which he has also posted responses ostensibly sent via an e-mail discussion group. I was gratified to see that this unmoderated bulletin board had strayed even further from the sources and the topic at hand than had my own students' discussion of this same topic!

A better example would be the lay discussion list initiated by Suzanna Betzel, which had seventy-five members, who have generated nearly 350 postings, between its debut in October 1998 and the end of December 1999.³⁵ This unmoderated discussion runs off a commercial web site, where it describes itself as "open to enthusiastic amateurs, professional scholars, students who want to learn more about the period...." This list has generated a highly civil and well-informed "public" discussion among academics, students, book sellers, and lay readers. While it is perhaps self-evident to conclude that web sites on the French Revolution--like general-interest television programs, films or books--can encourage greater public interest in the topic, I am arguing that the internet draws in both a broader public (while admittedly still very self-selecting), and as distinct from television, film or general-interest biographies, encourages interactve response and participation of that public in constructing the topic. Since these are of course our own goals as scholars and teachers in the field, I would encourage other academics and teachers to get involved in such lay discussion lists to supplement our already active participation in such "professional" lists as H-France.³⁶

The point I am making, then, is to suggest, as has Robert Rosenstone in his work on film and history,³⁷ that the Web in various ways foregrounds the process of representation in writing, teaching, and discussing history. I find that a salutary development, and I would suggest that the field of the Revolution, because the distinct nature of its source base, of its community of scholars, and of its prominence in public conceptions of world history, ought to be one of the privileged sites for this kind of thinking about the representation of history through multi-media. It should, I would argue, become a central concern of all French Revolutionists, because it is a natural extension of the work we have already been doing in our scholarship and teaching.

V. Conclusions: Plus ça change...

To conclude, I'd like to suggest that as the French Revolution comes into multi-media, our work as academic historians will evolve, but along lines in which it had already been moving. As educators and scholars, we know that no amount of technical wizardry can make dull material interesting to students, readers or other historians--but of course we have in this field great material to work with and highly motivated scholars, students and lay readers. What makes not only this project but also the use of multi-media in teaching and writing the French Revolution worthwhile, I submit, are the possibilities not so much for change but for continuity--a continuation of the richness and sophistication that has set French Revolution historiography off as a privileged topic within the discipline.

From my work on this project and my use of it in teaching the French Revolution, I can confirm what multi-media theorists tell us, that good information design is crucial, because it is even more difficult to get students to read text off a computer screen than from a book. Moreover, there are any number of other resources to which a teacher, student, lay reader or scholar can turn for compelling documents, accounts and interpretations of the Revolution. So why then should the French Revolution be explored in multi-media? I've tried to suggest that the coming of the French Revolution into "cyberspace" enables us, as professional specialists, to continue developments in research and pedagogy we had already been pursuing--and to communicate that work more effectively and more directly to each other, our students and an interested, and perhaps--due to our work in multi-media--growing lay public.

Appendix

These 3 figures illustrate the variety of engravings and other images we dealt with in preparing the CD-ROM and web site. Figures A and B are described in note 18; Figure C is described in note 20.

Figure A: Engraving of the overthrow of the monarch, 10 August 1792.

Figure B: Engraving of the Queen carrying the royal family on her hips from the Tuileries palace to presumed safety, as royalists below comment.

Figure C: Engraving caricaturing the forces of counter-revolution, including a textual key to identify key figures.

Links to sites referred to in the article

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity website (at the Center for History and New Media):
<http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution>

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity description and online demo (at Penn State University Press):
<http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02087-3.html>

American Social History Project: <http://www.ashp.cuny.edu>
2nd
NightKitchen TK3 Multi-Media Authoring Tool: <http://www.nightkitchen.com>

National Standards for History in the Schools: <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/nchs/standards>

The Cost of Digital Image Distribution: <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon>

Library of Congress “Preservation Digital Reformatting Program”
<http://lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/prd/presdig/presintro.html>

Links to other sites on Era of the French Revolution mentioned in the article

Project for American Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL): <http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html>

Musée Malmaison on-line exhibit: Anti-Napoléan
<http://www.napoleon.org/us/us_mu/expos/caricatures/car-principal.html>

George McKee, “The Image of France” database:
<http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/mckee>

Lars Pederson, “The French Revolution Homepage”
<http://members.aol.com/agentmess/frenchrev>

“Yahoo! French Revolution Discussion Group”
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FrenchRev>

My course sites

UNLV History 462: Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon
<http://www.unlv.edu/faculty/gbrown/hist462>

<http://www.unlv.edu/faculty/gbrown/hist462/links.html>

More French Revolution Sites

compiled by Gregory S. Brown
with assistance from Eric Nystrom and Daniel Bubb

http://www.csv.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/History/teaching/french-rev/index.html

"Teaching Resources on French Revolution, 1787-1799": A course site that includes a paper by Prof. Gwynne Lewis arguing that "the ordinary Frenchman - and Frenchwoman - who had been virtually excluded from politics during the Old Regime, did not 'go home' in 1793, but that they provided the essential dynamic behind the political and social upheavals of the Revolution throughout the 1790s", in response to Michelet. Includes a chronology of the Revolution in HTML table form. Under "Course Bibliography" is a combined syllabus/bibliography of print resources, broken down into categories. Even without full bibliographic information, this is a useful resource. The most original and valuable contribution of this is its comprehensive glossary of terms commonly encountered while studying the French Revolution.

http://www.fsu.edu/~napoleon/

"Institute on Napoleon": Home of Florida State University's "Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution", headed by Dr. Donald Horward. Contains information for the prospective grad student about the INFR. The site makes is not intended for the casual researcher, and refers him or her to the large collection of Napoleonic era website links. The page also hosts the site for the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, which is also organized out of FSU. The most useful portion of the page is the unannotated list of Napoleonic Links.

http://history.hanover.edu/modern/frenchrv.htm

Historical Texts: The French Revolution. A collection of links to primary documents from the French Revolution. All are properly attributed. Site design is sparse, with few images, which makes it quick to load. Also includes an essay and two bibliographies. A good site for undergraduate research.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook13.html

Internet Modern History Sourcebook: French Revolution - offering original content and links. Structured in outline form, this site offers a collection of online primary sources for each stage of the revolution, as well as a few "high quality" web sites with each period. The outline tree structure of the site makes it easy to navigate and quick to load. The site uses a few small graphics to spruce up the look a bit without making the site gaudy or slow to load. Content spans from pre-Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars. A good resource for advanced secondary students and undergraduates. (Part of a larger Internet Modern History Sourcebook project.)

http://otal.umd.edu/~fraistat/romrev/frbib.html

A well organized scholarly site put together to give resources for the French Revolution for a college class. Includes short bibliographies for general works regarding the French Revolution in both electronic and "letterpress" form.

http://userwww.port.ac.uk/andressd/homepage.htm

This site, the homepage of historian Dave Andress at Portsmouth University in Britain, contains an online summary of projects, including lists and descriptions of books authored, articles written, and papers presented, as well as a collection of French Revolution links. Academic papers the author has presented are available. Andress's work is concerned extensively with the lower classes and sans-culottes.

http://www.navigo.com/wm/paint/theme/revolution.france.html

Paintings, painters, and art movements regarding Revolution and restoration (1740-1860), covering French Classicism, French Romanticism, and French Realism. The site has a good introductory essay about each genre, and lists several representative artists of that movement. Several of the artists of each period have additional bibliographic essays available, including images of their work. Well written, includes source references. Far short of comprehensive, but the information that is present is of high quality. The site has not been updated since 1995.

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/mckee

"The Image of France": An "index of the record of prints authorized for public distribution,1811-1830" Some of it is obviously post-revolution. Complete through 1831, and evidently an ongoing project. The "listings are transcribed from notices printed in the Bibliographie de la France". No images are actually included here, only metadata. This site is of use primarily to researchers investigating French visual culture during the later Napoleonic Empire and the Restoration.

http://eee.uci.edu/programs/slideguide/FrenchRevolution/

Images of the French Revolution. This site contains approximately 60 very good quality images of the French Revolution. The images are organized thematically. No textual context is provided. Thumbnails are loaded, and one can click on the image for a larger version. This site would be useful to someone wishing to illustrate a presentation or project about the French Revolution.

http://www.Columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/courses/parismaps

A site is maintained by Prof. Barry Bergdoll at Columbia University, it consists of of 100 high resolution images of maps of Paris, from 1716 to 1887. This site would be useful to anyone who wants to get a feel of the physical layout of Paris (maps are included for 1789, 1802, 1807, 1811, 1812, 1814, 1815, 1821) during the Revolution or at other times. The images are large, however, and take a long time to load on anything slower than a T1 connection.

http://www.napoleon.org/us/us_mu/expos/caricatures/car-principal.html

A well researched, documented, referenced, scholarly site on cartoons about Napoleon. Originally authored for a museum and on-line exhibit by Jérémie Benoit, the site is presented by Malmaison Museum and the Fondation Napoléon. The site includes a bibliography, a brief introduction, and two essays on the caricatures of Napoleon as social criticism. An excellent site overall.

http://barkov.uchicago.edu/mark/projects/theatre

"The Parisian Stage and the French Revolution:" This site contains a searchable database of all of the plays performed in Paris from 1789 to 1799. The database contains 90,744 performances, and is searchable by date of performance, author(s) and composer(s), title, theatre, genre, number of acts, year of publication, and date of first performance. A paper book has been published [Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James McGregor, and Mark Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audience in Revolutionary Paris. Analysis and Repertory, (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1996)] which describes sources used in the database, methodologies, summaries, top performances, and the like. The access to this database is restricted; a potential searcher must first email the database administrator for the password to access the search engine, though this restriction is for scholarly rather than commercial reasons. This site is an excellent resource for any serious scholar interested in Parisian theatre.

http://www.history.sfasu.edu/history/WCOut6A.html

A very detailed outline of the French Revolution. Would be useful as a teaching resource for collegiate level (like a western civ class). At the conclusion, places French Revolution in context of the development of Western civilization. Poorly designed --one 83K monolithic file, with no hyperlinks or anchors. The text is too closely alligned, with little white space, rendering the site difficult to read.

http://www.txdirect.net/users/rrichard/napoleo1.htm

"France during Revolution and under Bonaparte: An Annotated Chronology of Civil and Military Events." This site seems to live up to its promise - a good chronology of the French Revolution, forcusing heavily on Napoleon. Includes some footnotes, though many seem to be repetitive. The chronology begins in 1763, with the birth of Josephine, and ends in 1940, when Adolf Hitler moves the remains of Napoleon II to reside in Les Invalides in Paris next to Bonaparte. Visually unappealing, the page is long and bare of graphics. The timeline is dated 1997, and the site does not appear to have been updated since then.

http://www3.hmc.edu/~brdavis/courses/anarchy/revolution/

A partial transcription (in English) of P. A. Kropotkin's The Great French Revolution (1909). It appears to be a work in progress - approximately 10% of chapters are complete.

http://www.woodberry.org/acad/hist/FRWEB/index.htm

Created and produced by high school students for other students and their teachers, the aim of the site, in the words of the authors, is to "provide something on the web that was substantive, attractive, and useful." This is a comprehensive site designed for students to "view and learn different aspects of the moderate phase of the French Revolution (1789-1793)". High-density images make it rather slow to load. Sources are cited in footnotes.

http://www.woodberry.org/acad/hist/Vendeewww/Finished-Pages/homepage.htm

The Vendee Insurrection during the French Revolution. Written by the same "Woodberry Forest School" group that created the French Revolution site above. The site is a fairly comprehensive look at the Vendee Insurrection, geared toward high school or beginning undergraduate students. Site includes images and text, and sources are cited. Site layout is not difficult to navigate.

http://www.geocities.com/broadwaysfuture/

A site dedicated to the musical version of A Tale of Two Cities. No useful information located here. Much of the site is incomplete or under construction. Interesting as a reflection of popular response to the Revolution.

http://www.self-gov.org/freeman/8908pete.htm

An article from The Freeman, an online libertarian magazine, which compares and contrasts the French Revolution and the American Revolution. An interesting exercise in the uses of the Revolution. The essay itself is reasonably well-written, if pretty right-of-center. Sources are documented at the end of the piece (mostly secondary works are cited).

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Arc/8639/index.html

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION HISTORY - Behind The Rose of Versailles. The Rose of Versailles was a short-lived Japanese Anime series, evidently. The site contains information in the RoV series and a background history of the French Revolution. Not directly useful to scholars or teachers.

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/french/french.html

French Revolution - Robespierre, and the Legacy of the Reign of Terror. A first-person essay (plus several images, many quotes) from a clearly conservative point of view. The author sees the French Revolution in an entirely negative light, as giving birth to Stalin, etc. Focuses on the Terror and Napoleon. Not very useful to scholars.

http://olympus.athens.net/~hartman/essay13.htm

"All You Need to Know About the French Revolution" by Paul V. Hartman. A page and a half summary of the beginning of the French Revolution. Worth viewing for such literary gems as "In reality, Louis XVI was a harmless fuzzball". This site is of no use to scholars or teachers.

http://www.powerup.com.au/~rdale/rev.htm

"The French Revolution, By Caitlin" - a short overview site of the French Revolution. Information presented as a series of questions and answers. Gives three links for further information, and none of them work. Not useful for scholars or teachers.

http://hss.sd54.bc.ca/School/Pages/student/Humanities/hum9-Renata/class.htm

The work of a secondary school class on which are published student work on the French Revolution. Topics covered include most of the standard figures and events of the revolution. Limited content, but of interest particularly as an example of teaching high school history in new media.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5154/index.html

"Marie Antionette/Charlotte Corday": This site was created by four high school students in California for a history project. It includes biographies of Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday and a discussion about different paintings about them. The quality of the text reflects its high school authors. The visual aspects of the page vary. This site might be useful for high school teaching, as a model of student work.

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/wordswor29.html

This is simply Wordsworth's famous poem about the Revolution.

http://www.metaphor.dk/guillotine/Pages/Guillot.html

An extraordinarily complete site on the history of the guillotine, from the 1300s to the present. No references, though plenty of schadenfreude.

Notes

¹ Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "The Historian and the Computer," in The Territory of the Historian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 3-32. The most impressive recent research project in the field along these lines, Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), offers an interesting discussion of quantitative studies on the French Revolution since the 1950s (pp. 2-4) and then of the use of computers in content analysis (46-48, 75-77, 95-96).

² Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language, University of Chicago, http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html. Robert Morrisey and Marc Olsen have developed ARTFL into a broad-reaching, multi-media web site housing a variety of research and pedagogical resources on French literature, history and culture.

³ The package will be published in early 2001 by Penn State University Press. The package will include over 1500 pages' worth of edited, translated and annotated primary texts; nearly 400 full-color images; 10 songs; and six video presentations on key issues in teaching the Revolution. A full description is available at http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/revolution.

⁴ Steve Brier, Joshua Brown, and Roy Rosenzweig, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (New York: ASHP/Voyager Publications/Learn Technologies Interactive, 1993). (The ASHP's web site is http://www.ashp.cuny.edu.) On Liberty, Joshua Brown worked as Creative Director and Brier and Rosenzweig as Executive Producers. This production team brought not only expertise but access to a prototype of state-of-the-art authoring software, ToolKit 3 from Night Kitchen (www.nightkitchen.com), which obviated entirely the need for costly professional programming.

⁵ Major funding came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency; from the Florence Gould Foundation, a private foundation promoting French culture in the United States; and from George Mason University.

⁶ The content development team, based at the CHNM, included myself and Horn, joined by a far-flung assemblage of university professors, community college and secondary teachers, post-docs, graduate assistants, undergraduate interns, and paid staff. The necessity of assembling very large amounts of information, in a variety of formats and contexts, required such a large team, which in turn raised the problem of how its members could all have access to the latest information, simultaneously. In this sense, the move into multi-media raises possibilities to develop another aspect of historians work that is somewhat distinct to early modern French studies, collaborative research, on French model of équipe.

⁷ Fred Moody, I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multi-Media Frontier (New York: Viking, 1995).

⁸ See for instance the reflections on "serial history using non-quantitative, heterogeneous sources," in Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 1-27.

⁹ National Council for History Standards, National Standards for World History, revised edition (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, 1996), chapter 2, begins with the statement that "true historical understanding requires students to engage in historical thinking: to raise questions and to marshal solid evidence in support of their answers; to go beyond the facts presented in their textbooks and examine the historical record for themselves; to consult documents, journals, diaries, artifacts, historic sites, works of art, quantitative data, and other evidence from the past, and to do so imaginatively--taking into account the historical context in which these records were created and comparing the multiple points of view of those on the scene at the time."

¹⁰ See for instance, Lynn Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994) and Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial : Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997).

¹¹ Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) 1-2.

¹² David J Staley, "From Writing to Associative Assemblages: 'History' in an Electronic Culture" in Dennis A. Trinkle, ed., Writing, Teaching and Researching History in the Electronic Age (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998) 3-13; quote on 4.

¹³ Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) p.2. See also Rolf Reichart, "Images of the Bastille," and James Leith, "Ephemera: Civic Education Through Images," in Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, eds., Revolution in Print 1775-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 223-251; 270-289.

¹⁴ Hunt, "The Imagery of Radicalism," in Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 87-119; Bordes, Le Serment du Jeu de paume de Jacques-Louis David : le peintre, son milieu et son temps, de 1789 à 1792 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1983; Bordes, La Mort de Brutus de Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (Vizille: Musée de la Révolution française: 1996).

¹⁵ de Baecque, La caricature révolutionnaire (Paris: CNRS, 1988); Marin, Portrait of the King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Other cultural historians who have used visual sources to offer novel interpretations of the treatment of the royal family include Annie Duprat, Le roi décapité : essai sur les imaginaires politiques (Paris: CERF, 1992) and Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen : The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette trans. Julie Rose (New York: Zone Boks, 1999).

¹⁶ To supplement the original 300 images from the Musée de la Révolution Française, Censer later selected and obtained permissions for another 150 images from the Andrew Dickson White Collection of the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of Cornell University Library, and I selected another three dozen from the Library of Congress, particularly on the topics of Napoleon and the Haitian Revolution.

¹⁷ Reichart, "Images of the Bastille," 224.

¹⁸ Figures A and B show two examples of Revolutionary prints; each depicts different outcomes for the royal family at the Tuileries palace. Figure A shows the overthrow of the royal family as a constitutional monarchy on 10 August 1792, and Figure B shows the family in flight from the palace to Varennes on 21 June 1791.

Figure A, engraved by Helman based on a drawing by Monnet, demonstrates classical composition and technique; such a romantic view of the event as a massive popular uprising greatly influenced how subsequent historians have interpreted this event. (This image appears courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Dickinson Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.) Figure B, entitled "Holy Family on her Hips," depicts a royalist fantasy of Marie Antoinette flying away from the palace, carrying her husband and children to safety in the provinces, as prominent former-nobles and defrocked high clergy comment. Drawing on a commonplace of early modern popular culture of the good witch--a woman possessed of supernatural powers she uses to save her family--this engraving is much more characteristic of Revolutionary-era prints in its basic (and anonymous) line drawing and unpracticed water coloring, although its motif is of course less characteristic of historians' interpretations of the flight to Varennes. (This image is reproduced from the Library of Congress, Department of Prints and Photographs, French Revolutionary Prints Collection, call number PC5-1791.2b.)

¹⁹ See for instance the discussion of such questions in Howard Besser and Robert Yamashita, The Cost of Digital Image Distribution: The Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution and Usage of Image Data (Berkeley, CA: School of Information Management & Systems, University of California, Berkeley, 1988), available on-line at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon. See also the Library of Congress's digitization policy guidelines, "Principles and Specifications for Preservation Digital Reformatiing," http://lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/prd/presdig/presintro.html.

²⁰ Figure C, for instance, "The Counter-Revolution," is reproduced from a folio-sized woodcut engraving featuring fine visual details and an extensive text key, all of which had to be rendered readable on a 640 x 480 pixel screen. (This image reproduced from the Library of Congress, Department of Prints and Photographs, French Revolutionary Prints Collection, call number PC5-1792.4b.)

²¹ See Jérémie Benoit, "Introduction," and "The Diffusion of Caricature," in "L'Anti-Napoléon," Musée Malmaison (Paris: Musée Malmaison, 1996), on-line on the Musée de la Fondation Napoléon (January 1998), www.napoleon.org/us/us_mu/expos/caricatures/car-principal.html.

Of related interest is the thinking behind "The Image of France," George McKee's on-line database of prints registered with the Restoration government, which includes entries for "all kinds of prints, not merely those judged to be admirable or collectible by institutional or other standards," yet which still had to address the problem of redundancy, since book illustrations were often reprinted as separate prints (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/mckee).

²² George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0 (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Jerome McGann, "The Rationale of HyperText," General Publications of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (06 May 1995), http://www.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html.

²³ De Certeau, "Reading as Poaching," in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 165-176; Chartier, "Popular Appropriation: Readers and their Books," in Forms and Meanings (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) 83-98; Darnton, "Reader Response," in Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996) 217-231.

²⁴ Lusebrink and Reichart, The Bastille: History of a Symbol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) 47-48.

²⁵ Chapter four of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity includes 8 different first-hand accounts and 10 images of the events of 14 July 1789. Other moments in which historians have discussed the multiplicity of contemporary narratives and which led us to include various texts in our project include the Damiens trial of 1759-1763, the October Days (5-6 October 1789), and the trial of the King (December 1792-January 1793).

²⁶ Timothy Messer-Kruse, "Participatory Historical Writing on the Net" in Trinkle, ed., 37-46.

²⁷ My course syllabus and other materials are on-line at http://www.unlv.edu/faculty/gbrown/hist462.

²⁸ For instance, Leslie Jarmon, "Showing and Telling: Developing CD-ROMs for the Classroom and Research," in Greg M. Smith, ed., On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMS and the Promises of a New Technology (New York: New York University Press, 1999) 239-260, esp 243.

²⁹ http://townhall.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/WebX?13@@.ee6b280. At UNLV, I used an e-mail list-serv, which had the advantage of requiring no instruction for the students. The efficacity of proprietary discussion software, such as WebCT, remains an issue of debate in the literature on teaching with electronic resources and among academic IT units.

³⁰ These findings support the arguments Censer put forth based on a similar experiment, in "Teaching Historiography and Methodology: the Electronic French Revolution," Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter 35: 1 (1997) 1, 6-8, 16.

³¹ For instance, one student posted to the discussion the following:

Since the monarchy was being supported by the Roman Catholic Church it was a far gone [sic] conclusion that the Monarch would suffer.... The Catholic Church was an organization on bending the Laws Of G-d...that oppressed and persecuted the masses [and] knowingly incorporated the philosophies of pagan religions. The reformation was the spirit of G-d separating themselves from a anti-Christ doctrine.... The King got what he deserved. And those who ally themselves to this organization will be judged accordingly. (Student e-mail posting, 16 October 1998; to list-serv: "History 462: The French Revolution.")

Whereas such a comment in the classroom might have thrown the discussion entirely off the topic, such an intervention in the on-line discussion became an opportunity for me to introduce in class the question of theological doctrine, along side political theory, in discussing the regicide.

³² Another example makes the point equally well, that students frequently look to the Web not only for information to interpret but for wholly formed "answers" to broad and misunderstood "questions" they have been "assigned" to study:

...I am doing a report on the French Revolution, and if anyone is out there and could help me out I would greatly appreciate it. I need to know What did the cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity-or Death" mean. That is the question. It's due tomorrow so hurry. Thanks for helping. (E-mail to author, 2 March 2000).

³³ The web site for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, to be housed at the CHNM, will include an annotated directory of links to French Revolution web sites. A preliminary list of such links may be consulted on my web site at http://www.unlv.edu/faculty/gbrown/hist462/links.html.

³⁴ http://members.aol.com/agentmess/frenchrev/index.html.

³⁵ http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/FrenchRev.

³⁶ http://www.uakron.edu/hfrance.

³⁷ Rosenstone, Robert A, Visions of the past : the challenge of film to our idea of history (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also the essays in Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning history : film and the construction of a new past (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1995).

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