Abstracts

Panel 1: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Day 1)

Chair: Steve Pincus (Yale)

Alexandre Dupont, Institut d’Etudes Politiques Aix-en-Provence (France), “Popular Royalism in the Pyrenees and its Paradoxes”

This paper deals with the political practices of the Pyrenean populations and more precisely with the popular royalism embodied, in the Basque provinces and Catalonia, by carlism, and also with the cross-border political solidarity developed with them by the French Pyrenean populations. The aim is to take this political culture seriously and to point two paradoxes that help to undestand the particular nature of popular royalism in the Pyrenees. At the same time, it is also important to show how this particular royalism fit into a larger political culture thanks to the presence of go-between who link it to the royalism of the social elites. From one hand, popular royalism in the Pyrenees is characterized by a growing implication of the people. It constitutes a general movement in a political culture which rejects commitment during the 19th century. This implication leads to the emergence of singular political practices and sociabilities which reflect the modernity as well as the idiosyncrasies of the counterrevolution. From the other hand, in the Pyrenees, one can observe the instrumentalization of royalism by the players : more than a deep conviction, royalism seems to be a political instrument for the Pyrenean populations. The support of Basque and Catalan people to don Carlos would be a mean of pressure to preserve their traditional socioeconomic world, more than a defence of the Ancien Régime.

Doris Garraway, Northwestern University (USA), “Legitimating Monarchy in an Abolitionist State: The Case of Henry Christophe in Haiti”

In this presentation, I examine the problem of monarchy in postrevolutionary Haiti both from the standpoint of its historical conditions of possibility in colonial slavery and radical antislavery revolution, and from the perspective of the strategies of legitimation whereby this monarchy sought to appeal to its elite and popular constituencies. Moving away from interpretations of the Haitian Revolution as the realization of Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality, I consider the fundamental differences between the Haitian Revolution and its contemporaries in the age of Revolution, focusing in particular on the specificity of the social contract that emerged, largely implicitly, in order to justify the authoritarian, royalist, and neofeudalist state. This authoritarianism, already present in the earliest articulation of revolutionary emancipationism by figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and constitutive of the 1801 and 1805 constitutions, culminated in the establishment of a hereditary monarchy and an accompanying neo-feudal social order in the regime of Henry Christophe, between 1811 and 1820. If Christophe’s regime represented an exclusive political order in which ordinary ex-slaves would have little, if any, say in government, and the colonial plantation order was translated into a hybrid model of state-controlled proto-capitalist lordship, this new regime was presented as a vehicle for the elevation and “regeneration” of the social body through a massive program of cultural, educational, and moral reform. I argue that this project, while paradoxical, drew on an alternative and potentially more radical understanding of liberty and equality as compared to its French and American counterparts. I therefore set out to distill, from the constitutional history and textual remains of the kingdom, the legal, symbolic, and material means by which the monarchy forged a novel theory of social contract tailored to the demands of what I can an “abolitionist state.”

Aurélien Lignereux, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Grenoble (France), “The Royalist Insurgency of Spring 1815: A European Perspective”

In contrast to the first war of Vendée (1793-1795) – early internationally recognized as the reference for counterrevolutionary movement -, the later insurgencies are regarded as some low-intensity and closely localized aftershocks ; hence the small place that the royalist uprising of spring 1815 occupies on the historiography, except in a narrow regional bibliography. At the most, such an approach emphasizes the dependence on the Great-Britain but it ignores the scope attributed to the revolt at that time. Certainly, the hopes or the fears of a movement soon spread to the whole of Atlantic French seaboard are quickly dashed : the rebel territory was contained within the former Military Vendée and some Chouan countries. Should we limit the understanding of this so called fourth war of Vendée to the meaning dictated by the three previous conflicts in this area ? Yet that would be to ignore the following evidence in favour of a further dimension :

on the one hand, the various forms of protest observables in the Western departments during the whole Napoleonic Era are similar to those that exist within the annexed European territories ; this would confirm a core-periphery pattern of the French imperial space (Michael Broers).
on the other hand, the army officers sent to end the insurrection of 1815 are often Spanish veterans : in spite of the Vendean or Chouan prism, they have a broader-based approach of this type of conflict.
at last, failing a convincing parallel in terms of warfare practices, all a stereotypical imagery like to compare the Vendéens or the Chouans with the Spanish people.

Thus, the royalist insurgency of spring 1815 should be put into international perspective but, twenty-five years after the bicentenary of the French Revolution, our conference provides also an opportunity to update an important historiographical debate on the nature of the first vendean war, between counter-revolution (as ideological rejection) and anti-revolution (as refusal of institutional and daily innovation). Did the insurgents of 1815 fight by counter-liberalism or by anti-liberalism ? Such questioning leads to study the regional dissidence from 1814 until 1817, beyond the Hundred Days, in order to analyze the popular and nobles’ criticisms of the Chart.