The French Revolution and the Sacred

In the years leading up to the bicentenary commemorations of 1989, a new liberal interpretation of the French Revolution challenged a long-lived socialist one. In contrast to the Marxist view of a “bourgeois revolution” with popular support, the liberal historiography has recurrently emphasized the role of “revolutionary ideology” and the “collective mentality” which led to the episode of the “Terror”. We might take the end of Cold War binary frameworks as an opportunity to move beyond this long-lasting interpretive divide, and to reinvestigate how the Revolution transformed ideas of the sacred and has itself been sacralized.