Understanding Pure Blood: Logics of Violence in French Revolutionary Historiography

A thesis examining structural, ideological, and circumstantial historiographical views of the French Revolution. This paper advances three primary arguments. First, the most defining rift between historians over their understanding of violence during the Revolution is a disagreement whether the counterrevolution truly posed a threat to the legacy of the Revolution after 1789. Second, attempts to explain the violence of the Revolution on rhetorical and ideological grounds have fallen victim to retrospectively creating a Terror that was not present in 1789. Third, that ideologically minded historians, despite their opposition to Marxist thinking, functionally substituted ideology for the Marxist use of class, thus falling prey to a determinist way of thinking from which a small group of historians only broke away in recent years.