How are revolutionaries made? For much of the twentieth century, and within the context of eighteenth-century France, two answers to this question predominated. Marxist historians pointed to social and economic conditions and heralded French artisans and workers (the famous sans-culottes) as the source of revolutionary energy. Revisionist historians highlighted the influence of ideas and politics and focused on the careers of those at the center of official revolutionary politics. Yet as historians have continued to expand their view of who participated in the revolution and how, they have uncovered a variety of pathways to revolutionary action. From culture to global economics, the sources of revolution have expanded to meet the wide array of historical actors engaged in the politics and performance of revolution in late eighteenth-century France.

This panel seeks to interrogate the provenance of revolutionary activity through a variety of lenses. In the first of three papers, Dr. Corinne Gressang investigates an oft-overlooked group in French revolutionary history: Catholic nuns. Many nuns did not, in fact, turn against the revolution. Rather, as Gressang shows, they turned toward it and welcomed the reforms that the National Assembly brought to the church. Through an analysis of letters written by ex-nuns and active religious orders to the National Assembly, Gressang explores the ways that religion and gender impacted commitments to revolutionary change. Dr. Jeffrey Ryan Harris focuses his paper on the famed abbé de Sieyès to argue that Sieyès's anti-royalism was as crucial to the development of the Left as his anti-aristocracy, for which his pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? is best known. Harris reveals that Sieyès’s notion of the “general will” was one among many competing visions of the “general will” all of which were vying for acceptance in the early years of the revolution. In displaying Sieyès’s impact on the extreme Left in the Estates General and National Assembly, Harris complicates the simple narrative of a singular Enlightenment’s formative role in revolutionary ideology. Finally, Dr. Daniel J. Watkins tells the unlikely story of Joseph-Antoine Cerutti, a one-time Jesuit priest turned ardent revolutionary. Cerutti abandoned the reactionary politics of many of his confreres and embraced calls for change, particularly as they applied to life in provincial France. Instead of minimizing the role of Cerutti’s Jesuit early formation, however, Watkins’s analysis of Cerutti’s writings draws attention to the ways that Jesuit theology and intellectual culture formed the bedrock of Cerutti’s revolutionary politics. Dr. Claire Cage, associate professor of history at the University of South Alabama, will serve as chair for the session, and audience Q&A will function en lieu of a formal comment.