A Brill Calendar: July 19

Few subjects of scholarly inquiry are as vast as the history of the French Revolution.

Even if reduced to a calendar of events with the Fall of the Bastille for starters and Bonaparte’s coronation as Emperor for an ending – a highly problematical, if not impossible restriction – the topic is boundless. There have been quite a few crucial developments with vital and irreversible consequences for the world happening in a time-scale shorter than one human generation; but none of them compares to the events and activities following July 14 1789.

The reason – or rather one reason – for this must be that the French Revolution created its own myth; and it is seldom that such a creation occurred in a civilization convinced of the importance of documenting the grandiose shift. Moreover, the topic is a contemporary of the budding of historiography as an academic discipline. Both grew up together, so to speak, and reached maturity only after Waterloo.

This growth in awareness is exemplified in the enormous oeuvre of Francois-Alphonse Aulard (Montbron, France July 19 1849 – Paris, October 23 1928) who was appointed to the new Parisian Chair of the History of the French Revolution in 1887, specializing in the ground-work of his ‘métier’. It is hardly possible to appreciate the immense intellectual effort needed by Aulard to undo the mythical fountainhead of stupendous change which became the French Revolution from thick layers of propaganda, lies and deceit.

The work earned Aulard great political prestige, also outside his scholarly discipline proper; including Presidency of the International Congress of the League of Nations, the short-lived predecessor of the United Nations, following World War I.