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So I just finished reading Claude Mossé's L'Antiquité dans la Révolution française, which will be a pretty good overview for my senior thesis. (It may seem like I'm insanely ahead on this, but actually, since I'll probably have to do most of my research next year when I'm in France, I'm actually - scarily enough - not.) At any rate, I thought Mossé's analysis was pretty solid. She especially got into some of the nuances and/or possible contradictions of Robespierre's views on Antiquity, and Sparta in particular, though of course one could probably go into a lot more depth on that aspect alone.
Only about 100 pages were on the Revolution itself, which I thought was both a shortcoming - in the sense that, considering the title, you wouldn't necessarily expect more than a third of the book to be, essentially, a drawn-out introduction - and an asset, because it allows Mossé to explain the points of Ancient History most referenced by the Revolutionaries to a general audience no longer likely to be familiar with them and to show how very Enlightenment figures had already made use of Greek and Roman references. I actually feel she could have done more with that last point, that maybe she could have discussed how much of the Revolutionaries' interpretations of Antiquity were direct and how much filtered through Rousseau, say, or Mably's interpretations. Not that that's a question that could be definitively answered, but it might be worth exploring.
Mossé repeatedly makes the assertion that most of the Revolutionaries knew Antiquity pretty much exclusively through Plutarch. It would be interesting to investigate the truth of this, since it seems to me that Plutarch, though clearly widely read, would have been one of the least likely candidates to be taught in schools, considering that most collèges had greatly de-emphasized Greek in the period when the Revolutionaries would have been in school. Which begs the question, if Plutarch was their only acquaintance with Antiquity, then what Latin texts were they reading in school? Since I'm currently researching a paper on collèges and universités in 18th century France, I can safely say that not much has been written about the curricula at most of these schools (Louis-le-Grand and the other collèges of the Université de Paris forming a notable exception), for one reason or another, and there would have been even less in 1989 when this book was published.
In any case, this book presents an excellent summary and has given me a lot of possible further leads for research, so I can't complain about it. Besides, it's refreshing to see a historian of Ancient Greece who can write intelligently about something so far removed from her subject as the Revolution. There are so many historians who are fine writing about anything but the Revolution, but then someone go haywire whenever they mention it. And that's even among 18th century French historians whose main focus is not the Revolution. (Take Robert Darnton for example. His studies on the Ancien régime are brilliant, but he has a less than perfect understanding of Revolutionary mentalities and becomes very condescending along ideological lines when it comes time to talk about the Revolution.)
On the other hand, most of the studies I've found of representations of Antiquity during the Revolution are by historians of Greece or Rome. It would be nice, I think, to get the perspective of a few historians for whom Antiquity is less familiar than the Revolution to complement that of these historians for whom the opposite is true. I also felt - and it's possible I'm wrong, since I haven't done enough of my own research on the topic yet - that Mossé perhaps overemphasized Greece because that's her speciality. She herself seemed to admit as much, with the statistics she provided on the number of citations of Rome vs Greece (citations of the former were far higher), but statistics can sometimes be misleading. I was also somewhat disappointed that she didn't call Desmoulins out on his "citation" of Tacitus, which as has been demonstrated - and can be verified by actually reading Tacitus with Desmoulins' passage in mind - is not actually in there.
Probably though, the single most important thing that annoyed me about this book had nothing to do with the content, which, aside from the few misgivings I've already spoken about, really was excellent, was its lack of footnotes/endnotes. Mossé quotes a lot of different sources, but more often than not, fails to give exact locations for them. She lists sources in the back, but it's not particularly helpful to know that a quote came from somewhere in the thousands of pages of the Archives parlementaires. It really makes it much more frustrating than it needs to be to look them up. (This would be the negative example for why I love footnotes. The positive example being that I managed to cram 65 of them into a 14 page paper last year, as you may recall.)
I should say, before I sign off, that I apologize for any incoherence in the above assessments. I blame it on the fact that it's nearly one in the morning. The bottom line is, I highly recommend this book as an overview, but be aware that it's not perfect.
Only about 100 pages were on the Revolution itself, which I thought was both a shortcoming - in the sense that, considering the title, you wouldn't necessarily expect more than a third of the book to be, essentially, a drawn-out introduction - and an asset, because it allows Mossé to explain the points of Ancient History most referenced by the Revolutionaries to a general audience no longer likely to be familiar with them and to show how very Enlightenment figures had already made use of Greek and Roman references. I actually feel she could have done more with that last point, that maybe she could have discussed how much of the Revolutionaries' interpretations of Antiquity were direct and how much filtered through Rousseau, say, or Mably's interpretations. Not that that's a question that could be definitively answered, but it might be worth exploring.
Mossé repeatedly makes the assertion that most of the Revolutionaries knew Antiquity pretty much exclusively through Plutarch. It would be interesting to investigate the truth of this, since it seems to me that Plutarch, though clearly widely read, would have been one of the least likely candidates to be taught in schools, considering that most collèges had greatly de-emphasized Greek in the period when the Revolutionaries would have been in school. Which begs the question, if Plutarch was their only acquaintance with Antiquity, then what Latin texts were they reading in school? Since I'm currently researching a paper on collèges and universités in 18th century France, I can safely say that not much has been written about the curricula at most of these schools (Louis-le-Grand and the other collèges of the Université de Paris forming a notable exception), for one reason or another, and there would have been even less in 1989 when this book was published.
In any case, this book presents an excellent summary and has given me a lot of possible further leads for research, so I can't complain about it. Besides, it's refreshing to see a historian of Ancient Greece who can write intelligently about something so far removed from her subject as the Revolution. There are so many historians who are fine writing about anything but the Revolution, but then someone go haywire whenever they mention it. And that's even among 18th century French historians whose main focus is not the Revolution. (Take Robert Darnton for example. His studies on the Ancien régime are brilliant, but he has a less than perfect understanding of Revolutionary mentalities and becomes very condescending along ideological lines when it comes time to talk about the Revolution.)
On the other hand, most of the studies I've found of representations of Antiquity during the Revolution are by historians of Greece or Rome. It would be nice, I think, to get the perspective of a few historians for whom Antiquity is less familiar than the Revolution to complement that of these historians for whom the opposite is true. I also felt - and it's possible I'm wrong, since I haven't done enough of my own research on the topic yet - that Mossé perhaps overemphasized Greece because that's her speciality. She herself seemed to admit as much, with the statistics she provided on the number of citations of Rome vs Greece (citations of the former were far higher), but statistics can sometimes be misleading. I was also somewhat disappointed that she didn't call Desmoulins out on his "citation" of Tacitus, which as has been demonstrated - and can be verified by actually reading Tacitus with Desmoulins' passage in mind - is not actually in there.
Probably though, the single most important thing that annoyed me about this book had nothing to do with the content, which, aside from the few misgivings I've already spoken about, really was excellent, was its lack of footnotes/endnotes. Mossé quotes a lot of different sources, but more often than not, fails to give exact locations for them. She lists sources in the back, but it's not particularly helpful to know that a quote came from somewhere in the thousands of pages of the Archives parlementaires. It really makes it much more frustrating than it needs to be to look them up. (This would be the negative example for why I love footnotes. The positive example being that I managed to cram 65 of them into a 14 page paper last year, as you may recall.)
I should say, before I sign off, that I apologize for any incoherence in the above assessments. I blame it on the fact that it's nearly one in the morning. The bottom line is, I highly recommend this book as an overview, but be aware that it's not perfect.
