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In early 1799 French authorities issued orders to identify and register Ottoman Muslims within the territory of the Republic, followed by orders to arrest Algerian subjects and sequester their property. The immediate context of the policing operation was France's unprovoked July 1798 invasion of Egypt, leading to the Ottoman declaration of war in September. But the aims of this botched and almost entirely fruitless operation are harder to discern. Presented as a way of ensuring the safety of French subjects who had been detained in Istanbul and Algiers, it only exacerbated tensions. It was less a proportionate diplomatic action than a Machiavellian tactic by the foreign minister, Talleyrand. In the interests of ending the Revolution in France, Talleyrand sought to aggravate the war and drive the Ottoman Empire into the arms of the anti‐French coalition. The new anti‐Muslim rhetoric that emerged in this process outlasted Talleyrand's ministry and contributed to the fragmentation of republican universalism in the lead‐up to Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état at the end of 1799. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 28, 1794, a criminal investigation that had begun almost a month before concluded with the execution of sixty-three men and women, the imprisonment of fifteen more, and a few days later the destruction of an entire village. This article examines the burning of Bédoin, the crime that provoked it, and the judicial process that accompanied it, to explore the relationship between criminal cause and punitive effect during the Terror of year II. As a case study in revolutionary justice, this episode appears extreme, but this article argues that it allows us to interrogate the meanings that ordinary revolutionaries attached to terms like crime and complicity when the survival of the state seemed at stake. In looking beyond the Terror to the controversies that enveloped this village's destruction, this article also examines the aftermath of atrocity to consider how a society comes to terms with crime when both the definition of criminality and the identity of the criminal are in flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes French departmental statistical reports published under the Directory and the Consulate as a prism for tracing transformations in ideas about inheritance, from the Montagnards' radical egalitarianism to the Napoleonic Civil Code. By focusing on prefects, who provided statistical reports on the population of their respective departments, the article reveals their role in ushering in a return to patriarchalism. Not only did some prefects turn a blind eye to the fact that many families were ignoring the new egalitarian inheritance laws, but they also used novel social scientific vocabulary to defend practices of local, unequal property distribution. Paradoxically, those communities that the statisticians perceived as un‐French and uneducated were also those that supposedly encapsulated the domestic values that would ensure social stability for the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cet article étudie les origines religieuses de la Révolution, au sens de ce qui a rendu possible l'idée même de révolution. Il suggère que la Révolution a eu des origines religieuses dans un sens bien plus direct que ce que suggèrent les études sur les controverses autour du jansénisme. C'est parce que l'ordre divin était considéré comme supérieur à tout ordre créé par les humains que la rupture avec les coutumes et traditions du royaume a pu être conçue comme légitime. En ce sens, la Révolution française est comparable aux révolutions qui l'ont précédée. Cet article invite à reconsidérer la pensée politique des Lumières françaises, irriguées par la pensée théocratique. La thèse principale est que ce qui change dans la France des Lumières par rapport à celle du XVIIe siècle, c'est une insistance nouvelle sur les lois immuables et éternelles établies par Dieu. Les origines profondes de cette pensée théocratique, qui remontent à la scholastique médiévale, y sont considérées. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]