ONE MAN, ONE VOICE – Known for his biographies of Talleyrand, Fouché and Du Barry, the historian endeavors to describe in his new work the metamorphoses of several symbols of the Revolution.
Clemenceau’s sentence addressed to Reinach remained in the memories of schoolchildren who had the chance to study before the arrival of the global method: ” The French Revolution is a block. A block from which nothing can be distracted, because historical truth does not allow it. » In his own way, and in complete discretion, Emmanuel de Waresquiel has been dismantling this block for years in the seminars he runs at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. And he does it with great skill, as he demonstrates in his new historical essay, entitled We needed myths.
Waresquiel has nothing against the Revolution in principle, even if he deplores like everyone else the errors of the Terror and the assassination of Marie-Antoinette. With a historian’s probity which honors him, and which one would look for in vain in a Patrick Boucheron for example, he set himself the objective of describing the metamorphoses of a certain number of symbols of the Revolution. He retained seven of them, which form the pillars of the beautiful history that the revolutionaries and their thurifers wanted to build, whether they were historians, like Michelet, or novelists, like
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