Finalmente il popolo pensa. Sylvain Maréchal nell'immagine della Rivoluzione francese

This study examines an often misunderstood figure of the French Revolution, availing itself of new sources located in Autun, Amsterdam and Moscow. The poet of virtuous atheism and member of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals, Sylvain Maréchal, has been since the early XIXth century mostly attacked and sometimes defended, and is still abundantly but not always soundly treated by historians of the Enlightenment or the Revolution today. The one reference on Maréchal’s life and work all later scholars have had is M. Dommanget’s biography, published in 1950, the last thorough research done – seriously, but with a strong ideological motivation – on this figure. This volume however takes a step beyond new material and a re-evaluation of the individual, to make of Maréchal a case-study for an intellectual and cultural history of the French Revolution, which is just taking shape internationally. It therefore seeks to pose new problems for such themes as the motivations of the generations of intellectuals involved in the Revolution and the precise nature of the cultural references they brought to bear on the events of that period, aiming at a better understanding both of revolutionary culture and of later representations of it.