Headless History - Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution

Headless History investigates a variety of works by 19th century French writers who attempted to address the major social and historical issues raised by the French Revolution. It shows how their textual strategies mirror many features of democratic society in postrevolutionary France. Fittingly, a `headless' postrevolutionary society must create its coherence or consensus from the collective social body instead of the symbolic person of the monarch, so the histories themselves are `headless' and the source of their legitimacy is constituted in the actual processes of writing and making history...