Revealing La Révolution
What We Are
Funded by the College of Arts and Humanities, Revealing La Révolution (the UMD French Pamphlet Project) is an effort to analyze and digitize a selected subset (700-1,000) of the approximately 12,000 French pamphlets currently held by the UMD Libraries. These pamphlets reveal valuable information about society during the upheaval of the French Revolution (June 1788-December 1804) and provide cultural historians, linguists, and political scientists with important source material to study history, language, politics, government, and social issues. Revealing La Révolution will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization by offering scholars and students working in the French revolution, political science, history, and French with these unique resources.
Who We Are
Working in cooperation with the Department of French and Italian, the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the University of Maryland Libraries, Revealing La Révolution will serve as a pilot project to make these important historical artifacts more accessible for scholarly and pedagogical purposes. The Project is led by Assistant Professor Sarah Benharrech and Professor Valerie K. Orlando of the Department of French and Italian and Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, Librarian for the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, from the University of Maryland Libraries. The other project team members are Doug McElrath and Joanne Archer from the Libraries' Special Collections, along with John Schalow from the Metadata Services Department. Revealing La Révolution counts on the support of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities as well.
Blog Posts
May 17, 2013 - French Pamphlets, Education, Thermometers, and Goodbyes
April 12, 2013 - Revealing La Révolution: Digitized Pamphlets Accessible through WorldCat
March 28, 2013 - Revealing La Révolution: An update from the trenches
February 26, 2013 - Revealing La Révolution, one step at a time!
Featured Pamphlets
Assemblée et arrêté des meres, sœurs, épouses et amantes, des jeunes citoyens, de la ville d’Angers
(Assembly and Order of mothers, sisters, wives and lovers of the young citizens of the city of Angers)
This pamphlet emblematizes the rising interest in democratic process throughout pre-Revolution France. The element that distinguishes this pamphlet from others is that the women of the city of Angers are particularly interested in being included in a democratic system wherein their voices can be heard. Apart from the transcription of individual women’s statements, the person transcribing the assembly notes the clamor that fills the room after something controversial has been said. The beauty of the prose allows us to imagine an assembly where nearly 200 people are standing and shouting in either agreement or disagreement over the future of their city and their country.
Projet d'alliance matrimoniale, entre M. Tiers-état et Madame Noblesse
(Plan for matrimonial alliance of Monsieur Third-Estate [the middle classes, neither nobility nor clergy] and Madame Nobility)
This satirical pre-revolutionary tract, presented in two parts, uses metaphors to denounce the efforts of the First and Second Estates to exclude the Third in the convocation of the Estates-General. The first figurative image is that of the wedding of the pamphlet’s title. Next is a beehive divided into three orders: the first that of the king and nobility, the second the “bee” clergy, and the third, by far the majority, the worker bees.
