“‘Natural and Social Right’: Founding Declarations in Dialogue in American and French Revolutions”
Katie Jarvis (Notre Dame)
Comment by Emma Kuby (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Discourses of liberty, rights, and political legitimacy shot through both the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which launched the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which propelled revolution in France thirteen years later. While French and American citizens articulated their rights in mutually legible ways and transatlantic friendships ensured sustained discussion between the two countries, the declarations’ shared values obscure the dramatically different social contexts that informed their conclusions. This talk examines this paradox at the heart of rights conceived of as both natural and societal. It focuses in particular on how French attempts to pronounce universal rights in the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen both resonated with transatlantic dialogue and responded to particular societal challenges that the French faced.
Sponsored by:
UW-Madison Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy
UW-Madison European Studies
With the support of the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the United States through the Center for Interdisciplinary French Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Katie Jarvis is a historian of early and late modern France. Her research focuses on popular politics, broadly conceived, during the French Revolution. She is especially interested in the intersection of social and cultural history, as well as gender history. She teaches courses on French and European history from the sixteenth century to the present.
Jarvis’s most recent book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press, 2019), integrates politics, economics, and gender to ask how Parisian market women invented notions of citizenship through everyday trade during the French Revolution. While analyzing how the Dames des Halles and marketplace actors shaped nascent democracy and capitalism, this book challenges the interpretation that revolutionary citizenship was inherently masculine from the outset. This book was named Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Award for Best First Book on the History of Women, Gender, and/or Sexuality. It won the 2020 Louis A. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the best scholarly book on an eighteenth-century subject in any discipline. It was published in translation as La politique sur les marchés. Travail, genre et citoyenneté dans la France révolutionnaire with Presses universitaires de Rennes in 2023.
Jarvis is currently working on a book project entitled Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France, 1789-1799. This study probes how the French revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness through economic, judicial, and cultural venues from 1789 to 1799.
Emma Kuby is an intellectual, political and cultural historian of modern France and its empire. To date, her research has focused on the legacies of World War II’s violence during the era of decolonization. Kuby’s first book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945, examined a French-led activist campaign by Nazi camp survivors to expose ongoing crimes against humanity in the postwar USSR, Francoist Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. It showed that the project championed by these non-state actors — centered not on genocide but on concentration camps as sites of political repression — helped foster a universalist paradigm for defending human rights but foundered on the limits of members’ own memory politics, the ideological pressures of the Cold War, and an inability to adapt to new forms of European violence in the context of decolonizing warfare. The book received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Council for European Studies Book Award.
Her current book project, The Outsider Turned Ambassador: American Jews, Holocaust Memory, and Tensions of Empire in Postwar France, reconstructs the ephemeral community of Jewish American expatriates who lived and worked in France and its empire after 1945, and tells the story of their efforts to grapple with the violent legacies of the Second World War in a context of French domestic conflict and colonial crisis. As these writers, scholars, bureaucrats, journalists, NGO staffers, and politicians helped establish France as the headquarters for diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to rebuild a ravaged continent in the wake of catastrophe, they also made it the unexpected focus of a post-Holocaust, early Cold War intellectual quest to reclaim Europe as a site of “Western civilization” — and to redefine themselves as consummate transatlantic mediators of Western liberal values.
Kuby’s teaching interests include modern Europe and modern France; colonialism and decolonization; war, atrocity, and post-conflict reconstruction; transnational activism; Jewish history; intellectual history; and gender and sexuality
