Overview

The recently-discovered letters of the wealthy counter-revolutionary aristocrat, Innocente-Catherine de Rougé, dowager duchess d’Elbeuf (1707-94), offer a vivid and exciting new eye-witness perspective on the French Revolution and the Terror. Hostile witness to everything about the Revolution, from the noble revolt, the storming of the Bastille and the peasant revolution in 1788-91, through to the outbreak of war, the overthrow and trial of Louis XVI and the Terror in 1791-4, the duchess’s letters to an unknown friend offer an unparalleled real-time narrative by an aristocratic woman struggling to understand radical change. Though tempted by emigration to the Low Countries, the duchess was unusual among her contemporary fellow-aristocrats in remaining in France down to her death in 1794, based in her two homes in Picardy and at the heart of Paris. As well as providing a detailed account of all she saw and read, the correspondence also portrays the anguished mental and spiritual odyssey of a highly devout octogenarian woman, who persisted inplangently declaring her outspokenly counter-revolutionary views even as she approached her own death in conditions of great personal danger. The letters constitute a remarkable example of female life-writing at the heart of the Age of Revolutions from a unique perspective.

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9781802078718

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'The editors of a surviving fragment of her diary – letters to an unknown correspondent, written between 1788 and 1794 and published here in the original French – retrace her rise from already illustrious heights to the top of pre-revolutionary society.' David Todd, LRB

Author Information

Colin Jones is Professor Emeritus, Queen Mary University of London and Visiting Professor, University of Chicago. He is the author of many books on French history, most recently Versailles (Head of Zeus, 2018) and The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021). Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley is Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of several articles on Revolutionary justice and the Terror during the French Revolution and he also researches the eighteenth-century transatlantic via Revolutionary connections between France and Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Simon Macdonald is an Associate Lecturer in Modern European History at University College London. His research focuses on transnational and cultural history, with particular reference to the French Revolution. He is the co-editor, with Pascal Bastien, of Paris et ses peuples au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020).

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