Dr. Joseph Clarke
Associate Professor, History

Projects

• Title
  • The Burning of Bédoin: Terror, Memory and the Meaning of Atrocity in Revolutionary France
• Summary
  • This project investigates the experience of revolutionary violence through the prism of one rural community's experience of that violence in its most extreme form. In early June 1794, Bédoin, a small village in the Vaucluse in southern France, was burned to the ground by Republican troops as an act of collective punishment for what were claimed to be the community's crimes against the Republic. Sixty-three of its residents were executed and the remainder of the population either incarcerated or scattered as an example to any who might consider conspiring against the Republic. This project interrogates the ideological context and political conflicts that led to Bédoin's burning, the actors involved in it, and the controversy and commemoration that accompanied its aftermath, as an archetype of the experience of Terror in Revolutionary France and as a case study of how communities commemorate and come to terms with, or fail to, the experience of atrocity in their midst. This project approaches the burning of Bédoin from multiple perspectives. It is at once a microhistory of Revolutionary violence and an exploration of the wider political culture, the attitudes and assumptions, that made this kind of Terror thinkable to the men who carried it out, not just in Bédoin but in towns and villages throughout France in 1793-94. Drawing on personal testimonies, research in regional and national archives, and the extensive public commentary this provoked in pamphlets and the press, this project analyses the violence visited on Bédoin in the context of the local conflicts that Revolutionary politics engendered in this region and in terms of the wider Terror that overtook France in 1793-94. It aims to uncover how this violence was understood by the actors involved in it, how it was rationalized by the officials who ordered it, experienced by the soldiers who inflicted it and endured by those who survived it. By extrapolating outwards from this example of the Terror in action, this research asks a range of questions about the relationship between violence and the Revolutionary state in France while also addressing wider issues concerning what Kalyvas has called 'the logic of violence' in times of civil conflict. This project also aims to explore the afterlife of an event that contemporaries soon came to describe as an atrocity: the controversies it gave rise to and the commemoration it engendered. After the Terror, the burning of Bédoin became a byword for terrorist brutality and that memory prompted bitter debates, locally, nationally and even internationally, about the violence of the recent Revolutionary past and the legitimacy of the Republic that had sanctioned that violence. That memory also fuelled further violence and inspired acts of commemoration, and the project will explore these acts of retribution and remembrance as a case study of cultural memory in an eighteenth-century context.

• Title
  • Providence and French Revolutionary Politics
• Summary
  • Providence and French Revolutionary Politics reassesses the relationship between religious belief and radical politics in Revolutionary France through an investigation of the popular providentialism that permeated the public sphere during the Revolutionary decade. While references to Divine Providence have normally been seen as the preserve of the reactionary right in the 1790s, this project draws on a wide range of evidence from contemporaries' private testimonies to the public discourse, ritual and art of the period to problematize our sense of the Revolution as marking the advent of secular modernity in the political realm. It asks instead how ordinary French men and women made sense of Revolution. How they did go about the business of imposing some kind of conceptual order on the very disorderly experience of Revolution or, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, what stories did the French tell themselves about themselves as they tried to come to terms with one régime's collapse and another's creation?
• Date From
  • 2018
• Date To
  • 2021

• Title
  • Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920
• Summary
  • "Making War, Mapping Europe" is a HERA-funded international collaborative research project, analysing militarized cultural encounters across the long 19th century. It examines one of the most significant forms of mass cross-cultural contacts in Europe and its borderlands from the Revolutionary Wars to the First World War. The project explores the experiences of German, British and French soldiers stationed on the European periphery and in the Middle East as well as researching the persistent impact these encounters had on the society of their respective home country. This project asks how military cultural encounters helped to shape collective perceptions of 'the self', 'the other', of Europe and of its borders in the period between 1792 and 1920? The project team involves researchers from Germany (Freie Universität Berlin), Ireland (Trinity College Dublin) and the United Kingdom (Universities of York and Swansea).
• Funding Agency
  • Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA)
• Date From
  • 2013
• Date To
  • 2016

• Title
  • Religion and Violence in France, 1500-2000
• Summary
  • This inter-disciplinary project involved the development of an international network of historians and social scientists to explore the relationship between religion and violence in France from the early modern wars of religion to the present. It resulted in an international conference in 2017 and the publication of a special issue of the journal French History in 2019.
• Funding Agency
  • TCD LRH
• Date From
  • 2017
• Date To
  • 2019

• Title
  • Revolution, Revival and Reaction: the culture and politics of religion in France from Republic to Restoration
• Summary
  • Following the suppression of normal religious worship during the Terror, France underwent an unprecedented revival of popular religious activity from 1795 onwards. Some of this was grudgingly tolerated by the authorities, more was not; much of it was initiated by a laity anxious to reassert its customary culture after the Terror and more of it provoked a shared sense of unease within otherwise antagonistic political and clerical elites. In many senses, resolving the problems this revival posed proved to be the principal political problem confronting these elites throughout the late 1790s and early 1800s. In many senses, reconciling Revolutionary politics and popular religious culture remained the principal poliitcal problem facing France for over a century to come. This revival marks a defining moment in modern French history, but as yet, crucial questions concerning the culture of religious revival, its scale, intensity and duration, have never been adequately answered, and its political implications remain just as unclear. Contemporaries, like the journalist Mallet du Pan, may have held that 'quiconque fréquentera la messe est un ennemi de la République', but was this inevitably the case? If not, how did Republicans reconcile their religious devotions with their commitment to Revolutionary politics in the 1790s, or come to terms with the Concordat in 1802 or endure the unforgiving atmosphere of the 1820s? This project is designed to answer these questions in the first comprehensive history of religion in France from the Revolution to the Restoration. Based on extensive archival research throughout France, it charts the evolution of religious practice across an entire generation and explains the political, cultural and social conflicts it gave rise, both nationally and locally.
• Funding Agency
  • IRCHSS
• Date From
  • 2008
• Date To
  • 2010

• Title
  • Revolution and Remembrance: the Commemoration of the Dead in Revolutionary France, 1789 - 1799
• Summary
  • This project represents the first comprehensive study of the cultural politics of commemoration in Revolutionary France. It examines what remembrance meant to the people who staged and attended ceremonies, raised monuments, listened to speeches and purchased souvenirs in memory of the Revolution's dead. It explores the political purposes these commemorations served and the conflicts they gave rise to while also examining the cultural traditions they drew upon. Above all, it asks what private ends did the Revolution's rites of memory serve? What consolation did commemoration bring to those the dead left behind, and what conflicts did this relationship between the public and the private dimensions of remembrance give rise to? A monograph, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance, 1789-1799, arising from this research has recently been published by Cambridge University Press while an article dealing with the commemoration of the Revolution's war-dead will be published in the journal French History in 2008.
• Funding Agency
  • British Academy Exchange Fellowship, EUI doctoral scholarship