The 2020 Besterman Lecture: Who were the French Revolutionaries?

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big
Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one
of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre
for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation,
TORCH is delighted to support the Annual Besterman Lecture, 2020
Lecture by Professor William Doyle. Introduced by Karen O'Brien
(Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University) and Gregory S.
Brown (General Editor of Oxford University Studies in the
Enlightenment and Senior Research Fellow, Voltaire Foundation).
Moderated by Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. When
Napoleon in 1799 declared that the French Revolution was over, he
said that was because it was now established on the principles with
which it began. The implication was that much of what had happened
over the preceding decade of upheaval had not been in accordance
with those principles. Napoleon took care, of course, not to state
what they were: his constitution was the first since 1789 not to
contain a declaration of basic rights. Yet everyone during the
Revolution claimed to be acting on revolutionary principles, or
denounced their opponents for betraying them. Can we distinguish
between those who held to and those who ignored or compromised
revolutionary aspirations? This lecture will make the attempt,
challenging some of the most enduring assumptions in revolutionary
historiography. Professor William Doyle Professor William Doyle is
Professor Emeritus of History and Senior Research Fellow,
University of Bristol. Professor Doyle is a British historian,
specialising in 18th-century France, and is most notable for his
one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution (1st edition,
1989; 2nd edition, 2002; 3rd edition, 2018). Professor Doyle one of
the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution,
obtaining his doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis
entitled The parlementaires of Bordeaux at the end of the
eighteenth century, 1775-1790 - he is also the author of sixteen
books on French and European history, five of which have been
translated into Chinese. Professor Doyle is also a fellow of the
British Academy and a co founder of the The Society for the Study
of French History. Introduced by: Karen O'Brien, Head of Humanities
Division, Oxford University. Before taking on this role in 2018,
Professor O’Brien was Vice Principal (Education) and Professor of
English Literature at King’s College, London. At King’s she oversaw
institutional strategy for all undergraduate and postgraduate
students, the university Maths school, admissions and widening
access, and the financing and implementation of student-facing
capital projects. She implemented major changes in the areas of
online degrees and digital learning, new classroom and clinical
teaching spaces, careers and co-curricular learning. Prior to this,
she was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birmingham University and held
academic posts at Warwick, Cardiff and Southampton Universities.
Originally educated at Oxford, she held a Harkness fellowship at
the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellowship at
Peterhouse, Cambridge where she is now an Honorary Fellow. She is a
trustee of the Rhodes Trust, a trustee of Chawton House, a member
of Princeton University Press’s European advisory board and a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In addition to being Head of
the Humanities Division, she is a professor in the Faculty of
English at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the
Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature, particularly the
historical writing and fiction of the period. Professor Gregory S.
Brown, Professor of History; University of Nevada, Las Vegas,
Senior Research Fellow; Voltaire Foundation and general editor of
OSE. He is author, with Isser Woloch, of Eighteenth-Century Europe:
Tradition and Progress (2nd edition; Norton, 2012), and author of
Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (Greenwood, 2003); and
A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in
French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (Columbia,
2002). Professor Brown will be delivering the ASECS-BSECS lecture
at this winter's virtual BSECS conference, on the intellectual
origins of "eighteenth-century studies. Moderated by: Professor
Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. Lauren R. Clay is an historian
of Old Regime and revolutionary France and its empire, with
particular interests in urban cultural and civic life and the
emergence of a commercially oriented society. Her book Stagestruck:
The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its
Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines the
establishment of professional public theaters in cities throughout
France and the French empire during the prerevolutionary era.
Stagestruck was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Barnard
Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History by the
American Society for Theatre Research and was named a finalist for
the 2013 George Freedley Memorial Award, for exceptional
scholarship examining live theatre or performance, awarded by the
Theatre Library Association. Her article “Provincial Actors, the
Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in
Eighteenth-Century France,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2005)
was the co-winner of the 2006-2007 James Clifford Prize, awarded by
the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has a
chapter on Voltaire’s fortunes at the box office forthcoming in
Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online,
1680-1793/Données, recettes et répertoire. La scène en ligne
(XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Eds. Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel
(MIT Press, 2020). Lauren's work has also appeared in The Journal
of Modern History, Slavery and Abolition, and The Oxford Handbook
of the French Revolution. Currently, she is writing about the
debate over the legality of the slave trade during the early French
Revolution. Lauren completed her PhD in history at the University
of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she spent several
years teaching at Texas A and M University. Her scholarship has
been supported by grants and fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National
Fellowship Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches
courses on the history of early modern France, the economic history
of the eighteenth century, revolutions in the modern world,
European imperialism, and the history of Paris. She is a past
Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.