Time Warps during the French Revolution*

Abstract

On 10 August 1792, the Parisian sans-culottes surrounded the Tuileries Palace, overthrew the monarchy and helped to found a Republic. What might otherwise have taken centuries to achieve appeared to materialize within hours. During the preceding weeks, sans-culotte discourse began to coalesce around the belief that a demonstration of collective violence could enable France to bypass the ordinary laws of history and thereby realize, instantaneously, the revolutionary ideal of regeneration. It would create, in effect, a time warp. While historians are familiar with the perception of accelerated time that accompanied the Revolution, insufficient attention has been paid to ways in which time, as a discursive category, remained circumscribed by ideas of space. It was problematized as an interminable distance, a gulf or abyss, that separated present and future, nullifying the sense of limitless possibility unleashed in 1789. The process of political radicalization that culminated in 10 August was prompted not so much by a desire to quicken time as by a need to escape it altogether. In centring upon a micro-historical analysis of the time discourse that accompanied 10 August, this article reassesses the theories of temporality that have emerged in the historiography of the Revolution by foregrounding the perspective of lived experience.