Villa Gillet - Rhône-Alpes - recherches contemporaines

Sophie Wahnich, CNRS director of research at the Laios EHESS Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology, is a historian of political awareness at the time of the French Revolution. To carry out what she calls “profanation” of knowledge, that is, the reproduction for the public of a form of critical history, she claims that in writing history, we must include an emotional dimension postulating shared political values. History is thus both historical science and the practice of political consciousness. If the emotions are rational tools of moral evaluation, which are not only essential but unsurpassable for all humanity, historical criticism cannot free itself of its emotional implication. From a theoretical and methodological point of view, one must no longer consider that emotions and rational discourse are two distinct spheres of life in society; one must try to understand how social and historical determinations that can be read in the emotions result from a process of subjectification and decision-making. The approach is therefore pluridisciplinary and aims to connect often unrelated fields: the history of the political, political analysis of active sovereignty and the role of violence, and the anthropology of rituals, vengeance, and the sacred. Her books reflect the still-dominant view of the Revolution: the “good” Revolution of 1789-1790 was followed by blood baths, frightful massacres, and the guilty exploitation of a good idea by the “terrorists” Robespierre, Marat and company.