![]() ![]() ![]() This well-written, well-researched, and revelatory book is, in one register, about the dead bodies of the French Revolution, the problem bodies: the millions in the Cemetery of the Innocents that had been accumulating there for more than a millennium but whose stench newly came to be seen as an existential threat to the health of Paris in the waning years of the Old Regime the thousands of hastily buried headless corpses of the 1793–94 Terror that kept resurfacing the martyrs and great men of the revolution-the Mirabeaus and Marats-who had to go somewhere the long dead remains from royal, clerical, and other aristocratic tombs attacked by iconoclasts along with the shattered monuments that had stood above them and the countless ordinary corpses of the 1790s that awaited the outcome of debates for the creation of new spaces for the dead as the old ones were dismantled.īut it is also about French revolutionary dead bodies, that is, about how they- the problem bodies-in league with their living compatriots, wrought what Erin-Marie Legacey calls the “Revolution of the Dead.” The bodies from the Cemetery of the Innocents went into quarried caves under Paris-the catacombs, as they came to be called-where a new empire of the dead gave Parisians a sense of relief from the discontinuity of revolution by creating a “beautiful horror” that connected them with their ancestors and with a universal and timeless sense of mortality. ![]()
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