The Duchesse d'Elbeuf's Letters to a Friend, 1788-94

The French Revolution has always occupied a place of choice within general anglophone culture as well as among the historical community. From Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837), Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and the Baroness d'Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel series (from 1903) through, more recently, to TV, film and other media - such as the controversial 2015 Assassin's Creed video-game - particular interest has focussed on the personal experience of the Revolution by ordinary people.

This Project introduces into discussions and debates a character who could have walked straight out of a Dickens or d'Orczy novel: the dowager duchesse d'Elbeuf (1707-94). A completely unknown set of six notebooks in her hand in the form of letters to a friend, discovered by Colin Jones in the Archives Nationales in Paris, provide a running commentary on France's Revolution from late 1788 through to the violent turmoil of the Terror of 1793-94. They are remarkable not only for being written from the perspective of a woman of high aristocratic status articulating overtly Counter-Revolutionary views, but also for having been composed largely at her Parisian home, the Hôtel d'Elbeuf, situated a matter of yards from the authorities running France from the Tuileries Palace complex. Above all, they are of interest as a unique critical commentary from the heart of Revolutionary Paris on the daily development of the Revolution, and especially the Terror, written at a period when politically unorthodox or Counter-Revolutionary views were increasingly being silenced - and when such statements could lead their authors to the guillotine.

The project aims to bring this extraordinary document into scholarly discussion of the Revolution and making it widely known among the general public. The first task is to provide a full transcription of the Letters: they will be published in entirety in French as a scholarly edition and select passages will also made available in English translation on an open-access online site. This effort will combine an investigation of the circumstances in which the Letters were composed, and how the manuscripts survived, with reconstructing the author's biography, and a study of the authorial voice and commentary which emerges from the text.

The Project team will then seek to diffuse knowledge of the Letters as broadly as possible so as to stimulate interest in their content and what they reveal about the French Revolution. The scholarly community will be targeted via seminars, lectures, conference talks and articles in peer-reviewed journals (besides making the Letters readily available for the first time). The team will also hope to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection on the Letters and on the Revolution more generally, notably by an international conference on the theme, 'Historical Witnessing', targeted at a literary as well as a historical audience. In addition, the Project will seek to stimulate interest in and discussion of the French Revolution among the general public and in particular among trainee historians, undergraduates and A-Level students. This will be achieved notably through an exhibition to be co-curated with the Art Museum at University College London; by making a selection of letters in English translation available on the Project website; by an H-France 'Webinar' aimed at graduate students; and by a conference aimed at A-Level teachers and students. The Blog will facilitate conversations spanning all audiences and provide a hub for promoting Project outputs. Articles placed in history trade journals such as History Today as a starting point for developing wider impact through the media. Finally, the project will enhance the development of two scholars of the French Revolution - the Co-Investigator and the Postdoctoral Research Assistant attached to the project - both at an early stage in their careers.

The French Revolution is a topic that engages a huge worldwide audience among scholars and the general public. A good deal of that interest - ranging from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) through to the controversial 2015 Video-game, Assassin's Creed - focusses on personal experience of the Revolution, a topic which the Duchesse d'Elbeuf letter series strikingly illuminates. An unknown figure of aristocratic extraction, the eighty year-old dowager duchess maintained a running commentary on the events of the revolution from 1788 to her death in 1794. This letter series is all the more striking for expressing strong counter-revolutionary sympathies, while being written a matter of a hundred yards from the Tuileries palace complex which housed the National Assembly and then the Revolutionary Government.

ACADEMIC BENEFICIARIES of the research comprise specialists in the French Revolution in Great Britain, France and the extra-European anglophone and francophone worlds, plus more generally historians of modern Europe. The project has been designed so that the outputs will also interest specialists outside the discipline, working in eighteenth-century studies, literature, the emotions, women's writing and the epistolary form. The main peer-reviewed outputs will be an edition of the Letters published in French (an English translation will also be made available gratis online), 5 learned journal articles and an international interdisciplinary conference in London towards the end of the project. A 'Webinar' on H-France - the largest scholarly organisation for Francophone history and culture in the anglophone world, with around 3,500 members from 40 nations worldwide - will be targeted particularly at graduate students in French history. The Co-Investigator and Postdoctoral Research Assistant will also be academic beneficiaries, and the experience of organising the research and its impact will be significant in their career development, which will be under the mentorship of the PI Jones.

NON-ACADEMIC BENEFICIARIES: the research will engage with a set of activities and events designed to promote knowledge exchange between academia and the general public including schools and higher education. We anticipate these being largely but not wholly in Great Britain and the anglophone world. An exhibition is planned at the Art Museum of University College London, which drawing on its collection of French Revolutionary prints has already has staged an exhibition on the earlier part of the Revolution in 2015, which achieved impressive levels of engagement. The exhibition will focus on the Terror and the Elbeuf letters will be used as a thematic thread through the exhibition as a whole. The British Museum has kindly agreed to make loans from its own collections. In addition, an English translation of select passages totalling 10K words via a free website managed by Exeter University Digital Humanities Lab. The website will also provide space for teaching materials, aimed at an undergraduate and A-level student audience. The Project will also seek to reach student audiences through two collective events. One of these will be targeted at A-Level teachers, to encourage feedback into the project that will maximise impact among students. The second will be a conference for the schools which we have identified as teaching the French Revolution to A-Level. Finally, we plan to publish at least three articles in trade publications in history (drawn from History Today, BBC History, the Historical Association's The Historian, and the Paris-based L'Histoire). These will bridge the two communities of academic and non-academic beneficiaries. We will use publication in these journals and the exhibition in order to to trigger a wider set of approaches to media outlets, which we will pitch under advice from QMUL's and Exeter's public relations offices. A Project Blog will also facilitate dialogue between and within academic and non-academic audiences.