Spring 2013 - History - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Performing the French RevolutionSome things never seem to change. Take theFrench Revolution. Every course in Western historyfeatures the French Revolution as an epic, transformationalevent, so pivotal in fact that it typicallyserves as the hinge event between the modern andearly modern worlds.But the way the French Revolution can betaught does change. Beginning in the spring semesterof 2012, Associate Professor Clare Crowstonoffered her first version of “History 349: The Age ofRevolution, 1775–1815,” which features a dramaticallyinnovative teaching practice: an eight-weeksession of historical reenactments performed by thestudents themselves.Chronologically, Crowston’s course extends wellbeyond the customary years of 1789–1795. Theforty-year span running from the 1770s to the firstdecades of the nineteenth century witnessed threeinterlocking revolutionary upheavals—in BritishNorth America, France, and the Caribbean islandof Saint-Domingue (the modern nation of Haiti).Together, the American, French, and Haitian revolutionsfundamentally and permanently changedEuropean—and indeed, world—history and left anongoing legacy of ideals and conflicts for today’sworld. Crowston’s course examines the political,social, economic, and cultural aspects of these overlappingrevolutionary movements as well as theirmajor events, ideas, personalities, and outcomes.Crowston also explores how fundamental “ordinarypeople”—such as peasants, sailors, women,enslaved Africans, and native Amerindians—wereto these revolutions.The really exceptional component of thenew course involves the historical reenactments.Crowston selected a key revolutionary institution,namely, the French National Assembly of1790–1791, which drafted France’s first constitution.Each of the 35 undergraduates in the coursewas assigned a role and became responsible forresearching his or her historical character andmaking oral and written presentations intended topersuade the other students to take their side in theissues and voting of the National Assembly. Someroles were of famous, real-life characters (includingLouis XVI, the marquis de Lafayette, MaximilienRobespierre, and Georges Danton) whereas otherswere of groups of people, such as aristocrats, Catholicclergy, Jacobins, and members of the Parisiancrowd. Each student was responsible for proposingnew laws from the perspective of their groupor faction and for debating the merits of theirproposals in speeches to the Assembly. Reflectingthe exclusionary voting laws of the time, membersof the crowd watched the debates from the sidelinesand had to seek informal ways to make theiropinions known, sometimes by staging impromptu“riots” in the streets of Paris. Issues debated inthe Assembly—such as human rights, the role ofthe church, the abolition of slavery, and the fateof the king—echoed the real legislative agenda ofthe country during the early 1790s. The winningfaction won a small bonus in their grades forthe course.Two years ago, while attending a conference,Crowston had seen a poster presentation aboutthe experimental use of student role playing inthe college classroom. The idea appealed to her atonce. Eventually, she set to work drawing on coursematerials developed as part of the Reacting to the2 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign