Note:  The Nov. 3rd opening lecture and reception is now full. We are unable to accept further RSVPs.

This conference will look at modern revolution as a historical script invented in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then elaborated and improvised upon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than asking which is the first modern revolution, or what stages all revolutions may (have to) go through, we will examine revolution as a way of defining and acting upon a particular situation, a narrative frame that political actors explicitly adopted and extended as giving meaning to their goals and strategic choices. To call oneself a revolutionary after the eighteenth century, in other words (or a counter-revolutionary too, for that matter), was to embrace a genealogy and script for action that could be changed or improvised upon, but was necessarily accepted before it could be adjusted or extended in a new context. The aim of the conference will be to see the extent to which modern revolutions can be analyzed and interpreted in this way as so many variations on a common theme. From this perspective, "scripting revolution" would also be about modes of historical writing and narration.

Co-sponsored by the School of Humanities & Sciences, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the France-Stanford Center

Note:  An RSVP is required to attend the Nov. 3rd opening lecture only.  An RSVP is not required to attend the conference panels on Nov. 4th and Nov. 5th