Trauma in the Third Estate, 1789

Review of Barry M. Shapiro, Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), ISBN 978-0-271-03542-0, Hardcover, $65.

Barry Shapiro knows his way around the French Revolution. He’s also eager to understand it from the inside out. In this book, he makes a solid beginning at uncovering some of the Revolution’s more important psychodynamics. It’s a pleasure to see a master historian at work.

Shapiro begins at the beginning: the convening of the Estates General in the spring of 1789. Called by Louis XVI as a last-gasp measure in his almost decade-long, failing efforts to reform France’s ailing finances, the Estates General soon moved from the king’s control to take a direction of its own.

According to France’s unwritten constitution, the privileged First and Second Estates (clergy and nobles) paid no taxes and hadn’t for centuries. They wanted to keep it that way. In one of the more important and dramatic acts in history, the deputies of the Third Estate took the unprecedented and illegal step in mid-June 1789 of challenging the king and the centuries-old unwritten French constitution by transforming themselves into the National Assembly, claiming they alone represented all of France, not just commoners, and invited delegates in the First and Second estates to join them. Some did.

Louis’ response was to decide to crush the Third Es-

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tate. He began to call up troops. The deputies of the Third Estate (now National Assembly) began to fear they might be arrested or killed, or possibly both. It was the first time the overwhelming majority of them had undergone anything like it, or acted in any way deemed remotely illegal. The idealized image of the king as a “good father,” which they’d carried within themselves from their districts to Versailles, held only until it was finally shattered by each delegate’s unexpectedly having to face a sudden, terrifying, and continuing life-and-death situation.

Shapiro’s study focuses on the psychological consequences of this June-July 1789 crisis. Using the findings of trauma studies, he argues that at this moment a core trauma was experienced and formed in the Third Estate’s delegates, one that proved of considerable importance for the future. The delegates, as he shows, relived the trauma in various ways in the short and long run, including the traumatic reenactments apparent in the political decisions they made in 1790 and 1791.

Because trauma doesn’t exist in a vacuum, Shapiro provides rock-solid historical contexts. His scholarship, based on an impressive list of published primary and secondary materials, is impeccable. It includes an especially notable list of archival sources, mainly letters written by the Third Estate’s delegates. From these, as well as the delegates’ other writings, Shapiro draws a convincing body of evidence showing the emotional roller coaster they were on as events unfolded in June-July 1789. He finds the delegates fluctuating “between idealized and demonized visions of the monarchy,” following over the course of time an “oscillating rhythm of psychic avoidance and hypervigilant repetition” (pp. 14, 15), each suggestive of a traumatic aftermath.

Woven through Shapiro’s narrative are several historiographical references, each orienting the reader to relevant

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earlier and current interpretations of specific events, including a few controversies, but placed so judiciously and explained with such brevity they help clarify matters instead of interrupting the narrative flow. Abundant footnotes are conveniently placed at the bottom of the page, where they belong. Some include helpful lengthy explanatory notes that significantly enhance the narrative.

That’s on the historical side. On the psychological side, Shapiro’s explication of the findings of some pioneering trauma historians—psychiatrist Vamık Volkan and historian Rudolph Binion among them and other pioneering trauma scholars like psychiatrists, Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman, adequately explains why he argues as he does, though his study occasionally goes beyond trauma itself to touch on other areas of psychological analysis, including some of the findings and approaches of psychoanalysis.

One of the things “psychoanalytic theory can offer historians,” Shapiro reports, is “the ever present reality of emotional ambivalence.” This means that in 1789 France and later, “an intensification of affection and tenderness toward the king would be accompanied by a parallel intensification of residual feelings of antagonism and hostility” (p. 34), a finding confirmed by historian Lynn Hunt’s earlier The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992).

As for trauma, I particularly like the way Shapiro plays with evidence on the theme of the dialectical paradoxes scholars have found embedded in traumatic memories and reenactments. In my own work, I’ve found it is a crucial but tricky business and conceptually difficult to explain. Here is one example where, I think, Shapiro at least partially successfully communicates the traumatic paradox and its outcome. The “dialectical relationship between denial and repetition [is] important,” he writes, since “compulsive efforts to deny or forget…can never…be entirely successful given the

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relentless intrusion of traumatic memories into conscious awareness.” Indeed, “in the paradoxical spirit of psychoanalytic logic…the harder that one tries to repress such memories, the more insistent and relentless they become.”

This played out in the decision of the traumatized deputies of the Third Estate/National Assembly to grant the king a measure of power in the Constitution of 1791 by giving him the right to suspend legislation for one year. The “idealization and denial behind the granting of the suspensive veto “‘called forth’ its opposite,” writes Shapiro, “the hyper-vigilance behind the exclusion of the deputies from the ministry.” This, in turn, ensured that any reconciliation with the king, the cooperation that the delegates consciously hoped would emerge was subverted and “would never be realized” (p. 162). Unless I’m missing something, I have one major question regarding an issue I find absent in Shapiro’s splendid study, though it’s implicitly hidden in places here and there. Trauma is not the only thing that needs studying in psychological history; I wonder where all the guilt has gone.

It’s inconceivable that the Third Estate’s delegates, not to mention the millions of city dwellers and peasants primed to explode in their own insurrections in July, 1789, could move through these dramatic, forbidden, and extraordinary changes without feeling some guilt about what they were doing, or merely felt like doing. The paranoia emergent in the Great Fear that lay over the near horizon, or that expressed itself in abundance in the later Jacobin Terror, were doubtless tinged with, if not driven by, projections having something to do with the need to punish their own guilt—a guilt that can, as we know, sometimes be generated by merely thinking about rebellion without actually joining one.

Shapiro wonders if his study might have “wider implications” and that “the model of traumatic reaction…might

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be useful in helping explain the aftermath of innumerable other political situations in which threat or intimidation played a comparable role” (p. 183). As a historian of historical trauma, I hope so. It may even come to pass that questions of guilt may themselves be better understood through studies of historical trauma such as Shapiro’s Traumatic Politics.

This relatively short monograph—187 pages of text and footnotes—is a rich interwoven interdisciplinary tapestry that makes an outstanding contribution to both history and psychological history. The Penn State University Press should be commended for publishing it.

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