CORRECTION APPENDED

Nine years ago, in an introductory session for research fellows, visiting professor James Livesey ’94 declared to an audience of scholars that the French Revolution was a good thing. The then-controversial statement was met not with outrage, but with chuckles.

“They all burst out laughing,” he recalls.

This year, Livesey returns to his alma mater to teach students about the French Revolution—but this time, no one’s laughing.

OVERTURNING IDEAS

Livesey “has this new way of thinking about the Revolution,” says Goelet Professor of French History Patrice Higonnet, who taught Livesey when he was a grad student and remains close to the professor from the University of Sussex.

In one of the most influential critiques of the French Revolution, scholars have traced the origins of modern totalitarianism to the Revolution.

In his 2001 book “Making Democracy in the French Revolution,” Livesey focuses on the Directory government of 1795 to 1799. He argues that this final stage of the Revolution, often underestimated by scholars, was actually at the root of the continental European model of democracy.

Higonnet, a French scholar who has also written on the Revolution, says the book is about how the second half of the Revolution can be considered as the beginnings of a shift from traditional society to a modern liberal market society.

“He wanted to show that these 18th=century revolutions were certainly anti-traditionalist revolutions, not capitalist revolutions,” Higonnet says. “Of all the great Western nations, France was the least enthusiastic about market societies.”

Livesey argues that understanding the Revolution is crucial to distinguishing how the more egalitarian European model for democracy differs from the Anglo-American one.

‘CLEVER FOR THE MOST PART’

Livesey is currently teaching a graduate seminar on the French Revolution and the new undergraduate lecture course History 1422, “The World of the French Revolution,” which covers the entire Revolution from its origins to Napoleon’s coup d’etat. The class explores the emergence of political feminism, alternative market economies, and political terror, among other topics.

The class, which has 22 students and is, according to Livesey, “turning into a reading seminar despite itself,” went on an expedition to the Loeb Drama Center to watch “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera composed by Mozart during the time period.

“It was very useful as a means of learning about the atmosphere of the French Revolution through art,” says Kevin M. Riley ’08, a student in the course. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

Livesey, who was a visiting lecturer at Harvard from 1998 to 1999, has returned in part to develop some of his new ideas by introducing them to Harvard students, whom he dubbed “clever for the most part.”

Before getting a Ph.D in modern French history at Harvard, Cork-born Livesey studied philosophy and history at the National University of Ireland, where he said that he “slipped into French history” via philosophy.

“One of the classic places to worry about how ideas work in history is the French Revolution. My ‘Frenchness’ started out of my ‘ideasness,’” he says.

Livesey says he is teaching sections himself because he wants to hear his students’ comments.

“[His] excitability is very contagious and makes people more interested in the topic,” Riley said. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

Eve H. Bryggman ’10, a student in Livesey’s class who has never taken a history class before, said that she found Livesey “nothing but encouraging from the beginning.”

In the spring, Livesey, whom Higonnet called “very Irish in a bizarre way, although he doesn’t live in Ireland,” will be teaching a class in modern Irish history. He expects the class to be packed, because modern Irish history is rarely offered at Harvard. The last time the class was taught was in 1998 and 1999, when Livesey was a visiting lecturer.

He is also slated to teach a reading seminar on democracy and liberalism in modern France this spring.

LOOKING FORWARD

In what he called the “last throes” of finishing a book, Livesey praised Widener Library’s seemingly endless resources, another reason he came back to Harvard.

“You’ve no idea how efficient you are, sitting in Widener, there’s no other place with an open-stack library like that,” he said.

His book, which is to be called “The Origins of Civil Society” and will be out next year, is a historical critique of the idea of civil society. This idea, according to Livesey, is “a set of values that anchors the domains of modern life by resolving the varied and incommensurable value orientations to one another.”

Livesey, who spent ten years researching the origins of civil society and believes the idea to be a “weak” and “terrible” one, is working on his own republican model of democracy.

“The alternative to [civil society] is some model of cosmopolitan democracy,” Livesey writes in an e-mail. “The dominant version of this is a Rawlsian rights-based model of representative democracy, but I am working on a republican model organized around a more substantive version of citizenship.”

Livesey is also working on a study of the French province of Languedoc, which he said is a “fat book which won’t have as much of a readership.” The work will focus on the participation of peasants in transforming modernization.

FROM ‘SANTA CRUZ’ TO CAMBRIDGE

Livesey says the atmosphere at Harvard is a quite a change from that of the University of Sussex, which, located on England’s south coast, is known as the “Santa Cruz” of England due to its left-wing politics, new social movements, and experimental teaching methods.

Sussex is in some sense livelier than Harvard, Livesey says, in that the University feeds off the energy of nearby Brighton, the center of music and new media industries in the United Kingdom.

“Most of [the students] think they’re going to be really big in media, they’re very culturally active,” Livesey says. “You can’t get the students to do anything. They think they own the place and we [the faculty] think we do.”

Sussex has also pioneered many historical methods, according to Livesey, including queer theory and the new social history concerned with women’s oral history.

“What we say about Sussex is that it is full of new ideas,” Livesey says. “Problem is, half of them are bonkers.”

Livesey is involved in other arenas of Harvard besides scholarly pursuits. His “terrible secret” is that he plays rugby for Harvard Business School.

Livesey currently lives in Mather House with his wife Joanna Stephens, a semi-professional actress who will appear in the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s production of “Bodas de Sangre,” and their two daughters Beatrix and Frankie.

—Staff writer Angela A. Sun can be reached at asun@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The Oct. 16 news article "Revolutionizing the Revolution" incorrectly attributed remarks by Michael R. Ragalie '09 to Kevin M. Riley ’08. It was Ragalie, not Riley, who said, "It was very useful as a means of learning about the atmosphere of the French Revolution through art" and "[Visiting professor James Livesey's ’94] excitability is very contagious and makes people more interested in the topic."