IEA

Fellowship from January to June 2011

Research project:

"The death of the French Atlantic"

"My aim is to write a history of the decline of the French Atlantic from its apogee in the decades before the Revolution to its final demise during the first half of the nineteenth century. This cannot be adequately explained in purely economic terms; it had its roots in enlightened ideals, revolutionary politics and the devastation of war. It was also driven by the aspirations of slaves on the Caribbean plantations and the example set by America in 1776. I shall draw on my previous work on the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to discuss the individual experience of those involved on both sides of the Atlantic. I will also seek to integrate insights from British and American studies of slavery and abolition. The decline of the French Atlantic and its major port cities cannot be told in a purely national context; it must be placed in its transnational context."

Biographical elements:

Alan Forrest is Professor of Modern History at the University of York and is in his final year as Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. He previously taught at the Universities of Stirling and Manchester before moving to York in 1989. He works in the field of modern French history, notably the period of the French Revolution and Empire; is especially interested in French provincial history during the Revolution and in the responses of local people to central government; has published widely on military culture and the experience of the individual in war; and - over the last few years - has developed a further research interest in the history of the French Atlantic in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has contributed to conferences and collaborative volumes in many European countries, as well as in Australia and the United States, and has been a professeur invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He serves on the editorial boards of two English-language journals, French History and War in History, and on the comité scientifique of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française. He is President of the International Commission on the History of the French Revolution, affiliated to the International Committee of Historical Sciences.

His major publications include Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (1975); Conscripts and Deserters (1989); The Soldiers of the French Revolution (1990); The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789-1799 (1996); Napoleon’s Men. The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (2002); and The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory (2009). From 2005 to 2009 he managed an AHRC-funded research project on `Nations, Borders, Identities: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in European Experience ‘, the British part of an international collaboration on the experience and memory of war with Etienne François and the Free University of Berlin. Along with Rafe Blaufarb and Karen Hagemann, he edits a series of books on `War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850’, published by Palgrave-Macmillan.