It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why.

Introduction – The French Revolution is Not a Myth: Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan and usPart IChapter one – How did the French Revolution become a Sartrean object?Chapter two – Working with historical details against the fetishizing of realityChapter three – Do not dissolve the real men of the French Revolution in a bath of sulfuric acid Chapter four – Restoring the sacred to its placeChapter five– Apocalypse and Fraternity-TerrorChapter six – The question of dialectical time and the futility of the notion of rearguardPart IIChapter seven – Three humanities in one, Europeans, colonized, savages Chapter eight – Conclude a book, conclude a discussion Chapter nine – Michel Foucault and the French Revolution: a misunderstanding?Chapter ten – The French Revolution in between archaeologies of knowledge, discourse formations, and social formations Chapter eleven – Surrounding the Iranian revolution, retrieving the missed object with Foucault, in spite of Foucault Chapter twelve – the French Revolution, matrix of totalitarianism, a strange enigma of a statementChapter thirteen – Sade and the folds of the ethics of the French RevolutionConclusion – Dissipating layers of fog