ECONOMIC AND IDEOLOGICAL CAUSES OF POLITICAL RADICALIZATION AND VIOLENCE: EVIDENCE FROM THE 1789 FRENCH REVOLUTION

Funders: Volkswagen Foundation (VW) and Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture (MWK) under the Research Cooperation Lower Saxony - Israel

Partners: Dr. Richard Bluhm (University of Stuttgart), Dr. Raphäel Franck (Hebrew University), Dr. Gerda Asmus-Bluhm, Dr. Andreas Fuchs , Atanas V. Spasov (University of Göttingen)

Website: Project (Grants Database)



Abstract: This project investigates the deep economic and ideological causes of political radicalization and revolutionary violence by providing a historical perspective on the 1789 French Revolution. The project studies the incentives of the three main agents at work during the revolution: the ‟Stateˮ, the ‟peopleˮ and the revolutionary leaders. The novel contribution of this project is to combine political economy and history to determine which economic, ideological, and political transformations contributed to the radicalization of the population. We will make use of novel archival data covering all of France or using new microdata for Paris jointly with state-of-the-art causal inference techniques. By focusing on events just before the start of the 1789 Revolution or immediately after its outbreak, the proposal aims at determining not only the root causes of revolutionary violence but also its mechanisms.