Howard G. Brown, Binghamton UniversitySUNY, author of
Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon:
"A Natural History of Revolution is a bold and strikingly original study of revolutionary political culture. Mary Ashburn Miller argues that the French revolutionaries of 1789–1794 turned new 'enlightened' understandings of natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, lightning, and volcanoes into powerful verbal and visual metaphors that made revolutionary violence appear not only natural but also necessary, even providential. Graceful prose and fascinating analysis make this book a pleasure to read and a provocation to discuss."
Darrin M. McMahon, Ben Weider Professor of History, Florida State University:
"Anyone inclined to think that there is nothing much more to be said about the French Revolution ought to read this fresh and exciting new book. Historiographically sophisticated and deeply researched, it combines the best of extant French revolutionary scholarship with seminal insights drawn from environmental history and the history of science to offer a novel vision of the Revolution as natural wonder, a spectacle both awful and sublime. At once a political history of nature and a natural history of politics, Mary Ashburn Miller's creative work will be of interest to all who study the eighteenth century, as well as to anyone keen to see how new methods and approaches can continually animate the past."
Johnson Kent Wright:
"Miller Ashburn Miller succeeds in breathing new life into the topic. Part of her success is owing to her demonstration of how much these rhetorical gestures owed to recent advances in science and natural history. But Miller also offers an intriguing narrative of the rise and then sudden decline of a specific strand of revolutionary rhetoric, which put a set of violent natural occurrences—earthquakes, lightning strikes, volcanoes—to ideological use as metaphors for social and political events. The upshot of the story, Miller claims, bears directly on our understanding not just of revolutionary violence but of the Reign of Terror itself."
Ivy Dyckman:
"Miller... does offer a convincing argument, demonstrating how tropes from the natural world—earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes—were used as political propaganda, to justify the violence and eventual regeneration wrought by the Revolution. In short, she examines scientific, literary, and political texts to prove the importance of language in shaping and propagating revolutionary thought from 1789 to 1794. Her acute selection of thirteen period illustrations, like the one on the jacket, enriches her discussion, further proving that communication may be just as effective whether expressed through written or visual images."
Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History:
"Mary Ashburn Miller's fabulously creative and historically revealing book shows how beliefs about nature informed the French Revolution and sometimes excused its violence. Mistakenly interpreted as the triumph of the will, the revolutionary era in fact allowed for disguising sometimes murderous human choices as if they were part of the course of nature: lightning strikes, the earth trembles, and mountains—when they become volcanic—explode. It has long been known that 'revolution' began as a scientific notion later assigned to human events, but only Miller has explored the inseparable connection that the natural and the political maintained. A gift for historians of science interested in naturalistic discourse, literary readers insistent that figurative language matters, and Europeanists concerned with the origins of modern politics, A Natural History of Revolution is a wonderful lesson in how the social imaginary shapes real politics in every era."
Sophia Rosenfeld, University of Virginia, author of Common Sense: A Political History:
"Earthquakes, floods, lightning strikes, volcanoes.... By listening closely to the metaphors of natural disaster with which the French revolutionaries peppered their speech, Mary Ashburn Miller arrives at a wholly new explanation for the violence of the Terror. A Natural History of Revolution is itself a tour de force."
Dan Edelstein, Stanford University, author of The Terror of Natural Right: The Cult of Nature, Republicanism, and the French Revolution:
"In this illuminating book, which draws on cultural, intellectual, and political history, Mary Ashburn Miller shows how examples from natural history served not only to justify but also to encourage violence during the French Revolution."
