Projekt

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 "state", the "people", and the revolutionary leaders. Part one examines whether the development of a French national state with a centralized administration was one of the deep causes of the Revolution. Part two studies whether increased economic competition at the beginning of the Revolution contributed to the radicalization of individuals living in Paris. Part three examines the voting behavior of radicalized politicians and how it relates to their personal interests. 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. The scientists 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.

• Prof. Dr. Andreas Fuchs

  Universität Göttingen
  Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
  Ibero-Amerika-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung
  Göttingen
  

• Dr. Richard Bluhm

  Universität Hannover
  Economics and Management
  Institute of Macroeconomics
  Hannover
  

• Dr. Raphael Franck, Ph.D.

  The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Economics
  Jerusalem
  Israel