In his original programme, Berlioz called the last two movements a dream – or nightmare. Despairing of the chances of a production of his opera Les Francs-juges, he took from it a ferocious ‘Marche des gardes’ – soldiers who, in the opera, are obedient to a tyrant. The orchestra is enlarged by additional brass (trombones and ophicleide or tuba) and percussion. The main theme is presented in many guises, with much harmonic and instrumental originality. To fit the March into the symphony Berlioz added a recollection of the idée fixe at the end, where the image of the beloved woman is brutally cut off; interrupted as the protagonist dreams of his own execution by guillotine.

The adoption of the policy of “terror” by the Convention in 1793-1794 emerged in large part from a position of relative weakness in the context of external war and internal unrest. While Jacobin deputies were prominent in revolutionary leadership, the policy was endorsed by deputies in the Convention. The “terror” policy was seen by those who perpetrated it as a temporary form of justice, albeit harsh justice, necessitated by war and revolutionary crisis. The Revolutionary Tribunal and the guillotine were designed as examples of spectacular violence, to show the strength of the revolutionary government, and intimidate counter-revolutionary opponents. The actual application of these laws was very uneven, and fell most heavily in frontier departments, and in those regions where there were armed uprisings against revolutionary government. By far the greatest number of deaths occurred in the context of the civil war in the Vendée.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.

Civil war has beset France yet again. Victor Hugo reacts to the slaughter of the Commune in 1872 by telling – like Vergil, Lucan, and Augustine – a story from the past. Quatrevingt-treize is set during the Terror (1793) following the French Revolution. Paradigmatic characters and places instantiate ideologies that have mapped positions since ancient Rome. As in Augustine, no history has managed to overcome civil war. Christianity has merely enabled the shift to a new form of domination in monarchy. A new republic is needed that will refound France – a universal paradigm like Rome – on secularized Christian values that will finally bring new order to the world.

Between the years 1793 and 1796, a proliferation of small, creamware ale mugs and jugs, transfer-printed in enamel, were made by regional English ceramic factories. These relatively affordable wares depicted scaled-down images of the most infamous scenes of the French Revolution. Used in taverns and in the home, these printed ceramics formed part of what Jon Mee has called the “conversable world”; they raise significant questions about the complex nature of counter- and prorevolutionary sentiment in England. Encoded with a multiplicity of meanings, they had the capacity to act as historical and political agents. This chapter situates these pots within wider conversations around the sociocultural aesthetics of ceramics, and examines the processes involved in, and the material and historical consequences of, scaling down such monumental events onto handheld objects.

The fourth chapter offers an extended conclusion that examines an international controversy ignited by the guillotine that revolved around the relationship between cognition and sensation, the evidentiary authority of bodily experience, and the limitations of human perception. It argues that the works of Fuseli, Girodet, and de Loutherbourg point to the radical remapping of an Enlightenment empirical framework that used the human body as a privileged source of knowledge. The controversies that circulated around the guillotine heralded, instead, a world in which “appearance” and “truth,” “seeing” and “knowing,” were radically decoupled – a world where scientists began removing direct sensory observation from their experimental procedures and where the idealized nude body no longer stabilized pictorial meaning. It proposes that this shift had significant implications for the epistemological status of experience for Romanticism, more broadly.