Describes the phenomenon of “Sister Republics” and shows that it was limited until the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. To better understand the interactions between the “mother” Republic and her “daughters,” this chapter studies their constitutions and bills of rights, which reveal that some of them were shaped by native patriots, while others were forced upon them by the French government. In a way, the “Sister” Republics became a “constitutional laboratory” for France. All these changes did not happen without chaos and violence. In the “sister” republics too, force and coercion were necessary to implement the new regimes and to silent the factional struggles and the counter-revolution. Thanks to the French army, however, revolutionary terror did not win the day at least until 1799. In spite of all these problems, the young republics experimented new institutions and improvements for the time being and for the future. But, by a strange irony of fate, the only true “sister” republic was the republic of the United States, that is the only one which was not really influenced by the French Revolution, and which was to become a model in the following revolutionary waves.

Drawing on local judicial records and on-the-ground interviews, the chapter examines two criminal cases in a Shandong village, highlighting how, in the hyper-politicized context of the Great Leap Forward, factional struggles among rural elites took on a dangerous new significance. The revival of the Socialist Education Movement saw the downfall of two leading cadres in early 1960. The local lineage made a series of incendiary allegations against them, leading to their removal from office, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. A key learning from this case study concerns the way in which the implementation of campaigns, as well as judicial punishments, produced contingency. At the local level, campaigns were not just a path by which the state achieved or failed to achieve its own goals, but also provided a framework for individuals to exercise their own agency. Meanwhile, a decentralized judicial system with limited safeguards and poor evidence-gathering and case-making practices allowed campaign-induced conflict to spill over into criminal punishment. The convergence of campaign-style politics with politicalized legal enforcement seems inevitably to have ratcheted up the stakes to the point where only one endgame was possible: a bitter struggle followed by brutal and ultimately fatal punishments.