Introduzione. La Rivoluzione francese: evidenze lessicologiche, evidenze lessicometriche e interpretazioni storiografiche.

The second tome of "La felicità è un’idea nuova in Europa" deals with a major theme: it allows the reader and the scientific community to test the latest and most important interpretations of the French Revolution through lexicologic and lexicometric data. The authors’ work is based on a 'corpus' of 7,000,000 'tokens', that is currently the widest digitized 'corpus' on the French Revolution examinable by the linguistic software. In order to have digital copies, authors first scanned the original sources and then extracted text from images with a OCR application. The txt and doc files were finally compared with sources. The lexicologic and lexicometric works were assembled through the following computer software: 'Bruco', 'Concordance', 'Lexico 3', 'Treetagger'. An articulate and wide introduction leads the reader into the bibliographic references involved in the choice of any single lexia. Except for the revolutionary catechisms, at the moment the corpus cannot be published on-line, due to the bans of copyright. It contains the following bibliography: Marat's 'Œuvres politiques' (10 volumes, Bruxelles, 1989-1993) and works from his pre-revolutionary period; Robespierre's 'Œuvres' (11 volumes, Paris, 2000-2007); Saint-Just's 'Œuvres complètes' (Paris, 1984); Hébert’s newspaper, 'Le Père Duchesne' (10 volumes, Paris, 1969); Lequinio's speech, 'Du Bonheur' (20 brumaire an second); 112 revolutionary catechisms (105 printed editions and 7 manuscripts). The volume suggests indexes of frequency, concordances, concurrences, diagrams, temporal flows, collocations and tag clouds of some lexias at the heart of the historiographic debate of the French Revolution. The concordance of the string dict* refers to the debates about the influence of the French Revolution on the shift from the idea of “commissarial dictatorship” of the Ancients to the modern idea of revolutionary “sovereign dictatorship”. The concordances of the lexias 'bonheur' and 'félicité' integrate the results of research authors already explained in the first tome and they refers to a keyword in the lexicon of the Revolution. The concordances of 'liberté publique', 'droit(s) naturel(s)', 'droit(s) de la nature', 'nature humaine', 'ennemi(s) de l’humanité', 'ennemi(s) du peuple', 'hors (de)(-)la(-)loi' refer to the Terror and to the Republicanism issues. The concordance of 'terreur' is at the core of the historiographic debates about the French Revolution, which authors already addressed in the first volume through the specific reference to Robespierre. The concordance of the string veng* refers to the Terror issues, too. In this case, the reader can test the interpretations that identify the 'vengeance' as the explanatory element of the Terror, through the speeches of the main characters of the Revolution and in the dialectics Revolution–Counter-Revolution. The last group of lexicographic and lexicometric data of this volume concerns a central feature in the studies on the Revolution: the 'sans-culotte'. The suggested linguistic material confirms the polysemy of the noun 'sans-culotte' in the lexicon of the Revolution. It proves the gap between the political and the social use of this noun, that caused many contrasts among scholars, who meditated on the suggestions and symbolism of this republican emblem.