Le deuil de la fraternité dans les mémoires (Quelques notices...) de Louvet (1795)

Fraternity, a crucial political sentiment during the French Revolution, turns from an enthusiastic and all-inclusive feeling to a coercive and sometimes murderous instrument of exclusion during the Terror. In his memoirs Louvet, one of the Girondins proscribed by the Convention in June 1793, narrates in a dramatic and sentimental manner his yearlong flight throughout France, with an emphasis on the constant threat of denunciation and betrayals by former friends. He mourns the metamorphosis of fraternity under the pressure of fear and suggests that genuine affective bonds cannot be formed without political freedom.