Paris, Rethinking Revolution

Revolutionary ideals aren’t always what they seem. The 1789 French Revolution is marked by two competing narratives: the Enlightenment humanism that led to “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and the populist rhetoric that culminated in the Reign of Terror. Whether referring to 1789, the 1871 Paris Commune, or the May 1968 student revolutions, this experience is a walk through Paris’ rich history of revolutionary ideas that continue to shape debates about democracy today. Led by a novelist and expert in modern European history, this journey unfolds as a dialogue about the ideas, stories, and events that sparked France’s major revolutionary moments, with particular focus on 1789, 1871, and May 1968. The walk concludes in the Latin Quarter, where the conversation continues over a drink, allowing time to reflect on history, philosophy, and the revolutionary ideas that still unsettle authoritarian regimes today.

This experience is shaped by Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’s way of reading history as a living, contested process rather than a closed chapter. A novelist and publisher with an MA in social theory and an MFA focused on the invention of historical narrative, he approaches the French Revolution through the ideas that emerged from it and the legacies of figures such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Louise Michel, and Guy Debord. With a focus on the modern intellectual history of Paris and the narratives that shape how the Revolution is remembered, this experience challenges common understandings of the “French Revolution” in a nation that has experienced multiple revolutions since 1789. Samuél's approach invites participants to consider how the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man also led to the Terror and Napoleon Bonaparte’s colonial regime, and how three 19th-century revolutions helped inspire Situationism and May 1968.

Samuél has lived in Paris since 2010 as a novelist, musician, and literary tour guide. He holds an MA in social theory and an MFA in creative writing. He is a member of an indie rock band and the co-founder of Kingdom Anywhere, an independent anglophone publisher in Paris. He taught creative writing at the Sorbonne for five years before focusing on writing and leading historical walks on modernism, existentialism, and the Nazi Occupation of Paris. His first novel, Slim and the Beast, shares its name with his band, which has played extensively across Europe. His second novel, The Requisitions, is a work of historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland. Samuél is also fiction editor at SOUVENIR Magazine, an anglophone arts and literature magazine based in Paris.

A notebook for curious note-takers. Umbrella or rain jacket during the rainy season.