Time and the Duchess: Revolution and Temporality in the Letters of the Duchess d’Elbeuf, 1788–94

The chapter uses the prism of temporality to examine the recently discovered personal correspondence of Innocente-Catherine de Rougé, duchesse d’Elbeuf, from 1788 to her arrest by French Revolutionary authorities in early 1794 and her subsequent death. Like many contemporaries, the duchesse shows an awareness of the sensation of time accelerating after 1789. Yet her correspondence also reveals varying senses of time running in counterpoint: an unwillingness to discard the ‘feudal time’ of the Ancien Régime’; a sense of provisional time awaiting the restoration of the monarchy down to 1791–2; and then with her withdrawal from social life under the Terror, a feeling that time was slowing down and yet also repeating the temporality of the persecuted early church.