“Democracy in Darkness: The Politics of Secrecy in the Age of Revolutions,” 1/31 KICD Colloquium with Notre Dame Historian Katlyn Carter

Drawing on research from her recent Yale University Press monograph, Notre Dame Assistant Professor of History Katlyn Carter will open the Kinder Institute’s Spring 2025 Friday Colloquium Series by tracing the line between eradicating secrecy and limiting transparency that was toed as the world’s first representative democracies took shape in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Prof. Carter’s talk will be held on January 31 at 3:30pm in Jesse Hall 410.

Abstract

In this talk, Prof. Carter will cover how state secrecy came to be seen as despotic in the years preceding the American and French Revolutions. She will then examine how revolutionaries who sought to fashion representative governments in North America and France confronted the challenge of determining secrecy’s place in their new regimes. In a context where gaining public trust seemed to demand transparency, was secrecy ever legitimate? Whether in Philadelphia or Paris, establishing popular sovereignty required navigating between an ideological imperative to eradicate secrets from the state and a practical need to limit transparency in government. The fight over this—dividing revolutionaries and vexing founders—would determine the nature of the world’s first representative democracies.

Katlyn Carter, Assistant Professor of History at University of Notre Dame, is a political and intellectual historian of the 18th-century Atlantic World, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. Her research focuses on the origins of modern representative democracy through the study of political practices and institutions. Prof. Carter’s first book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2023), explores how decisions and debates about the place of secrecy in politics during the Age of Revolutions shaped representative democracy. She has published in the Journal of the Early Republic and French History. Additionally, she has written numerous op-eds for The Washington Post, TIME, and the Age of Revolutions blog, for which she serves as an editor.