In one classroom on Notre Dame’s campus, the French Revolution plays out like this: The year is 1792, and the National Assembly is stalled while debating the new French Constitution. The conservative factions are upset at the Assembly’s previous decision to sell off church lands in order to generate revenue for the indebted French state. The left-wing Jacobins and General Lafayette are determined to abolish slavery after reports of slave revolts in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). After Prussia and Austria declared war on France, failed attempts at diplomacy by Lafayette and King Louis XVI left the French citizens upset with their ineffectual government.
“This is the darkest day in the French Republic!” exclaims sophomore Nicholas Damberg, playing an outspoken French citizen named Andalle, after the Austro-Prussian invasion began. He means it sincerely, but it was actually a Thursday morning class in 2025, over 230 years after the revolution they were play-acting. Only 20 minutes earlier, Andalle had started a protest in the streets of Paris — symbolized by the dramatic tearing of two pieces of paper.
The students in this elective, The French Revolution and Napoleon (HIST 35435), are free to alter the course of history during the five-week simulation. But the issues faced by the students are grounded in historical fact, says professor Katie Jarvis.
“The overlap [between the game and history] is in the issues, not necessarily the outcomes, but we have space to talk about the outcomes,” Jarvis says. “After break, we resume our chronological trajectory, so it’s easier to put the pieces back into place.”
The students call each other not by their real names, but by the names of the historical characters they embody in the game. Even after the simulation part of the course ends, Jarvis says she hears Maury, Lafayette or Bouron more than the students’ actual names.
This is Jarvis’ ninth year teaching a version of this course. She taught a similar class at Baylor University before joining the Notre Dame faculty in 2016. But the outcome of the French Revolution simulation is different every year. One year, members of the crowd — who are not allowed to vote in the National Assembly — won the game by taking over the Assembly and instituting direct democracy. Another year, the king conspired with foreign troops and tricked the National Assembly into an ambush that resulted in the reestablishment of the divine-right monarchy.
“We’re having a revolution, right? So you can’t plan for it,” Jarvis says of the unpredictable class outcomes.
Each participant has a different list of things they must accomplish to win the game. Members of the same faction — from the Jacobins on the left to the moderate Feuillants to the conservative nobles — have similar goals. Junior Katie Dobelhoff, playing a moderate member of the National Assembly named Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, says her goals included the confiscation of church lands, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and keeping a moderate president in office throughout the entire game. Other factions were focused on the abolition of slavery or the protection of free speech.
Class time during the simulation starts with a flutter of student-authored newspapers passed between factions. Each class meeting is a new session of the National Assembly, and voting members of the Assembly give speeches to try and pass legislation that aligns with their goals. The students must research their characters’ positions and incorporate historical documents into their speeches and newspapers.
Dobelhoff says the simulation helped her understand key players in the revolution she would not have learned about extensively otherwise.
“I think it’s really easy in hindsight to just be like, oh, people got radical, and then the French Revolution happened. But then when you think about all of the buildup of the French Revolution and all of the issues at play, it’s just so much more populated than that,” she says. “Really getting to know the character is something that I think will stick with me more than if I was just lectured about it.”
What begins as relatively tame speechmaking can devolve into dealmaking between factions, manila envelopes delivered by outside messengers (played by former students), and even an impassioned rendition of “Ça Ira (It will be fine),” an emblematic song of the French Revolution. Key moments in the game are determined by a dice roll — such as the survival of conservative clergy during a protest in Paris or the success of foreign military maneuvers.
The students are instructed to adopt the tone and posture of the characters they play, but sometimes emotion takes over. When confronted with the National Assembly’s unwillingness to confront the slave revolt in Saint Domingue, General Lafayette shouts: “While you are sitting in the National Assembly with your baguette and your croissant, people are revolting!”
Jarvis asks her students to speak formally and call each other by their simulation names so that each historical character is well-represented. Some characters argue for morally questionable positions, she explains, so it’s important to separate the student from their character.
“We need all of those perspectives, and we need them to be played faithfully so that we can have a good discussion, so we can understand these dynamics. Because when we don’t understand the dynamics of these debates and we just let them fall away, that’s when it becomes dangerous again,” Jarvis says.
The class materials and gamebook Jarvis uses during this portion of the semester are produced by a company called Reacting to the Past, which makes role-playing games for all kinds of historical events, from protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to the Council of Nicaea. The gamebook keeps track of the logistics of dice rolls and extra points.
Students bring their own props, which can influence the outcome of the game. If the crowd is wearing all red, for example, they can get an extra point that could tip a protest in their favor. This prompted Damberg to wear a knitted red beanie each class session.
Students also meet outside of class to strategize with their faction.
“There’s all the stuff you see happening in class, and then there’s all the stuff on the side that ultimately affects things happening in class, but no one is quite aware or sure how. It’s just like real life,” Jarvis says.
Because of the excitement of the game and working closely with each faction, Damberg says that the class becomes a real community.
“When you get students involved with activities like that, you do more than just educate them,” he says. “I think there’s also a greater understanding of contingency in history. Not everything is a long chain of cause and effect, but things happen or don’t happen for certain reasons.”
By the end of this year’s game, Lafayette and the King tried to escape rioting Paris. Their fates came down to a dice roll that decided the king would escape, but Lafayette would be captured and killed. The Austro-Prussian army was luckily deterred, which left a five-minute opening for the moderate faction to reject the Jacobins’ call for a republic and create a new constitutional monarchy, with one of their own on the throne.
History remembers the story a bit differently: The first French Republic was created on September 22, 1792, following the storming of the Tuileries Palace and the overthrow of the monarchy. This revolutionary period continued until November 9, 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup, dissolving the Directory — a five-member governing committee installed in November 1795. The republic came to an end in 1804 when Napoleon declared himself Emperor, establishing the First French Empire.
On the last day before break, Jarvis leads a “postmortem” session, where the class discusses how the game diverged from or converged with what actually happened in history. Students are also given the opportunity to confess all their scheming and deal-making that took place outside of the classroom. Jarvis says that though some students appear hesitant at the beginning of the simulation, they are always disappointed when it ends.
“It’s really a joy to watch how much mastery the students gain over the topics, and also confidence in their own ability to argue something that they’re not fully expert in,” Jarvis says. “It’s really affirming for me, and I hope it’s affirming for them, that they have all the skills they need to do an amazing job no matter what their major is, and that they all bring so much to the table.”
Katie Muchnick, an English and economics major and journalism minor, is this magazine’s spring intern.