Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (2 page)

outline the argument that is to follow and spell out some of the capital

assumptions undergirding that argument.

As intimated above, research and writing on the revolutionary period in

France has long mirrored suppositions that were more or less Marxist

in nature. Historians laboring in the long shadows cast by Jean Jaurès,

Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre comfortably assumed that behind

the collapse of the Bourbons’ rule in the late eighteenth century loomed

a struggle between an economically retrograde, “feudal” aristocracy and a

progressive, “capitalist” bourgeoisie. The entrepreneurial interests, backed

at critical junctures by urban artisans and shopkeepers and rural peasantry,

1

2

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

“won” the resultant contest for power in the tempestuous 1790s and would

proceed to create nineteenth-century France in their own dynamic image.

Thus, the dramatic seizure of political power in this revolutionary situa-

tion by profit-oriented bourgeois pointed to the even more fundamental

phenomenon of structural
economic
change in French society.1

Paradoxically, the very success of this venerable thesis in provoking

debate and innovative research has proven its undoing. Today there are

few scholars on the various “cutting edges” of French Revolutionary stud-

ies who still subscribe to the socioeconomic orthodoxy of old.2 They can

report all too easily that there was no demonstrable correlation between

economic and social roles in the
ancien régime
: noncapitalist “bourgeois”

outnumbered capitalist bourgeois, and there were entrepreneurial as well

as economically conservative nobles. They can point up the oversimplicity

of the notion of sequential “class” insurgencies precipitating revolutionary

change in France in 1788 and 1789. They can also show that the assemblies

and committees of the decade of upheaval drew their personnel primar-

ily from the staid worlds of bureaucracy and the law rather than from the

adventurous marches of capitalism. And, perhaps most decisively, these re-

visionists can assure us that the economic ancien régime in France actually

outlasted
the sociopolitical old regime by a good half-century or more. In

summation, there probably can be no cogent demonstration for France

of systemic sociopolitical change grounded in transformative
economic

change.

So far, so good. Yet (predictably, perhaps) those who reject the old

paradigm have found that it is one thing to participate in the demolition of

an obsolete edifice and quite another to raise a durable structure in its place.

At this point, a broader question may first interpose itself: whether there

is really any way to explain the Revolution convincingly
as one unified

phenomenon
, from causes to consequences. Did Lefebvre and historians of

similar persuasion err, not only in the specific sense of positing the centrality

to the French Revolution of socioeconomics, but also in the more general

sense of supposing that the gestation, process, and ultimate import of the

Revolution are all explicable in the same terms? We will have to deal with

this broader issue in due time. For the moment, however, we need to confine

ourselves to asking what, specifically, the revisionist critics of the Marxist

explanation of the events running from 1789 to the Bonapartist coup d’état

of 1799 have been able to insert in its place.

1 The classic statement of this thesis, at least for American readers, remains Georges Lefebvre,
The Coming of the French Revolution
, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947).

2 For a very competent review of the literature on the specific question of the
causes
of the French Revolution, refer to the initial, historiographical section of William Doyle,
Origins
of the French Revolution
, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Introduction

3

The answer to this latter query seems to be: nothing fully adequate. Some

contributors to the debate, while discarding the concept of an upheaval

consecrating the triumph of capitalism, have tried to retain something of

the social emphasis inevitably associated with that concept. Hence, Alfred

Cobban, writing in 1964 and essentially turning the Marxist theory upon

its head by accentuating the anticapitalist biases of the Revolution, held that

“the revolutionary bourgeoisie was primarily the declining class of
officiers

and . . . lawyers and other professional men.”3 Such individuals, rather than

commercial and industrial figures, dominated the bureaucracy and legisla-

tures of the revolutionary years. Other authors – and here, revisionists like

Denis Richet and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret come most readily to mind –

have contended that a vanguard of educated, landowning “notables” issuing

from clergy, nobility, and Third Estate seized the helm of public affairs in

1789. Theirs was a
révolution des lumières
, a “revolution of enlightened

notables,” helped along, admittedly, by atrocious short-term economic

conditions that furnished these respectable Frenchmen with daunting allies

from society’s plebeian ranks. Once the hurricane was over, these proper-

tied notables would come fully and safely into their own.4

These arguments may have refined our understanding of social devel-

opments in the revolutionary era, but they have also proven problematic

in their turn. Cobban’s
officiers
seem upon closer examination to have been prospering for the most part, or at the very least holding their own, rather

than “declining” on the eve of 1789. Moreover, they apparently made up

a steadily
diminishing
proportion of active revolutionaries as the 1790s

unfolded.5 More seriously, perhaps, scholars have come increasingly to

question the whole notion of elite solidarity in the advent and process of the

Revolution. Richet himself had to allow that in the crucible of events defin-

ing 1789 the propertied
lumières
abruptly fell out over what he called the

“problem of privilege” – that is, over what economic and social prerogatives

to preserve, curtail, or abrogate altogether.6 Other specialists, investigating

the tumultuous years that followed, have conceded – ironically – that there

are still good reasons to stress the continuing importance of social tensions

3 Alfred Cobban,
The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 67.

4 Refer to Denis Richet, “Autour des origines idéologiques lointaines de la Révolution franc¸aise: Elites et despotisme,”
Annales: E.S.C.
24 (1969): 1–23; and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret,
La Noblesse au XVIIIe siècle.De la féodalite aux lumières
(Paris: Hachette, 1976).

5 On the former point, see William Doyle, “The Price of Offices in Pre-Revolutionary France,”
Historical Journal
27 (1984): 831–60. He has recently returned to this and some related issues in
Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The latter point is made repeatedly by, among others, Lynn Hunt, in her provocative study
Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

6 Richet, “Autour des origines idéologiques,” p. 23.

4

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

and conflict among the notables.7 Indeed, a kind of “rediscovery” of con-

flictual social dynamics in the revolutionary era has figured prominently

in the historiography of the last ten years.8

However, the most influential tendency among those historians who

reject the socioeconomic orthodoxy of earlier days has been to develop

and employ an explanatory perspective that concentrates on politics or

(more accurately) “political culture” in revolutionary France.

The “rediscovery of politics” in this contentious field was foreshad-

owed as far back as 1967, when George V. Taylor declared roundly that

what France had experienced during the years 1789–99 had in fact been

“a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolu-

tion with political consequences.”9 Before long, a number of historians

were giving a truly novel twist to the meaning of “politics” in the French

Revolution. In the late 1970s Franc¸ois Furet, probably the most influen-

tial of these scholars, emerged from a long-running vendetta with Marxists

like Albert Soboul and Claude Mazauric to offer a political-ideological

explanation of the maelstrom of 1789–99.10 Furet asserted that new dis-

courses of political legitimacy vied to fill the unforeseen and unprecedented

vacuum left in public life by the collapse of the absolute monarchy. From

1789 through the climacteric of the Terror of 1793–94, this increasingly

murderous competition of discourses, all proclaiming fealty to the newly

sovereign “people,” drove the Revolution leftward. For this brief, unfor-

gettable period, ideology was independent of – and, indeed, constitutive

of – sociopolitical reality; only after the overthrow of the Robespierrist dic-

tatorship in Thermidor of Year II (July 1794) would “society” reassume

its ordinary role as the primary determinant of historical evolution.

Furet’s conceptualization of the unfolding of revolution in France

has proven very influential – and, by the same token, very controversial.

Specialists including Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, and Emmet Kennedy have

contributed enthusiastically to this endeavor to substitute political-cultural

forces for the socioeconomic processes of the earlier historiographical

school.11 Moreover, the Bicentennial gave rise to a number of scholarly

7 As examples in point, consult Patrice Higonnet,
Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles
during the French Revolution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and David Andress,
French
Society in Revolution, 1789–1799
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

8 A point discussed in detail by (among others) Jack Censer, in “Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after the Bicentennial,”
French Historical
Studies
22 (Spring 1999): 139–67.

9 George V. Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,”

American Historical Review
72 (1967), esp. 491–92.

10 Franc¸ois Furet,
Penser la Révolution franc¸aise
(Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Translated into English by Elborg Forster as
Interpreting the French Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

11 See Hunt,
Politics, Culture, and Class
, and, more recently,
The Family Romance of the
French Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Keith M. Baker,
Introduction

5

consortia and collaborative editorial projects through which Furet and

like-minded colleagues reiterated their call for a cultural exegesis of revo-

lutionary change in France.12 True, not all proponents of the new approach

endorse Furet’s more extreme claims: for instance, they may balk at his con-

tention that the Terror was fully implicit in the ideological “breakthrough”

of 1789, and regard with some skepticism his postulation of ideology as

an autonomous and constituting historical force up to 1794.13 Still, they

share with Furet the fundamental conviction that the Revolution was, as

Lynn Hunt has put it, quintessentially “the moment in which politics was

discovered as an enormously potent activity, as an agent for conscious

change, as the mold for character, culture, and social relations.”14 And few

would deny that they have a compelling and portentous story to tell: the

story of how ordinary Frenchmen – and Frenchwomen – fashioned

through rhetoric and ritual and raw human action a new identity for

themselves in a world briefly and challengingly turned upside down.

We might go so far as to wonder whether we have here the makings of

a new explanatory paradigm for the French Revolution. Such speculation,

however, is probably premature. Indeed, quite apart from the schism in

post-Marxist scholars’ ranks over the issue of elite solidarity or discord

in revolutionary France – an issue
not
resolved by forays into political-

cultural analysis – there exists a potentially even more troublesome ques-

tion. An institutional historian, Isser Woloch, broached this question in

the midst of the Bicentennial euphoria. Woloch took Furet (and a number

of his associates) to task for denying that circumstances shaped the rev-

olution and, indeed, for maintaining that revolutionary exigencies could

never “justify acts that were inexcusable by ordinary standards of liberal

principle or morality.”15 At about the same time, another specialist, David

Bien, raised much the same issue in an exchange with Furet himself.16

It was perfectly natural for Woloch and Bien to respond to Furet’s ideo-

logically driven schema of revolution by emphasizing the pressures of

Inventing the French Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Emmet Kennedy,
A Cultural History of the French Revolution
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).