Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (3 page)

12 See, for example, Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds.,
A Critical Dictionary of the French
Revolution
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Keith Baker et al., eds.,
The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture
, 4 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–94).

13 On this point, see, most recently, Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Franc¸ois Furet’s
Penser la Révolution franc¸aise
in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s,”
French Historical Studies
22 (Fall 1999): 557–611.

14 Hunt,
Politics, Culture, and Class
, p. 236.

15 See Woloch’s review article: “On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,”

American Historical Review
95 (1990): 1452–70.

16 Refer to the remarks by Woloch and Bien in “Franc¸ois Furet’s Interpretation of the French Revolution,”
French Historical Studies
16 (1990): 777–802.

6

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

day-to-day circumstances on the revolutionary politicians. Both historians,

after all, had been involved for some time in research on the armies of

old regime and/or revolutionary France, and both had been sensitized

by their research to the influence exerted upon French affairs by those

uniquely urgent “circumstances” preceding and attending renewed

European warfare in the 1790s.17

Then again, both Woloch and Bien could have easily enough cited the

concern of earlier historians with larger geopolitical issues too often ne-

glected in recent arguments between Marxists and their detractors. Indeed,

a full century ago and more Albert Sorel was surveying the course of events

in the 1789–99 period from a European diplomatic-military viewpoint.18

True, those dominating the landscape of revolutionary historiography for

the next half-century, while never losing sight of the great mobilization

of French resources against foreign invasion in the 1790s, attributed the

drastic sociopolitical changes of those years, in the most basic sense, to

the progress of capitalism rather than to geopolitical exigency. Still, Sorel’s

notion of international affairs as being central to the Revolution has never

disappeared entirely from the pertinent scholarly literature. The works

of Robert R. Palmer signaled this in the years during and following

World War II,19 and so have syntheses authored in more recent times by

Donald Sutherland and William Doyle.20

But perhaps the most forthright challenge to historians of both Marxist

and post-Marxist vintage has come from the pen of a political sociolo-

gist, Theda Skocpol.21 Writing ten years before the Bicentennial, Skocpol

presented a comparative analysis of the French, Russian, and Chinese

Revolutions that eschewed all “voluntarist” discussion of systemic changes

in society, of “purposive, mass-based movements,” of ideological trends,

or of aspirations of those outside the conclaves of government. For

Skocpol, analysis of the causes, process, and consequences of such great

upheavals required a “structuralist” focus on the state, viewed as “a set of

17 See, for example: David Bien, “La Réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’Example de l’armée,”
Annales: E
.
S
.
C
. 29 (1974): 23–48 and 505–34, and “The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution,”
Past and Present
85 (1979): 68–98; and Isser Woloch,
The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

18 Albert Sorel,
L’Europe et la Révolution franc¸aise
, 8 vols. (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1885–1904).

19 Robert R. Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941); and
The Age of the Democratic
Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America
, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959–64).

20 See D. M. G. Sutherland,
France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and William Doyle,
The Oxford History
of the French Revolution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

21 Theda Skocpol,
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia,
and China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Introduction

7

administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and more or

less well coordinated by, an executive authority.” The state, Skocpol main-

tained, is “potentially autonomous from (though of course conditioned by)

socioeconomic interests and structures,” and at base is “geared to maintain

control of home territories and populations and to undertake actual or po-

tential military competition with other states in the international system.”

As applied to France, Skocpol’s argument turned upon the efforts of the

policymakers and administrators of 1789–99 to uphold their country’s

competitive status abroad through an unprecedentedly thorough utiliza-

tion of human and material assets on the home front. For this analyst,

accordingly, the cardinal bequest of the Revolution to future generations

of French citizens was not (as it had always been for the Marxists) a mod-

ernized, more capitalist economy nor (as it was soon to become for the

political-cultural school) a novel tradition of democratic republicanism,

but rather a reconstructed state power equipped for the European and

(increasingly) global struggles to come.

This attempt by a political sociologist to account for the cataclysm of

1789–99 within a context of international politics – though with reference

as well to domestic forces of socioeconomic change in the countryside –

has provoked a legion of criticisms in learned circles. The cultural historian

William H. Sewell, Jr., has probably spoken for a very large number of his

colleagues in faulting Skocpol for so rigorously shunning any consideration

of cultural and ideological forces in the revolutionary process.22 Lynn Hunt

has commented upon the tautological, lock-step nature of Skocpol’s model,

in which the causes, process, and outcome of revolution are allegedly con-

flated in such a manner as to make it virtually impossible to appraise the

events and personalities of this dramatic period in their own right.23 Jack

Goldstone, like Skocpol a sociologist, has argued for less of a focus upon the

wages of (unsuccessful) military competition and more of a stress upon the

destabilization of state and society supposedly induced by “the mounting

population and inflationary pressures of the eighteenth century.”24 Critics

have in addition complained that Skocpol’s comparative schema, encom-

passing as it does revolutionary change in Russia and China as well as in

France, overstates in the French case the revolutionary role of the peasantry

and underestimates that of bourgeois and humble townspeople.

22 See William H. Sewell, Jr., “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,”
Journal of Modern History
57 (1985): 66–67, 84. But see, in the same issue, Skocpol’s reply: “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell,” pp. 86–96.

23 See Hunt,
Politics, Culture, and Class
, esp. pp. 221–24.

24 Jack Goldstone,
Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 208, 211, and 250. Goldstone’s stress upon demographic and derivative economic factors is certainly original and stimulating; nonetheless, I think that he vastly overrates their significance.

8

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

What such strictures tell us at the very least is that this explanation of

major social revolutions, like any similarly ambitious argument, can be

challenged from many perspectives. But it is Hunt’s and Sewell’s reactions

that have struck a particularly resonant chord among those toiling in the

trenches of French Revolutionary research, since they raise two espe-

cially fundamental questions. First, can we unreservedly endorse Theda

Skocpol’s thesis that the origins, development, and results of this up-

heaval were essentially cut from the same cloth, and are therefore to

be comprehended today in one set of explanatory terms? If this be

true, the historian need not worry about playing up the discontinuities

in the revolutionary experience, for they turn out to be less deserving

of note than underlying historical continuities. Second, there is Skocpol’s

premise that a “structuralist” account of the maelstrom of 1789–99

hinging upon the interacting realities of statist competition abroad and

statist “semiautonomy” at home has to prove more satisfactory than a

“voluntarist” perspective keying upon the revolutionary roles of individual

actors and/or social groups and/or ideologies. If this is accurate, the histo-

rian must concede that it was the French state, pursuing as a bureaucratic

entity geostrategic and impersonal objectives, that instigated, carried out,

and benefited from the Revolution, and not previously unempowered

individuals or groups of individuals inspired by revolutionary ideology.

This latter assumption – that, for analytical purposes, the state can be

reified as a historical “actor” imposing its “will” more or less independently

upon society – has been especially challenged in the light of recent work

in the field. Scholars usually departing from Furetian analyses of political

culture have been blazing new paths in hitherto unexplored hinterlands

of gender, linguistic analysis, and all that is currently subsumed under the

rubric of the “new cultural history.” In doing so, they have usefully sug-

gested novel ways of conceptualizing the (French) state. It may yield rich

dividends, Suzanne Desan has written, to view the state “more flexibly

as a site of structured negotiation over power, resources, and relation-

ships, rather than simply as a coercive entity separate from society.” Such

an approach, Desan and other sociocultural historians have maintained,

would facilitate inquiries into the exceedingly complex relationships be-

tween revolutionary institutions and individuals, relationships mediated

by the political culture of the period. The considerable ability of the state

to structure social behavior and expectations would continue to be recog-

nized even as governmental norms and procedures are portrayed as being

themselves conditioned in part by developments within the revolutionary

society at large.25

25 See Suzanne Desan, “What’s after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary

Historiography,”
French Historical Studies
23 (Winter 2000): 163–96.

Introduction

9

Such theorizing may indeed provide a needed corrective to the

Skocpolian tendency to reify the state – in this case, the French Revolu-

tionary state. In a larger, historiographical sense, of course, observations

like these also remind us that no explanatory paradigm currently dominates

the field of revolutionary studies. What we seem to have, in the wake of the

demise of the old socioeconomic argument, is a somewhat decentralized

but no less fruitful dialogue between advocates of one or another brand of

“social revisionism,” on the one hand, and ever-multiplying proponents

of “political-cultural” and “new-cultural” analysis, on the other.

Yet, at the risk of exposing myself to the slings and arrows of informed

criticism in this contentious field, I would maintain that there is a way

to enlist insights from both the “social revisionists” and the “political-

cultural” analysts in the service of an explanation of the French Revolution

hinging upon the roles of a carefully redefined French state. For it is cer-

tainly arguable that, if subtly conceived, that state can in fact still be seen

as crucial to the onset, process, and various outcomes of the Revolution.

On the one hand, no reasonable specialist in this period can deny that

the single most pressing reality that those governing or aspiring to govern

France had to confront throughout this period was their country’s cen-

trality in the evolving European and extra-European struggle for survival,

power, and prestige. This was as inescapable a reality for politicians in the

radiant dawn of revolution as it had been for their most cynical predeces-

sors in the ancien régime. We need not revert to Albert Sorel’s excessively

one-sided preoccupation with the international aspects of the Revolution

to make this point. We can, however, note with some interest that the

recent inquiries of T. C. W. Blanning into the historical forces and diplo-

matic calculations behind the French Revolutionary wars point in much

the same direction.26 In addition, we can join Blanning in avowing that the

international concerns of France’s leaders were a thread tying the entire

revolutionary era to the years preceding it and the years following it.

To a certain limited extent, then, the origins, process, and aftermath of