Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (4 page)

the Revolution
were
cut from the same cloth.

On the other hand, just as no fair-minded observer can deny that the

revolutionary leaders from start to finish were burdened with the legacies

of past wars, the current needs of national defense, and anticipations of

possible conflicts to come, so must that same hypothetical observer view

the revolutionaries as caught up also in their own interests and expectations

of domestic reform and as responding to every imaginable kind of pressure

in French politics and society. Hence, it might be particularly advisable,

26 T. C. W. Blanning,
The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
(London: Longman, 1986), and, more recently,
The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

10

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

in reassessing the important foreign and domestic policies of the period

and retracing the twists and turns of domestic politics, to underscore the

complexways in which those policies and politics, mediated continually

by the political culture of the day, mirrored both European
and
uniquely

French realities. This is, of course, another way of saying that the French

state can only be an effective locus of analysis and vehicle of explanation

if it is conceived simultaneously as an initiator of policy and events and as

a focal point for political, ideological, and social struggle.

Essentially, what I am proposing to do in this study is to extend to the

French Revolution a modified version of the perspective I employed in an

earlier book to explain the anterior development, decline, and demise of

the old regime.27 The interpretation, as before, will be synthetic in nature,

drawing from the best work in many fields of historiography. Yet it will

also be “modified” along the lines indicated above: acknowledging the

complexity of revolutionary politics and of state–citizen relationships in

this period, it will continually revisit issues of political culture without

abandoning a central concern with the roles of governance in France’s

public affairs. A brief exposition of the argument would seem at this point

to be in order.

Chapter 1 will summarize developments in the old regime. It will first

review the increasingly global outreach of French foreign policy after 1715

and suggest how, given changes in the European state system, that out-

reach was probably destined to fail. Next, it will examine the many ways in

which the absolute Bourbon monarchy, insufficiently responsive to strate-

gic realities abroad, also proved in the end to be insufficiently responsive

to ever-evolving sociopolitical and ideological realities at home. Finally,

it will maintain that the convergence of these statist failures lay behind

the unprecedented politicization of the citizenry in the “prerevolution” of

1787–88 and ultimately brought about the government’s financial collapse

in the summer of 1788.

Chapter 2 will reexamine the process of France’s descent into

full-fledged revolution, from the government’s definitive admission of

bankruptcy in August 1788 to the removal of both king and self-proclaimed

National Assembly from Versailles to Paris in the wake of the October

Days of 1789. The argument will require an initial concentration upon

the dangers faced by a paralyzed France in a Europe seemingly primed

(as usual) for interstate warfare. The chapter will then turn to the domestic

crisis of a government shaken by its revelation of bankruptcy and besieged

by polarized social “notables” and popular insurgents. It will reappraise

27 Bailey Stone,
The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Introduction

11

the differing prescriptions for reform offered by Finance Minister Jacques

Necker and Louis XVI and then explain how the political initiative during

these transitional months gradually shifted from the crown to the most

progressive deputies in the National (Constituent) Assembly.

Chapter 3 will reassess the first attempt to stabilize the Revolution – at

this juncture, upon the basis of a constitutional Bourbon monarchy – which

lasted from October 1789 through the summer of 1791. Our general thesis

will again call for an initial concentration upon the challenges confronting

the French government in Europe and overseas. The focus then will shift to

the domestic front. Chapter 3 at this point will discuss a number of the most

significant institutional and social measures enacted by the Constituent

Assembly. It will also query to what extent these reforms reflected the state’s

multifarious needs and to what extent they resulted from a “domestic” cal-

culus of both “middle-class” interests and more broadly conceived human-

itarian concerns. The concluding section of the chapter will deal with the

continuing shift of political initiative from the crown and its conservative

adherents to the most progressive constituent assemblymen.

Chapter 4 will reassess the “revolutionizing of the Revolution,” an es-

pecially dramatic phase in the upheaval that commenced more or less with

the first Legislative Assembly sessions in October 1791 and ended abruptly

with the fall of the emergency Robespierrist dictatorship in Thermidor,

Year II ( July 1794). It will be even more imperative now to start with a

reappraisal of the international situation, for the evolution of French policy

and politics during this entire period took place against the constant back-

drop of mounting European challenge to the revolutionary experiment.

The next section of Chapter 4, like the analogous section in Chapter 3,

will not only review the key domestic measures implemented by the rev-

olutionaries but also reevaluate the roles played in the enactment of those

policies by statist calculations on the one hand and by class-oriented and/or

genuinely altruistic considerations on the other. The closing section of the

chapter will revisit the theme of political radicalization, which during this

stage of the Revolution played itself out in the factional struggles of the

Legislative Assembly and National Convention, and in the horrific political

and ideological climaxof the Terror.

Chapter 5 will reexamine the second attempt by the French to achieve

some degree of revolutionary stability, this time under the republican aus-

pices of the Thermidorian Convention (1794–95) and Directory (1795–99).

Analysis will have to bear first of all upon the gradual but momentous shift

in French foreign policy from national defense to national aggrandize-

ment, and upon the European reaction to this development. Chapter 5 will

then reinterpret the institutional and social policies of the 1794–99 period

in terms of the revolutionaries’ commingled diplomatic and domestic con-

cerns. It will conclude by returning one last time to the question of political

12

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

evolution, which in this closing phase of the Revolution expressed itself

primarily as a polarization and “militarization” of politics leading directly

to the Bonapartist coup of November 1799.

A Conclusion, after briefly restating the central thesis of the study and

summarizing the conclusions to be derived from it, will situate the entire

revolutionary experience in a broader historical context, with reference to

the
longue durée
of early modern, modern, and “contemporary” French

(and world) history.

The argument, as outlined above, will “play” the French Revolution as

tragedy – but tragedy with a certain ironic twist. At one level, it is easy

to view the whole revolutionary experience as demonstrating the relent-

less durability of
expedience
– the expedience of “bourgeois” class inter-

ests, to be sure, but, equally, of French anxieties about and aspirations in

Europe – and the ultimate fragility of more altruistic concerns. Whatever

some historians may have written, the Revolution was
not
suddenly and

fortuitously blown off course as the French turned to massive warfare dur-

ing the 1790s.28 In one fashion or another, war inhered in the Revolution

from the start, and even before the start: in its causation as well as in its

course and its aftermath. The sanguinary Terror of 1793–94 was, in hind-

sight, implicit not so much in the rhetoric and ideology of the times as in

the paramount need of this proud nation to prevail, by whatever desperate

means, in the sullied, scarred European world of the late eighteenth cen-

tury. No faction of politicians could escape from this compelling reality,

a reality that from one year to the next came to acquire precedence over

all other realities. Whatever the revolutionaries might strive to do for their

constituents (and, as we have already noted, our analytical approach obliges

us to take account of those ameliorative efforts), they were forced in the

end to tailor their dreams and their reforms to statist exigencies even more,

perhaps, than to their sense of immediate “class” interest.

At a deeper level of perception, however, the sense of tragedy yields to

irony – the irony in the fact that, to one extent or another,
all
persons in the new polity struggling to establish itself had a stake in the restoration

of France’s stature in the world, whether or not they were aware of this. It

may be true that those on the fringes, or beyond the pale, of “civilized” and

domiciled society were in fact as indifferent to the Revolution in general as

their chronicler Richard Cobb has suggested in many studies.29 Moreover,

28 An argument put forth by, among others, Franc¸ois Furet and Denis Richet in
The French
Revolution
, trans. Stephen Hardman (New York: Macmillan, 1970), esp. chap. 5.

29 See, for example: Richard Cobb,
The Police and the People: French Popular Protest,
1789–1820
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);
Reactions to the French Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and
Paris and Its Provinces, 1792–1802

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

Introduction

13

the Revolution insofar as it was a Parisian phenomenon undeniably

violated at times the sensibilities (and the material interests) of those in the

provinces.30 Yet again, it is all too obvious that it categorically withheld its

most meaningful opportunities, and many of its benefits, from women.31

Still, even these unfortunates were shielded by the Revolution’s military

successes from the worst depredations of Europe’s other armies (though,

on occasion, they were harassed and oppressed by their own troops), and in

some instances they genuinely profited from social and economic reforms

enacted in this era. As for those adult males definitely sporting the new

citizenship, they certainly stood to gain in more concrete ways from

innovations that afforded them new civic options while associating them

with an eventually triumphant patriotic “cause.” The feuding revolution-

ary leaders, then, if compelled all too often to rob the Peter of socially

beneficent expenditure to pay the Paul of military defense and aggran-

dizement, nevertheless were directly or indirectly serving the interests of

Frenchmen (and, yes, politically unenfranchised Frenchwomen too) in

all
walks of life.

We might sound one final cautionary note in this connection. No matter

how necessary it may be for our analytical purposes to separate the revolu-

tionary leaders’ governmental priorities from all the political and ideolog-

ical and social issues they had constantly to engage, in the daily affairs of

the Revolution these innumerable and conflicting matters could not be so

easily sorted out. Still, we can assert in general terms that France’s guiding

spirits were striving to fashion and control critical foreign and domestic

policies even as they themselves were borne upon the tide of clamorous

events. And in this, as in much else, the years of upheaval testified both to

the dogged continuities of French history and to the exhilarating novelties

of revolutionary hopes and actions.

30 This has been pointed out in numerous excellent monographs on the Revolution in the provinces. For one of the most recent of these works, see Alan Forrest,
The Revolution
in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Our study will have to deal recurrently with the tensions between the capital and the provinces during the revolutionary era.

31 There is a steadily growing corpus of works on the roles of women in the revolutionary era. See, as examples in point: Olwen Hufton,
Women and the Limits of Citizenship
in the French Revolution
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine, eds.,
Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Shirley E. Roessler,
Out of the Shadows:
Women and Politics in the French Revolution, 1789–1795
(New York: Peter Lang, 1996); and Dominique Godineau,
The Women of Paris and the French Revolution
, trans.