Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (63 page)

tion, Thermidorian politicians and Directors thereafter – had endeavored

(and failed) to master the revolutionary process in France. “Why shouldn’t

a victorious general become the chief of state in turn?”120 Perhaps. But

behind what might initially appear to have been a simple “process of elim-

ination of alternative solutions,” deeper forces were at work. Early on in

the Revolution, observers as ideologically dissimilar as Edmund Burke in

England and Maximilien Robespierre in France had foreseen the possibility

of a military finale to this upheaval. In retrospect, they appear to have

shared this vital insight: that a country long given over to (and likely for

the foreseeable future to embrace) the waging of war, yet striving at the

118 Woloch,
Jacobin Legacy
, pp. 370–71.

119 Lyons,
France under the Directory
, pp. 228–29.

120 Godechot,
France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799
, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 246–47.

258

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

same time to renew social institutions at home, would be prone at some

point to entrust its international and domestic tasks to some charismatic

soldier/statesman. That, by the late 1790s, politics of
all
hues on the spectrum, and society at large, had become so thoroughly militarized by the

experience of the Revolution only pointed further to the realization of

such a prophecy. Hence, in this more profound sense as well, Godechot

was correct. Napoleon Bonaparte himself was not “inevitable”; but some-

one very much like him was, by this time, scarcely to be avoided.

Conclusion: the Revolution in the

French and global context

The French Revolution, one scholar has recently concluded, was a “decisive

historical rupture” that placed Louis XVI and his eventual successor,

Napoleon I, in “totally different spheres.”1 To adopt this view is to dis-

agree in some measure with those writers, from Alexis de Tocqueville to

Georges Lefebvre to Franc¸ois Furet, who over the years have accentuated

continuities undergirding historical developments in prerevolutionary, rev-

olutionary, and postrevolutionary France.2 In completing what we have

defined in these pages as a “global-historical” analysis of the upheavals

of 1789–99, we may find it possible to accommodate both of these

explanatory tendencies. In doing so, however, we shall probably have to

conclude that most historians of the Revolution, whether they stress themes

of discontinuity or themes of continuity in their work, have failed to situate

the drama of 1789–99 in its larger, international/domestic context. This

will become increasingly clear in this Conclusion as we do essentially two

things: (1) reassess the Revolution against the broad backdrop of early-

modern and modern French history; and (2) situate it within a world-

historical context of modern sociopolitical upheavals.

On the first point, if there is anything that we have learned from our phase-

by-phase analysis of the French Revolution, it is that the men dictating

French destinies in this period were driven in their politics and policy-

making by a “dialectic” of foreign and domestic concerns. To say this,

however, is not to cite something in the French experience that was unique

to the revolutionary era. One of the most intriguing findings to emerge

in recent years from a growing body of historical works has been that

1 Martyn Lyons,
Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 296.

2 Refer again to any edition of Tocqueville,
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
; Lefebvre,
The Coming of the French Revolution
, esp. chap. 1; and Furet,
Interpreting the
French Revolution
, passim.

259

260

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

this dialectic of external and domestic pressures has played a key role in

shaping France’s public life at various times – that is to say, during certain

specific periods – ever since the dawn of the old regime. As a general rule,

this phenomenon has been most pronounced when the French have found

themselves preoccupied with international issues of security and prestige.

Since the Revolution occurred in the midst of one of these foreign-policy-

dominated periods, its commingling of external and internal incentives

to reform was only to be expected. In this fundamental sense, then, the

maelstrom of 1789–99 was but a microcosm – unprecedentedly dramatic

and sharply defined as an historical event, to be sure, but nonetheless a

microcosm – of the early-modern and modern French experience.

There is no need at this point to review the myriad ways in which the di-

alectic of external and domestic challenges to French statesmen manifested

itself in prerevolutionary times. My earlier synthesis identified the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries as a period during which France gradually

shifted from a defensive posture vis-à-vis the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs to

an expansionist “mission” both in Europe and on the high seas. Against this

background, it presented as exemplary of the dynamic interplay between

international and domestic forces such developments as the proliferation of

venal offices, the deepening divisions within the army, the gradual reduction

of social-status-related tax exemptions, and the growing constitutional

confrontation between the crown and the tax-resisting parlements of the

realm.3 All of these phenomena point to one paramount fact: that the old

regime’s ruling elite, pursuing its vision of a perdurably secure and pow-

erful France, was compelled to sponsor domestic policies that over time

became ever more difficult to reconcile with the social and ideological tenets

underpinning absolutism and social privilege. The bellicose ancien régime,

to put it succinctly, did much to dig its own grave. The end result was the

Revolution.

But, again, this is ground we have already explored in manifold detail.

What might be more useful at this point would be to suggest cursorily how

the dynamic interaction between foreign and domestic affairs reasserted

itself in French politics and policy-making in postrevolutionary times. Such

an analytical perspective appears in hindsight to apply most fruitfully to

the Napoleonic era (1799–1815), when French war making scored its most

spectacular achievements, and to the years from 1870 to 1945, when a

unified Germany forced French foreign policy back onto the defensive.

In the years immediately after the Revolution, dominated as they were

by Napoleon Bonaparte, the international/domestic dialectic is all too easy

to discern and need not detain us long. “The Consulate and the Empire,”

3 Refer again to Stone,
The Genesis of the French Revolution
, esp. chaps. 2, 4, and 5.

Conclusion: the Revolution in the French and global context

261

it has been said, “were not simply exercises in domestic political stabi-

lization under authoritarian ‘modernizing’ rule. Institutionally speaking,

Napoleon’s regimes furthered the fusion of the political and the mili-

tary, and the subordination of domestic policy to foreign policy, that had

begun under the Jacobins and progressed through the Directory.” In the

Napoleonic armies that rampaged from the Iberian Peninsula to the Middle

East and Moscow, the requirements of “high politics” and of civil society

forcefully merged. In putting together his
Grande Armée
, Napoleon

artfully realized the democratic and meritocratic potentialities of the

Revolution. In marshaling such vast forces on battlefields all over Europe,

he demonstrated how effectively the energies of the masses released within

France by revolution could be turned to geostrategic purposes far beyond

the country’s borders.4 Moreover, in the less tangible but equally im-

portant realm of political culture, the first Bonapartist empire actually

“democratized” the bureaucratic-military values of the old French society,

“giving the people access to a domain once reserved for the aristocracy.” Far

from having delegitimized these values of the old France, the Napoleonic

adventure positively reinforced them.5 Furthermore, the France of future

generations would only solidify the triumph of bureaucratic-military

values, values that owed more to the “French absolutism and . . . state-

bureaucratized society of the Ancien Régime” than to the newfangled

“Manchester” spirit of capitalism.6

Of course, the French could not indefinitely pursue war making on

such a grandiose scale: after 1815, domestic policy would never again be

so crushingly subordinated to the requirements of such an ambitious for-

eign policy. In this connection, it is noteworthy that among the clearest

“winners” emerging from the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras were

Frenchmen not at all implicated, at least directly, in the operations of the

modern fiscal-military “establishment.” In any inventory of such gainers,

holders of property must loom large. Property, above all rural property,

would define the elite of notables ruling France, as electors, through most

of the nineteenth century. Though, for a long time, restored nobles would

continue to predominate in the ranks of the great proprietors, and though,

at the other end of the social spectrum, small peasant landholders were the

most numerous beneficiaries of the revolutionary land settlement, it was

“bourgeois” citizens who would profit most handsomely from the sales

4 Theda Skocpol and Meyer Kestnbaum, “Mars Unshackled: The French Revolution in

World-Historical Perspective,” in Ferenc Fehér, ed.,
The French Revolution and the Birth
of Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 23–24.

5 Franc¸ois Furet, “Transformations in the Historiography of the Revolution,” trans. Brian Singer, in ibid., p. 271.

6 Ibid.

262

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

of crown and ecclesiastical lands. The
notabilité
of post-1815 France, then, was a reconstituted elite of landholders (and of professionals of various

stripes) as well as of politicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers.7

But in the years after 1870, even as proprietors and professionals con-

tinued to enjoy legacies of wealth, status, and power handed down to them

from the revolutionary-Napoleonic era, they would find international

affairs once again casting a long shadow across the landscapes of their

lives. In the wake of France’s resounding defeat in the Franco-Prussian

War, geostrategic issues took on an urgency at Paris not experienced for

generations. In practical terms, this meant a replay of the old, pre-1815

script: namely, French legislators and policymakers were caught between

interacting geopolitical and domestic-political imperatives.

In no area was this more dramatically apparent than that of welfare

reform. Particularly relevant to our argument is the fact that the historiog-

raphy on the rise of the welfare state in this period has, in the words of one

leading specialist, “undergone a sea-change in recent years.” The prevailing

wisdom once had it that the Third Republic established the welfare state

by enacting “a battery of social reforms – old-age pensions, accident insur-

ance, and the like – that were aimed at pacifying an expansive and militant

working class.” This interpretation, however, has yielded much ground to

a scholarly vision of pro-family reforms
predating
the turn-of-the-century

workers’ legislation, reforms driven by anxiety “not so much about social

disorder as about a declining birth rate, degeneration of racial stock, and

loss of stature vis-à-vis France’s competitors on the continent.”8

A number of feminist scholars, concerned above all to examine the

gendered aspects of modern social reform and thus focusing as much

upon French mothers and children as upon male workers, have figured

prominently in this recent historiographical “sea-change.” What is most

significant from our “globalist” viewpoint, however, is the fact that