Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (65 page)

French in 1789, unlike their revolutionary forerunners, were attempting

to live up to a very old tradition of greatness in the chief geostrategic

theaters of the world; and they were essaying this in the teeth of the armed

opposition of much of Europe. Is it at all astonishing, in the light of these

realities, that the Terror of 1793–94 had no real equivalent in either of the

earlier revolutions? On the other hand, the upheaval in France was less

18 Hunt,
Politics, Culture, and Class
, pp. 224 and 236.

19 Stone,
The Genesis of the French Revolution
, p. 237.

Conclusion: the Revolution in the French and global context

267

brutal and involved less thoroughgoing sociopolitical change than either

the Russian or the Chinese Revolution. This was so for a number of reasons,

of course; but foremost among them was the fact that the Russians and the

Chinese in the first half of the twentieth century faced, in Germany and

Japan respectively, much greater external threats to their existence than

the French confronted in the 1790s, and did so, in part, because of greater

relative technological and infrastructural backwardness than the French

had to overcome in the late eighteenth century.

So the winds of change that gusted across the picturesque French land-

scape during 1789–99 were pivotal in what we might call the world history

of revolution. Although the cataclysm in France has sometimes been re-

garded as the last and most profound of the “liberal” or presocialist revo-

lutions of the early-modern West, it also looked forward to the socialist or

communist upheavals of the twentieth century. The imperative driving the

French toward sociopolitical modernization was, for sure, not so much

a dire threat to France’s continued existence from one or several expan-

sionist and vastly more advanced rival states as it was a vision, “imposed

from within,” of revived French greatness in the competitive world at large;

but it was an imperative, an undeniable challenge, nonetheless. Moreover,

once the Revolution in France had gotten under way, it launched a chal-

lenge to the monarchical-“feudal” world of its time comparable in many

ways to the challenge hurled later at the liberal-“capitalist” world by the

revolutions in Russia and China. And, like those upheavals, and others that

have taken place in the past century on a less enormous scale, it survived

despite the violent efforts of its enemies to destroy it.20

Of course, whether we reinterpret the Revolution against the backdrop of

specifically French history or set it within a larger context of world history,

we can plausibly accentuate either its traditional or its novel aspects – or

both, for that matter. Yet, to bring this inquiry to a close, we shall probably

do best to reiterate what has been from the start its central contention: that

the ultimate significance of the French Revolution transcends the domes-

tic gains or breakthroughs that various interpretations have attributed to it

over the years. Yes, the Revolution innovated in the realm of popular polit-

ical culture and helped to found a new politics of “democratic republican-

ism.” Yes, it foreshadowed – and helped to lay the groundwork for – the

20 There is, of course, a vast historical and sociological literature analyzing, comparing, and contrasting sociopolitical revolutions in the early modern and modern eras. There is still no better survey of that literature than the one offered in the first section of Skocpol,
States and Social Revolutions
. Of the comparative studies that have appeared since the publication of Skocpol’s book, one of the most stimulating is Arno J. Mayer,
The Furies:
Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

268

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

rule of landed “notables” in nineteenth-century France. Yes, it removed

or weakened at least some of the obstacles barring the way to a more

“class-conscious” and entrepreneurial society. And, yes, it immensely

facilitated the triumph of the centralized, bureaucratized state – that

quintessentially “modern” creation that was possibly the prime benefi-

ciary of the upheaval of 1789–99. The Revolution did all these things,

but it also did something of yet greater import, something of genuinely

global-historical significance. It pointed unerringly to the overarching

international/domestic challenge that confronts all modern leaders of

goodwill in an unforgivingly competitive world.

The imperative need of France’s revolutionary policymakers to mobilize

their country’s human and material resources so as to ensure its survival

and restore its battered prestige in the world’s affairs guaranteed that they

would sympathize with the grievances and in fact address the needs of indi-

viduals and groups in society – but only insofar as doing so accorded with

the demands of French
raison d’état
. And in this the French Revolution

anticipated so very much of what was to come, most obviously in the future

years of France itself, but also (to a greater or lesser extent) in countries

all over Europe, and indeed all over the globe. Even today, and perhaps

today more than ever before, what even the most benevolent political lead-

ers can do for their peoples is deeply conditioned by the strategies they

must adopt in confronting the competitive forces of their contemporary

world. By pointing the way toward this challenging reality, and by doing

so in such a dramatic, unforgettable fashion, the French Revolution made

its deepest impression upon modern France, and indeed upon the modern

world as a whole.

Suggestions for further reading

It would obviously be impossible to provide here a complete inventory

of the scholarly literature on the French Revolution. Rather, my inten-

tion in this bibliographical essay is to point the interested reader toward

a few of the classic studies in the field as well as some carefully selected

scholarship of recent years. These works seem to fall most naturally into the

following seven categories: General Accounts and Historiography; Origins

and Background; Diplomacy and War; Domestic Politics; Administrative

and Financial Reforms; Socioeconomic Developments; and Religious and

Cultural Issues. Naturally, these are not hard-and-fast categories; conse-

quently, the reader who cannot locate a specific work under one rubric may

very well find it under a related heading. Additional sources appear in the

footnotes. This is especially true regarding the extensive documentation

on the old regime cited in connection with Chapter 1.

g e n e r a l a c c o u n t s a n d h i s t o r i o g r a p h y

The reader seeking a “Marxist” view of the Revolution should consult

either Georges Lefebvre,
The French Revolution
, trans. E. Evanson and

J. H. Stewart, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), or

Albert Soboul,
The French Revolution: 1787–1799
, trans. A. Forrest and

C. Jones (New York: Random House, 1962). Important “social revisionist”

works include: Alfred Cobban,
The Social Interpretation of the French

Revolution
, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);

Franc¸ois Furet and Denis Richet,
The French Revolution
, trans. Stephen

Hardman (New York: Macmillan,1970); and, by Furet himself,
Interpreting

the French Revolution
, trans. Elborg Forster (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1981). Claude Mazauric has spoken for the Marxist

defense in
Sur la Révolution franc¸aise
(Paris: Editions Sociales, 1970). Two urbane overviews of the debate between Marxist and social-revisionist historians are: Geoffrey Ellis, “The ‘Marxist Interpretation’ of the French

269

270

Suggestions for Further Reading

Revolution,”
English Historical Review
93 (1978): 353–76, and George

Comninel,
Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist

Challenge
(New York: Verso, 1987). See also, in this connection, Furet,

Marx and the French Revolution
, trans. Deborah Kan Furet (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1988). A recent valuable insight into Furet’s

rendering of the Revolution is offered by Michael 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 (1999): 557–611.

Theda Skocpol has advanced a very different exegesis of the Revolution

in
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia,

and China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Her expla-

nation has been challenged by William H. Sewell, Jr., in “Ideologies and

Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,”
Journal of Modern

History
57 (1985): 57–85. But see also Skocpol’s reply in the same issue,

pp. 86–96: “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary

Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell.” Similarly critical of

Skocpol, and promoting a “political-cultural” reading of the Revolution, is

Lynn Hunt,
Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution
(Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1984).

Dating from about the time of the Bicentennial are four works on

the revolutionary era revealing substantial interpretive depth. They are:

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

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); John F. Bosher,
The French

Revolution
(New York: Norton, 1988); William Doyle,
The Oxford

History of the French Revolution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and

Simon Schama,
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
(New York:

Knopf, 1989). Jack R. Censer has perceptively evaluated these four sur-

veys in “Commencing the Third Century of Debate,”
American Historical

Review
94 (1989): 1309–25.

Since the Bicentennial, yet other scholars have come forth with

overviews of the Revolution accentuating specific aspects of historical

change. See, for example, Florin Aftalion,
The French Revolution: An

Economic Interpretation
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990),

and David Andress,
French Society in Revolution, 1789–1799
(Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1999). Then again, a number of specialists

have placed the revolutionary upheaval within a broader context of

“modernization” and other international processes. See, as examples

of this, Ferenc Fehér, ed.,
The French Revolution and the Birth of

Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Joseph

Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, eds.,
The Global Ramifications of the

French Revolution
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Suggestions for further reading

271

As of this writing, clearly, no one interpretation dominates the field. For

some of the latest historiographical trends, see: Jack R. Censer, “Social

Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade

after the Bicentennial,”
French Historical Studies
22 (1999): 139–67; and

Suzanne Desan, “What’s after Political Culture? Recent French Revolu-

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

o r i g i n s a n d b a c k g r o u n d

Books focusing on the specific issue of revolutionary origins have multi-

plied over the years. The reader here can do no better than commence with

Alexis de Tocqueville,
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
, trans.

Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1954). The classic neo-Marxist ren-

dering of revolutionary causes remains Georges Lefebvre,
The Coming

of the French Revolution
, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1947; reissued 1989). Lefebvre’s ideas were vigorously

challenged in the 1960s by Elizabeth Eisenstein, “Who Intervened in 1788?