Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (68 page)

Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice
(New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1997).

s o c i o e c o n o m i c d e v e l o p m e n t s

Under this heading, the reader may usefully begin by reviewing the

scholarly literature on the
cahiers de doléances
of 1789. A number of

historians have analyzed them to explore the tensions between nobles

and bourgeois in the early days of the Revolution. See, notably: George

Taylor, “Revolutionary and Nonrevolutionary Content in the Cahiers of

1789: An Interim Report,”
French Historical Studies
7 (1972): 479–502;

Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret,
La Noblesse au XVIIIe siècle. De la féodalite

aux lumières
(Paris: Hachette, 1976); Roger Chartier, “Culture, lumières,

dolèances: Les Cahiers de 1789,”
Revue d’histoire moderne et contem-

poraine
28 (1981): 68–93; and Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, et al., eds.,

Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de doléances

of 1789
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).

The fate of the nobility in the revolutionary maelstrom has of course

attracted much scholarly attention over the years. The reader can still find

much useful information in two studies by Donald Greer:
The Incidence

of the Terror during the French Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1935), and
The Incidence of the Emigration during

the French Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1951). Robert Forster has offered subsequent reflections on the subject in

“The Survival of the Nobility during the French Revolution,”
Past and

280

Suggestions for Further Reading

Present
37 (1967): 71–86. Even more recently there is Patrice Higonnet,

Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

On the “bourgeoisie” (in this supposedly “bourgeois” revolution) there

is considerably less scholarship. The reader, still, may wish to consult the

following works, among others: Jeffrey Kaplow, ed.,
New Perspectives

on the French Revolution
(New York: John Wiley, 1965); William Sewell,

A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Siéyès and
“
What Is

the Third Estate?
” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); and

David Garrioch,
The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690–1830

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Over the past several decades, without doubt, practitioners of social

history have shown a special interest in the urban and rural masses. On the

former subject, a classic is Albert Soboul,
The Sans-Culottes: The Popular

Movement and Revolutionary Government 1793–1794
, trans. Rémy Inglis

Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). Several of the

articles in Jeffrey Kaplow’s anthology
New Perspectives
, cited in the

preceding paragraph, are also significant in this connection. George Rudé

has studied the great popular insurrections of the Parisian revolution in

The Crowd in the French Revolution
(New York: Oxford University

Press, 1959). Rudé has adopted a more comparative approach to the

subject in
Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Viking

Press, 1973). Colin Lucas offers some updated reflections, at least for the

early Revolution, in “The Crowd and Politics between
Ancien Régime

and Revolution in France,”
Journal of Modern History
60 (1988): 421–57.

William Sewell analyzes the discourses of Parisian laborers in
Work and

Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to

1848
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Georges Lefebvre was indisputably the foremost historian of the

peasantry in the French Revolution. His greatest work is
Les Paysans du

Nord pendant la Révolution franc¸aise
(Paris: A. Colin, 1924). But see also, by Lefebvre,
The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France
,

trans. Joan White (New York: Pantheon, 1973). Albert Soboul collected

his articles on the French peasants in
Problèmes paysans de la Révolution

(1789–1848)
(Paris: Maspero, 1976). P. M. Jones provides a more recent syn-

thesis on the subject in
The Peasantry in the French Revolution
(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988). Among American specialists in this

area, John Markoff clearly stands out. Consult, among his efforts: “Peasant

Grievances and Peasant Insurrection: France in 1789,”
Journal of Modern

History
62 (1990): 445–76; “Peasants Protest: The Claims of Lord, Church,

and State in the
Cahiers de Doléances
of 1789,”
Comparative Studies

in Society and History
32 (1990): 413–54; “Violence, Emancipation, and

Suggestions for further reading

281

Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,”
American

Historical Review
100 (1995): 360–86; and
The Abolition of Feudalism:

Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution
(University Park,

Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Yet Markoff shares his

expertise somewhat with fellow American Hilton Root: see, by the latter,

“Challenging the Seigneurie: Community and Contention on the Eve of

the French Revolution,”
Journal of Modern History
57 (1985): 652–81. For

a broader perspective on the issue of peasants in revolution, see J. Craig

Jenkins, “Why Do Peasants Rebel? Structural and Historical Theories

of Modern Peasant Rebellions,”
American Journal of Sociology
88 (1982):

487–514.

Some historians have preferred to deal with “popular” history in ways

that transcend the boundaries between urban and rural plebeians. The

exemplar of this approach in recent decades has been Richard Cobb. See,

among his works:
The Police and the People: French Popular Protest,

1789–1820
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);
Paris and Its

Provinces, 1792–1802
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); and

The People’s Armies: The Armées révolutionnaires
, trans. Marianne Elliott

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). In a somewhat similar

mode are books authored by several of Cobb’s countrymen. See, for

example: Alan Forrest,
The French Revolution and the Poor
(New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 1981); and, by Colin Jones, two studies:
Charity

and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region,

1740–1815
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and
The

Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and

Revolutionary France
(London: Routledge, 1989).

There is also an ever-growing body of works on the roles of women in

the revolutionary era. These include (but are scarcely limited to) Harriet

B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy, eds.,
Women and Politics in the Age

of the Democratic Revolution
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1990); Joan Landes,
Women and thePublic Sphere in the Age of the French

Revolution
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); 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 Their

French Revolution
, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998). Of related interest are: James F. Traer,
Marriage

and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1980); Roderick Phillips,
Family Breakdown in Late

282

Suggestions for Further Reading

Eighteenth-Century France: Divorces in Rouen, 1792–1803
(New York:

Oxford University Press, 1981); and Suzanne Desan, “‘War between Broth-

ers and Sisters’: Inheritance Law and Gender Politics in Revolutionary

France,”
French Historical Studies
20 (1997): 597–634.

Readers interested in the purely economic dimensions of the Revo-

lution should consult Tom Kemp,
Economic Forces in French History

(London: Dobson, 1971), and (for greater detail) Ernest Labrousse and

Fernand Braudel, eds.,
Histoire économique et sociale de la France
, 4 vols.

(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970–82). Franc¸ois Crouzet has

placed the Revolution in a broader context of international economic

developments in two influential articles: “Wars, Blockade, and Economic

Change in Europe, 1792–1815,”
Journal of Economic History
24 (1964):

567–88; and “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle: Essai d’analyse

comparée de deux croissances économiques,”
Annales: E. S. C.
21 (1966):

254–91. Also meriting consultation are two articles in
The New Cambridge

Modern History, Vol. 8: The American and French Revolutions, 1763–93

(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1965):H.J.Habakkuk,‘Population,

Commerce and Economic Ideas,” pp. 25–54; and K. A. Ballhatchet,

“European Relations with Asia and Africa,” pp. 218–51. Again, see

the important article by R. M. Hartwell, “Economic Change in England

and Europe, 1780–1830,” in
The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 9:

War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval 1793–1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1965), pp. 31–59.

Much of the work cited in this last paragraph relies heavily upon

Annaliste
assumptions (in the 1960s and 1970s) about cyclical and struc-

tural weaknesses in the economy of early modern France. Over the past

twenty years, however, a revisionist literature has arisen that paints a

much brighter picture of France’s economic resiliency in this period.

See, in this connection: Rondo Cameron and Charles E. Freedeman,

“French Economic Growth: A Radical Revision,”
Social Science History

7 (1983): 3–30; Robert Aldrich, “Late-Comer or Early-Starter? New Views

on French Economic History,”
Journal of European Economic History

16 (1987): 89–100; David Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolu-

tion in France and England, 1688–1789,”
Journal of Economic History

49 (1989): 95–124; Philip T. Hoffman,
Growth in a Traditional Society:

The French Countryside, 1450–1815
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1996); Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg, eds.,
Fiscal

Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–1789
(Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); George Grantham, “The French

Cliometric Revolution: A Survey of Cliometric Contributions to French

Economic History,”
European Review of Economic History
1 (1997):

353–405; and Philip T. Hoffman and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “New Work

in French Economic History,”
French Historical Studies
23 (2000): 439–53.

Suggestions for further reading

283

On the possible emergence of a “modern” political economy in this pe-

riod, see (among other works) Judith A. Miller,
Mastering the Market: The

State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860
(New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1999); and, by the same author, “Economic

Ideologies, 1750–1800: The Creation of the Modern Political Economy?”

French Historical Studies
23 (2000): 497–511. Finally, the reader should

again consult Florin Aftalion’s conspectus on the economic history of the

Revolution.

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

An indispensable starting point for readers interested in religious devel-

opments during the Revolution is André Latreille,
L’Eglise catholique

et la Révolution franc¸aise
, 2 vols. (Paris, Hachette, 1946–50). They may

wish to follow this up with John McManners,
The French Revolution and

the Church
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982; orig. 1969). Ruth

Necheles has examined the crucial role played by clerics at the start of

the Revolution in “The Curés in the Estates General of 1789,”
Journal of

Modern History
46 (1974): 425–44. For the impact of the Revolution upon

French Catholicism in later years, see the following works: Michel Vovelle,

Religion et Révolution: La déchristianisation de l’an II
(Paris: Hachette,

1976); Timothy Tackett,
Religion
,
Revolution and Regional Conflict in

Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791
(Princeton,