Tocqueville never wrote the book he intended on the Revolution, but his preliminary study The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) remains one of the most important ever written on the subject. It was not so much a history as an attempt to see the Revolution in a long-term context. In the long perspective of history, he saw it as a decisive stage in the irresistible progress of democracy and liberty. But these forces were not necessarily compatible, and in destroying the old order so comprehensively, the democratic, egalitarian impetus of the Revolution swept away most of the bulwarks of liberty which had impeded the authoritarian tendencies of the monarchy. This in turn had opened the way for Napoleon to overthrow the more rootless liberty introduced by the Revolution. None of the representative institutions set up since 1789 had survived long; and Tocqueville wrote when a new Bonaparte had destroyed the ones in which he himself had forged a political career. This liberal, therefore, did not see the Revolution as a liberating force. The democracy it unleashed was much more likely to lead to dictatorship. For Tocqueville this was a source of profound regret, since he revered liberal ideas, and could see that they worked beyond the Channel or the Atlantic. The inhabitants of these regions were flattered; and Tocqueville’s analyses, even though their factual bases could be easily shown to be inaccurate and misconceived, were widely studied in Britain and America for a century after he died (1859). The French were less inclined to listen to such a pessimistic analysis of their own history and prospects. Besides, only a few years after Tocqueville’s death the Third Republic ushered in a broadly liberal regime, confounding his expectations, and it lasted until 1940. He was soon largely forgotten in his own country; and the liberal strain in French writing about the Revolution was absorbed into the mainstream of the non-Marxist left.
Lying at the root of so many of the trends and movements that have fashioned the modern world, the Revolution has seldom been written about in isolation from contemporary politics. The years since 1945 have brought some change in this respect, yet it hardly seems a coincidence that the new controversies which have engulfed the subject arose in the shadow of the Cold War. They have been marked by what came to be known, like unwelcome internal criticism of Communist Party orthodoxies, as revisionism. In English-speaking countries it began in 1954, with the inaugural lecture of Alfred Cobban as Professor of French History at the University of London. Entitled ‘The Myth of the French Revolution’, the lecture argued that the Revolution was not the work of a rising, capitalist bourgeoisie, but of declining non-capitalist lawyers and office-holders. Ten years later Cobban amplified his criticisms of what he called the orthodoxies of Lefebvre, Labrousse, and Soboul in The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964, reprinted with a useful introduction by Gwynne Lewis, 1999). Not only was the Revolution not the work of bourgeois capitalists, it did not overthrow anything recognizable as feudalism, and so far from emancipating the economy by opening up free enterprise, it retarded economic expansion and was ‘a triumph for the conservative, propertied, landowning classes’. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, in a series of articles published between 1962 and 1972, George V. Taylor was analysing the structure of property and commercial activity before the Revolution. He concluded that the most vigorous types of capitalism worked through and with the monarchical state rather than against it; and that the share of French wealth represented by capitalism was small and therefore posed no challenge to the old order. There was in fact no economic competition between nobles and bourgeois at the top of society. Economically they formed part of a single élite. The Revolution was not therefore the result of class conflict. It was a political revolution with social consequences and not the other way round (see above all Taylor’s ‘Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, 79 (1967), 469–96).
In France these observations were greeted at first with incredulity or contempt. Lefebvre himself, before his death, brushed Cobban aside as a spokesman for an insecure western bourgeoisie. But the solidarity of the French left was beginning to crumble in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and growing criticism in Moscow itself of the historical record of Stalinism. In 1965 two disillusioned young former Communists, François Furet and Denis Richet, produced a new history of the Revolution (English translation and abridgement, French Revolution [London, 1970]) which resurrected the liberal tradition by arguing that the true Revolution was that of 1789–91, after which it had ‘skidded off course’ into terror as a result of royal treachery and popular control of Paris. The new authors were at once denounced, rather as Aulard had denounced Taine, for their lack of scholarly credentials. Furet responded to critics in 1971 with a furious attack on what he called the ‘revolutionary catechism’ or ‘Jacobin-Marxist vulgate’ which, he said, sought to commemorate the Revolution rather than analyse it with scholarly detachment. Now for the first time a Frenchman acknowledged the increasing contribution that English-speaking scholars were making to the subject, in contrast to its custodians in French universities, who, Furet contended, merely sought to perpetuate a fossilized Jacobin orthodoxy.
All this encouraged other French scholars to put their heads above the parapet, notably Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, who argued in a book of 1976 on the pre-revolutionary nobility (English translation, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century [Cambridge, 1984]) that in many ways it resembled the bourgeoisie and was open to much of the revolutionary ideology. Accordingly, the Revolution was not so much a triumph for the bourgeoisie as for a new propertied élite comprising both nobles and bourgeois, destined to rule the country far into the nineteenth century under the name of the Notables. Other work on the nobility by British and American scholars seemed to point in the same direction, downplaying class conflict as a cause of the Revolution. In 1980 the present author, who had come to the Revolution by way of work on the old regime, produced Origins of the French Revolution (3rd edn., Oxford, 1999), which, after surveying scholarly debate since 1939, argued that the outbreak owed more to accident and political miscalculation than to social conflicts; and that the Revolution made revolutionaries and not the other way round.
Revisionist researches, in fact, had cumulatively and convincingly undermined the ‘classic’ interpretation of the Revolution’s origins. The increasing difficulties of the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s were also soon to dent the credibility of the celebratory tradition of history writing which Soviet achievements had done so much to sustain since 1917. After the death of Soboul in 1982 no major figure on the left sought to rebuild the ruins of a once-dominant interpretation. When François Mitterrand, a socialist president, decreed that the Revolution’s bicentenary should be celebrated in 1989, the theme he chose was an impeccably liberal one: the Revolution as the proclamation of human rights, with no reference or relation to the Terror.
This was to accept Furet and Richet’s version of 1965: but by now Furet had moved on. In 1978, alongside a reprint of his great polemic of 1971, he published a series of essays (English translation, Interpreting the French Revolution [Cambridge, 1981]) calling for an entirely new approach which relegated social analyses, as well as his own earlier perception of a revolution skidding off course, to the sidelines. Only two earlier historians, he declared, had ‘offered a rigorous conceptualisation’ of the Revolution: Tocqueville and Cochin. Both names were a challenge, but at least Tocqueville was familiar to English speakers. Cochin, an avowed enemy of the revolutionary legacy, had not been taken seriously since the early 1940s. Furet’s journey across the political spectrum was restoring respectability to the intellectual right; and when he began to proclaim in the 1980s that the Terror had been inherent in the Revolution from 1789 itself, a product of ways of thinking matured over the preceding century, only his indifference to religious factors seemed to separate him from the oldest of hostile traditions. But soon the religious angle was resurfacing too, in renewed interest in the Vendée. Pioneered in 1964 by the American sociological analysis of Charl
es Tilly (The Vendée), the history of counter-revolution in the west was now seized upon by scholars with more traditional agendas. The most extreme and notorious example was Reynald Secher, Le Génocide franco-français: La Vendée-Vengé (Paris, 1986), which accused the Jacobin republic of systematically exterminating its peasant enemies, and did not shrink from the emotive description of genocide. Did the Revolution chart the path to twentieth-century holocausts and gulags? Another who seemed to think so was the British Jewish historian Simon Schama, whose Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution was the best-selling book of the bicentenary year. Violence, he argued, was the essence of the Revolution from the start, and ‘The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count’. Schama ended exactly where Mathiez and so many other left-wing accounts ended, with the fall of Robespierre in 1794: if terror was inseparable from the Revolution, when terror came to an end the Revolution was effectively over. An English-speaking world which knew about the Revolution chiefly through A Tale of Two Cities or even The Scarlet Pimpernel was told what it wanted to hear, but Schama was never translated into French. Furet, after all, had already conveyed the same message.
It was difficult to disentangle the social approach to the Revolution from the classic interpreters of the left who had first seriously promoted it. So when the coherence of the classic interpretation crumbled under the impact of revisionist research, Cobban’s initial call for a new social history with an untainted vocabulary was ignored. Revisionism, many complained, had demolished one edifice and put nothing in its place. Disillusion with what social history could explain was not confined to Furet. As early as 1952, J. L. Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy argued that the roots of modern tyranny, as first manifested during the Terror, were to be found in the thought of the Enlightenment. The argument owed something to Tocqueville, but much also to the counter-revolutionary tradition. Coming from a Jewish historian working in Israel, it could not be attributed to the Catholic right discredited by Vichy, but it was widely derided by social historians of all viewpoints. Not until Norman Hampson, author of the first Social History of the French Revolution (London, 1963), produced Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution (London, 1982) did an established figure in the field return overtly to intellectual explanations. But by then, a younger generation was moving in a parallel direction. From the 1960s Robert Darnton had been trying to bring the social and intellectual history of pre-revolutionary France together by studying the world of clandestine publishing and scurrilous literature below the level of the ‘High’ Enlightenment (articles collected in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime [Cambridge, Mass., 1982]). In 1978 Keith Baker began a series of discussions (collected in Inventing the French Revolution [Cambridge, 1990]) of thought patterns and ‘discourses’ among pre-revolutionary political writers. Neither concentrated on leading figures. They were more interested in what Baker called the ‘intellectual stock’ of the old order and how it laid the basis for revolutionary ideology. Their interest was more in culture than in ideas themselves, and they found much in common with the later Furet. By the mid-1980s the tide was turning their way. It could be seen in an influential collection of essays by Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984); and in 1986 Baker and Furet convened the first of a series of conferences in Chicago on the theme of the French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (proceedings published in four volumes under that general title, Oxford, 1987–94). Now the term ‘post-revisionism’ began to be used, signifying an approach based on the study of language and culture, in which the Revolution was largely viewed as a symptom of deeper trends such as the emergence of public opinion (building on the theoretical conjectures of J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962; English translation, Cambridge, Mass., 1991]), on the supposed ‘desacralisation’ of monarchy (J. Merrick, The Desacralisation of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century [Baton Rouge, La., 1990]) or on the marginalization of women in public life (Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution [New York, 1988]).
The bicentenary of 1989, for which the first edition of this Oxford History was written, coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, and with it, the hope which had reinvigorated left-wing interpretations of the French Revolution over much of the twentieth century. In the worldwide scholarly debates which marked the bicentenary, Furet proclaimed himself the winner; and there were certainly few signs of a younger generation still prepared to espouse anything like the classic interpretation, apart from a few forlorn attempts (e.g. P. Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution [Cambridge, Mass., 1998]) to dissociate Jacobinism from terror. In France, study of the Revolution languished after the death of Furet in 1997, and even before that, more and more it followed trends pioneered across the Atlantic (e.g. R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution [Durham, NC, 1991]). Interpretation of the Revolution in the years since the revisionist challenges of Cobban and Taylor had gradually been taken over by what the French bizarrely call the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. And the post-revisionism which, by the turn of the century, had become hegemonic, was largely a North American movement, following the eddying fashions of a world where Marxism no longer offered any sort of intellectual challenge.
The Revolution Today
More detailed guidance on recent debates and how they have evolved can be found in P. R. Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution (London, 2009). A useful collection of key articles, selected after wide consultation with scholars working in the field, is P. Jones (ed.) The French Revolution in Social and Political Perspective (London, 1996). The fullest (not to say most prolix) guide to the bicentennial controversies is S. L. Kaplan, Farewell Revolution (2 vols., Ithaca, NY, 1995). Among approachable one-volume histories written since then are D. M. G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford, 2003), J. D. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (1995, 6th edn., 2015) and P. McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2016). J. R. Censer and L. Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (University Park, Pa., 2001) is both a book and a multimedia package designed to introduce computerate modern students to the subject via simultaneous old and new technologies. Single-volume surveys, however, have been much less common in recent years than collections of essays exploring varied specific aspects of the Revolution. The most distinguished is D. Andress (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (Oxford, 2015), more comprehensive than P. McPhee (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (Oxford, 2013). They are usefully complemented by D. Andress (ed.), Experiencing the French Revolution (Oxford, 2013). Collections drawing attention to the Revolution’s wider resonance are D. Armitage and S. Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840 (Basingstoke, 2010); S. Desan, L. Hunt, and W. M. Nelson (eds.), The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2013); and A. Forrest and M. Middell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History (Abingdon, 2015).
Among works of reference, C. Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988) is an invaluable compendium of useful facts. S. F. Scott and B. Rothaus (eds.), Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution (2 vols., Westport, Conn., 1985) is very full but uneven in quality, with some strange omissions. The same is true of its French equivalent, A. Soboul (ed.), Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1989)—mostly the work of historians in the classic tradition. The Furet school produced its own version, F. Furet and M. Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), which is more a set of reflective essays than a work of reference. Superb guides to the legislators who led the early Revolution are E. H. Lemay (ed.), Dictionnaire des Constituants, 1789–1791 (2 vols., Oxford, 1991), and the same ed
itor’s Dictionnaire des Législateurs, 1791–1792 (2 vols., Ferney-Voltaire, 2007). A replacement equivalent volume for A. Kuscinski, Dictionnaire des Conventionnels (Paris, 1916, reprinted 1973) is said to be in preparation. Additionally, there is much revolutionary material to be gleaned from W. Doyle (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime (Oxford, 2012), and J. Tulard (ed.), Dictionnaire Napoléon (2nd. edn., Paris, 1989).
Most of the great figures of the Revolution have been the subject of biographies, although only a few now regularly take the interest of professional historians. The best life of Louis XVI in English is by J. Hardman (New Haven, Conn., 2016), but is at its most reliable and innovative for the period before 1789. The years after that are better covered by M. Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil (Basingstoke, 2002), and A. Caiani, Louis XVI and the French Revolution, 1789–1792 (Cambridge, 2012). A reliable guide to his last months is D. P. Jordan, The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs Louis XVI (Berkeley, Calif., 1979). An approachable life of the queen is A. Fraser, Marie-Antoinette: The Journey (London, 2001). The greatest recent biographical enterprise for a figure of the period is L. Gottschalk’s multi-volume Lafayette (Chicago, Ill., 1950–73). It remains unfinished at mid-1790, and it seems legitimate to ask whether that self-important figure is worth such attention. Necker, too, was self-important, but his financial operations were crucial in the old order’s final crisis. They have been studied by R. D. Harris in Necker, Reform Statesman of the Ancien Regime (Berkeley, Calif., 1979) and Necker and the Revolution of 1789 (Lanham, Md., 1986). There are several mediocre biographies of Mirabeau, but there is now authoritative work on him from F. Quastana, La Pensée politique de Mirabeau (1771–1789): ‘Républicanisme classique’ et régénération de la monarchie (Marseille, 2007). An approachable account of Sieyès is M. Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester, 1987). Among the leading Girondins, Condorcet has been carefully studied in his many roles by K. M. Baker (Chicago, Ill., 1975), Brissot by L. Loft in Passion, Politics and Philosophie: Rediscovering J.-P. Brissot (Westport, Conn., 2002), and the Rolands by S. Reynolds, Marriage and Revolution: Monsieur and Madame Roland (Oxford, 2012). They are collectively considered by Leigh Whaley, Radicals (Gloucester, 1999), as are prominent Montagnards by R. R. Palmer, Twelve who Ruled (Princeton, NJ, 1941), and N. Hampson, Will and Circumstance. The latter contains a particularly incisive appraisal of Marat, who is also chronicled at greater length by I. Germani, Jean-Paul Marat, Hero and Anti-Hero of the French Revolution (Lampeter, 1992). For his would-be successor we need to go back to G. Walter, Hébert et le Père Duchesne (Paris, 1946). N. Hampson, Danton (London, 1978) summarised what little reliable evidence there is on that enigmatic figure. Subsequently he did the same for Saint-Just (Oxford, 1991). On Carnot, the two volumes (in French) by M. Reinhard (1951–2) remain irreplaceable. Robespierre at least has had many good biographers. The most stimulating discussion of a career full of ambiguities is N. Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre (London, 1975). An important collection of essays is C. Haydon and W. Doyle (eds.), Robespierre (Cambridge, 1999); the best recent biography is Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven, Conn., 2011). The most famous recorder of the revolutionary scene is himself recorded by W. Roberts, Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), while its most politically and socially extreme participant is the subject of R. B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (London, 1978). Consigned to the Pantheon for the Bicentenary, the most generally acceptable figure of the Revolution is now perhaps Grégoire. He is the subject of an interesting collection of essays, The Abbé Grégoire and his World, edited by R. H. and J. D. Popkin (Utrecht, 2001). Books about Napoleon, of course, are appearing all the time. The most accessible account of his revolutionary years is P. Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799 (London, 2007). His relationship to the Revolution is explored in D. P. Jordan, Napoleon and the Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012).
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