Marxist historiography of the french revolution

Beginning in 1789, the French Revolution can be seen as a series of revolts against the oppressive social and political conditions in France. Within a span of less than ten years, France had radically transformed itself. Scholars like FRANÇOIS FURET see the revolution as ‘the torrential birth of democratic politics and ideology’ in which the centralized state is refashioned with far more power and authority than dreamed possible by the eighteenth-century monarchs. We shall try to highlight the various approaches to understand the French Revolution from different lenses.

Theory and Society, 1984

History of European Ideas, 2002

This paper aims to identify some challenges facing the field of French Revolutionary studies and proposes potential ways of moving forward. The most immediate challenge, I believe, involves making the Revolution relevant to debates about democracy. Throughout much of the twentieth century, interpretations of the Revolution were implicitly tied to competing conceptions of democracy, social and liberal. When François Furet famously stated that 'the revolution is over' in the 1970s, he meant that the Marxist philosophy of history had been debunked and that the 'totalitarian' nature of the French Revolutionary tradition had been exposed. (Furet, 1981(Furet, [orig. 1978) Though controversial, his claims revitalized the field in the decade leading up to the Revolution's bicentennial.

2015

Pascal Dupuy is maître de conférences at the University of Rouen. His research is focused on the history and historiography of the French Revolution and on European iconography at the end of the eighteenth century. Among his publications is Caricatures anglaises. Face à la Révolution et l'Empire, 1789-1815 (2008).

Historicising the French Revolution, 2008

Three decades ago, Francois Furet famously announced that the French Revolution was over. Napoleon's armies ceased to march around Europe long ago, and Louis XVIII even returned to occupy the throne of his guillotined brother. And yet the Revolution s memory continues to hold sway over imaginations and cultures around the world. This sway is felt particularly strongly by those who are interested in history: for the French Revolution not only altered the course of history radically, but became the fountainhead of historicism and the origin of the historical mentality. The sixteen essays collected in this volume investigate the Revolution s intellectual and material legacies. From popular culture to education and politics, from France and Ireland to Poland and Turkey, from 1789 to the present day, leading historians expose, alongside graduate students, the myriad ways in which the Revolution changed humanity s possible futures, its history, and the idea of history. They attest to how the Revolution has had a continuing global significance, and is still shaping the world today.

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English edition), 2016

History, 2003