HIST 353: 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

conventional historiography focuses on long term impersonal factors behind French revolution. But this study shows that it occured due to the inefficiency of the last monarch of the ancien regime Louis XVI.

concept that the significance of history is defined in relation to its utility in the present, whether the historian and the audience be reactionary, progressive, or revolutionary. As such, present perceptions of history, both academic and popular, need to be studied, and perhaps even corrected, lest they cause history to come back and haunt the present. In particular, the French Revolution has been distorted, through a combination of selective amnesia and reactionary political agenda, by both the Revisionist school and popularized media presentations. What follows is an introduction to the development of a more accurate and materialistic analysis of the French Revolution, which is arguably the key stone of revolutionary history. One of the most crucial problems with the state of historiography on the French Revolution is the absence of analysis of slavery. With notable exceptions such as Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, few historians have including more than superficial mention of the existence of an immense slave system within the French economy, where it is mentioned at all. However, it is impossible to fully appreciate or understand the Revolution without this component. By 1789, the colony of St. Domingue alone was producing 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee for the entirety of Europe, with the trade monopolized by France proper. 2 This incredibly profitable colonial trade provided for two-thirds of all of France's overseas trade,and colonial trade in general accounted for 40% of the total trade of France and England. 3 For the French, that trade meant 100,000 tonnes of goods to be sold. 4 The trade was not only prosperous, but also expanding. Since the end of the War of Spanish Succession at the beginning of the century, despite territorial losses, French overseas trade had at least quadrupled in value and possibly as much as quintupled. 5

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis. .. . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.-The division into Parts is not in the original, and is purely for ease of management on this website.-The section-headings are not in the original. Each marks the start of a new topic but not necessarily the end of the preceding one.-This work was written in 1790, three years before the executions of the French king and queen and the 'reign of terror' that followed.-In the last paragraph of this work Burke says that his life has been mainly 'a struggle for the liberty of others'. So it was. His opposition to the French revolution was one of the four main political battles in his life, the other three being support for the American colonists, for the Irish, and for the people of India (see page 25).

French Historical Studies, 2009