Reinterpreting the French Revolution

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

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.

Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, 2013

For contemporaries, probably the most striking feature of 1789 was its suddenness and completeness. In a matter of a few months, the most powerful monarchy in the European world, the wealthiest aristocracy, the most complex institutional apparatus, the most sophisticated hierarchy, crumbled, disappeared-and all without significant loss of blood. If it hadn't been 1789, and if they hadn't been brought up to use different linguistic protocols, the writers and talkers of the time might have called it all a miracle, a clear instance of the particular workings of Providence; Mirabeau or Lafayette or even Louis XVI himself might have been dubbed 'the Great Deliverer', the 'man of God's right hand', the instrument of God's benign purpose, as had William of Orange on a similarly bloodless and seemingly miraculous occasion (frequently compared to the events of 1789) a century earlier.! But, it was 1789. And the form of explanation was fundamentally different. Revolutions are, of course, literary events also, and the crumbling of the French state was saturated by words, in print, in conversations and in political meetings. The linguistic explosion was almost as striking as the revolutionary circumstances the writers and speakers grappled with, the new order they tried to explain. Groups hitherto politically inarticulate were suddenly invited to list their grievances so that the good king could put them right. The result was a collection of complaints and aspirations so complicated and voluminous that it still defies the computer. Newspapers and periodicals, few in number, subject to the vagiaries of ancien regime censorship, devoted in the main (as Mornet2 demonstrated) to belles lettres and science, made way for a deluge of politics; political clubs proliferated at every level; electoral, communal, sectional assemblies seemed to meet almost continuously; the various National Assemblies-the 'Constituant', the 'Legislative', and the 'Convention'-leant their enormous prestige to the rhetoric of Revolution. Some words quickly became taboo, mhers sacred: reading simple place names became 'a silent course in ethics'; and uttering terms like 'patrie' ,'nation', 'regeneration', 'virtue', 'terror', a son of revolutionary catechism. It is not too much to claim that the most striking and perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Revolution is indeed its new language of politics: 'its linguisticality', writes Lynn Hunt, 'is its most revealing aspect; its linguistic functions, its linguistic structure and its linguistic status are its most disclosive attributes' .3 Until recently, Revolutionary discourse has not received its proper attention: language has usually been treated as a a screen rather than a sign. Terms like virtue, for example, have made most historians uncornfonable: 'virtue', they have argued, must stand for something else. The opponents of the Revolution from Burke onwards had always argued that such language was invariably a hypocritical cloak, the tool of scoundrels or less frequently the self-delusion of fools. Marx devoted some of his most celebrated pages to what he called the masquerades or camouflages of Revolutionary language; and writers like Soboul or Poulantzas-more reductionist than their master-have written off the moral idioms or the rhetorical tropes of the Revolutionaries as mere ideology or false consciousness. Alben Soboul, for instance, sees in the 'vinue' invoked by Robespierre and St Just an instance of their pre-bourgeois intellectual limitations: 'incapable of analyzing the economic and social conditions of their time ... they believed in appeals to vinue'. Similarly, for Poulantzas, the terrorist idiom of the 'Pere Duchesne' was little more then 'a plebian manner to put an end to the enemies of the bougeoisie'.4 For their pan, revisionists like Cobban or Cobb, yet more materialist than the materialism they denounce, more caught in the polarization of the illusory and the real, simply don't bother

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.

History of European Ideas, 2002

[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).