Dr. M. S.

Dhakad Associate Professor,

Department of History Rajdhani College University of Delhi,
Raja Garden Ring Road New Delhi 110015.

Historiography of the French Revolution:

Reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre opposed the revolutionaries' arrogation of the

right to create—new political forms, social relations, or cultural values—from God and
his putative representatives on earth. By questioning cultural assumptions and by
evincing the man-made character of existing practices, these intellectuals had opened the
door for people to destroy and recreate basic institutions of governance and belief. Less
reactionary conservatives, notably the British parliamentarian and historian Edmund
Burke, accepted change and even introduction of political participation by non-noble
elites. After all, Burke had praised the Americans who had fought for independence and
enacted a republic in the previous decades. What Burke appreciated about the United
States, and what he failed to discern in France, was the willingness to embrace English
norms of law and aristocratic order. He advocated gradual change, to be pursued under
the sage guidance of the crown and church.
Tocqueville suggested that the crisis in France resulted primarily from the absolutist form
of monarchy advocated, though not fully realised, by crown and church. On one hand,
Louis XIV and his successors had not completed the process of centralisation. Some
regional prerogatives had been eliminated in the interests of uniform governances, but
others remained. The partial nature of French absolutism made the crown vulnerable to
criticisms from both those who wanted the restoration of abolished local privileges and
those who sought the elimination of all such anomalies. Having marginalised the nobility
of the sword and concentrated power in its own hands, the crown became the lightning
rod for all discontent.
Tocqueville contended that Enlightenment thought had given philosophical rationales for
an attempt to reform the French political and social system. The philosophes gave
expression to discontent, and perhaps also encouraged the discontented to believe that
they could legitimately challenge the existing order. Ultimately, however, Tocqueville
blamed the crown and its advisors for failing to provide clear, decisive leadership or to
confront the growing discontent. The revolution occurred when anger and anxiety
reached a boiling point, exacerbated by the state's financial and moral bankruptcy. The
revolution unfolded as it did because its leaders, equipped with so little practical political
experience, could draw only on books and theories as they sought to remedy all of
France's various ills.
Francois Aulard (1849-1928), admitted that his interests lay in the intellectual and
political aspects of the revolution far more than the social or cultural. In order to
demonstrate that the doctrines of the revolution included both democracy and
republicanism, he engaged in rigorous archival research, discovering and publishing
hundreds of speeches, articles, and other documents that he used to develop his theses.
Aulard argued that perhaps the most fundamental challenge of the revolution had been
for leaders and citizens alike to conceive of the nation and the national good as distinct
from the king; likewise, they needed to conceive of how to pursue beneficial reforms
without the accustomed royal leadership.
The Marxists:
Karl Marx cited the French Revolution as evidence for his theory about the progression
from feudalism through capitalism to communism. According to Marx, the bourgeoisie of
France rebelled against the institutions and mores of feudal society that prevented them
from exercising political power, and thus from transforming social and economic
relations to accommodate the demands of capitalism. The bourgeoisie temporarily joined
forces with the masses of impoverished peasants and fractious urban artisans, since it
needed additional support in their campaign to wrest control from the entrenched feudal
aristocracy. Violence resulted from the inability of the French nobility, monarchy, and
church elites to adjust to the inevitable evolution in notions of property, wealth, and
status. For Marxists, the first French Revolution manifested the struggle for power that
permitted modernisation. It paved the way for a society in which workers would feel
similar levels of frustration in confrontation with the bourgeoisie as the latter had endured
in their relations with aristocrats of birth in the eighteenth century. The Marxist have
tended to emphasise the overall preoccupation with leaders, even the most apparently
radical Jacobins, with enshrining the principle of private property and with eradicating
the corporatist elements of feudalism, such as guilds. They showed how the French
Revolution had prepared the way for capitalism to flourish, though that way would prove
to be fraught with challenges.
Albert Mathiez, one of Aulard's students, adopted notably different political positions,
which were reflected in his scholarship. In a series of works, culminating in the
biography Danton (1926), Mathiez revealed the reality behind the legends surrounding
one of Aulard's heroes. Instead, Mathiez favoured Robespierre; he not only published
numerous books but also founded a journal and an organisation to promote studies of the
leader. Albert Mathiez wrote for a general public as well as an academic audience,
exemplified by his three-volume The French Revolution (1922—7), which he later
extended into the periods of Thermidor and the Directory.
Georges Lefebvre pioneered an examination of the revolution from the perspective of
peasants. His attention to 'history from below', a term that he invented, widened the field
of study, as social history contributed to a more nuanced understanding of how political
developments were experienced by non-elites. For Lefebvre the French Revolution was
the outcome of the steady rise and growth of the bourgeoisie, which had overtime gained
class consciousness, possessed progressive qualities of thrift, enterprise and means, but
was deprived of status and respect in a society where social and cultural standing was
decided on birth and not merit. The bourgeoisie was the only organised class among the
Third Estate classes which had a vision of the future and was the ultimate beneficiary of
the revolution. The year 1789 was a historic moment when this wealthy and enlightened
class finally struck a deadly blow to the monarchy and the feudal decadent order and
established a constitutional, monarchy and later democracy.
However, even he acknowledged that the first blow was struck by the aristocratic revolt.
First came the aristocratic revolt which destroyed the monarchy with the support of the
bourgeoisie by demanding the calling of the Estates General to decide on the matter of
taxation and financial crisis. Then came the bourgeois revolution of July 1789 whose
success could only be ensured in the teeth of aristocratic conservatism by enlisting the
support of Parisian masses. This paved the way for a third revolution namely that of the
Parisian mob to be followed by wholesale insurrection in urban areas, lending itself to the
fourth revolution, one in the country-side by the peasant who indulged in arson, loot and
burning of manorial records, which was a result of panic and rumours that created the
grand fear. Lefebvre continued the chin started by his precursors like Jean Jaure, and
Mathiez and Albert Soboul continued this tradition after him. Soboul, who became Chair
of French Revolutionary Studies in 1967, continued in the same vein as Mathiez and
Lefebvre. They prioritised economic history, taking Jaures' historiography as an
inspiration, but he remained a far more traditional Marxist than Lefebvre.
The Revisionists:
The first challenge came from the British historian Alfred Cobban, who refreshed the
historiography of the French Revolution by reopening apparently answered questions. , in
1954, attacked what he called the 'Myth of the French Revolution', a myth that had
pervaded historical writings of the twentieth century. By analysing the social and
professional backgrounds of the representative of the Estates General he argued that only
13 per cent came from the world of commerce and two thirds were lawyers of some sort,
while 43 per cent were petty office holders and government servants. He went on to argue
that it was the frustration of these people who thought they did not received rewards
corresponding to their ability, and saw the income from these venal offices declining. In
short the revolutionary bourgeoisie was the declining class of officers, lawyers and other
professions rather than rising bourgeoisie of commerce and industry that was the main
driving force behind the revolution.
In essence, according to Cobban, the revolution had not been a revolution—at least not in
the Marxist sense. Cobban developed this argument further in his The Social
Interpretation of the French Revolution in 1964 with added vigour and sharpness arguing
that it was the peasant who destroyed the vestiges of feudalism by countrywide
insurrection, and not the bourgeoisie, and that the revolution, far from promoting
capitalism, in fact retarded its growth by burdening the economy by a destructive war.
The bourgeoisie rather than being a united class-conscious group was rather ambiguous
in its character.
In 1969 American revisionist G. V. Taylor following Cobban asserted primacy of politics
over the Marxist primacy of economic as far as the origins of the revolutions were
concerned. He stole the revolutionary winds from the sails of the bourgeoisie by
assigning it the status of a non-capitalist, essentially, proprietary class with investments in
land, urban property, venal office, and annuities. Much like the privileged noble elite, the
bourgeois superiority came essentially from this non-capitalist landed wealth, i.e.,
aristocratic in nature (Taylor 1967. G V Taylor found no evidence to support the Marxist
thesis of a long-standing, gradual growth of class consciousness in the bourgeoisie in the
nature of their wealth and relations of production.
In addition, his further study of cahiers convinced him, that it was the dynamics of
political events, quarrels and confrontations between the aristocracy and the king first,
and then between the Third Estate and the nobility, and eventually a fear of a counter-
revolution that resulted in the abolition of aristocratic privileges. The nationalisation of
church lands, destruction of the whole system of language, symbols, images and
formalities that reinforced the subservience of the lower orders, could not be found in the
cahiers as demands. They were products of pure politics of the times. In sum, the struggle
against absolutism and aristocracy was the product of a financial and political crisis that it
did not create. Second, the French Revolution was essentially a political revolution with
social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences (Taylor 1976.
A third revisionist onslaught came from a young Oxford professor Colin Lucas. In 1973,
Lucas added more meat to Cobban's arguments in his article, Nobles, Bourgeoisie, and
the Origins of the French Revolution. Using an array of empirical evidence Lucas showed
that by the end of the old regime bourgeoisie and nobility were a homogeneous whole
rather than bitter opponents. The privileges earlier enjoyed by the nobility alone were
being shared by the bourgeoisie, who also could evade taxes. The king continued to
concede letters of nobility to honourable, successful and well-connected men. Their
social standing and lifestyles were similar rather than opposed. There was no clear
contrast between the two in terms of economy or culture. The nobility invested in trade
and commerce just as the bourgeoisie invested in landed wealth. The nobility was not a
closed caste, but open to men of means and influence.
Francois Furet saw the importance of the French Revolution as a political event and a
cultural creation, as a series of acts that transformed the contemporary situation, as a
creation and experiential elaboration of an entirely new mode of political action. The
understanding of this politics and political culture is linguistic and therefore his particular
ways of looking at the revolution, is also commonly known as linguistic and cultural turn.
Let us first explain what is this cultural or linguistic turn. Language had traditionally been
seen as an instrument for referring to the real world, as a means of communicating ideas
and feelings. The post-structuralists and postmodernist, however, asserted that language
was not a mediator or a medium to express reality, but rather was an autonomous system
that in fact constructed reality. Supporting this stream of thought Furet based his
understanding of political culture on discourse, a term that is usually associated with
Michel Foucault.
Francois Furet further argued, The society below, constructed its own new political
sociability, which was democratic, without hierarchies, based on individuals, where
orders and ranks were rendered meaningless, and individuals communicated with each
other on an egalitarian basis. This was a live and thriving experience of eighteenth-
century France. It could be found in aristocratic (enlightened) salons, middle-class cafes
and clubs, masonic lodges and the so called philosophical societies. What emerged out of
these gatherings was public opinion, which was the chief actor in the revolutionary stage,
the biggest unifying agent in revolutionary France, completely outside the corridors of
courtly power. There was no communication between these old and new centres of
power.
The emerging power could not be fitted into the archaic corporate pyramid. Lack of
communication and increasing mutual contempt and distrust between the two generated a
conflict which burst forth in an uncontrollable manner in the revolutionary days. From
May to July 1789, the victory of the Third Estate, the collapse of the other two, the
storming of the Bastille, the march towards Versailles, and the fall of the monarchy all
clearly went beyond the framework of older legitimacy. In short, the history of the
decline and fall of absolutist monarchy became the history of rise and triumph of the
public opinion. However, this democratisation has been located by Furet as integral to the
centralising tendencies in the revolution. Both Furet and his American supporter K. M.
Baker see the terror as intrinsic to the revolution unlike the liberals of yesteryears who
separate the liberal phase—between 1789 and 1991—as the good phase of the revolution
from the degeneration into the Terror in 1792—94, while the Marxist see the apogee of
the revolution in the Terror. For this reason some historians have dubbed Furet, and
Baker as neo-conservative historians. However, their ideas of a political culture have
inspired an entire creed of historians who take the research into different directions.
Post-colonial and post-modern historiographical preoccupations with individual
experience, subaltern groups, gender, sexuality, and the ways in which revolutionaries
'marketed' the new culture to French men and women also reflects the shift from socio-
economic concerns to a politics of identity. By showing how ideologies of various kinds
disenfranchised categories of people and constrained people from exercising their right to
self-determination, late twentieth century historians of the French Revolution engaged in
scholarship that sought to emancipate individuals as individuals, just as surely as Marxist
historians once viewed their work as contribution to the emancipation of individuals as
members of a social class. This recent creed of historians have responded more to the
works of Furet and Baker rather than their revisionist counterparts of the earlier
generation, and have applied methods drawn from linguists, anthropology, cultural
studies and literary criticism to derive newer understandings of the background and
events of the 1780s and 1790s—with their own perspectives, and in pursuit of their own
identity. Scholarly interest has now shifted to women's and gender histories, the history
of everyday life, micro-history, and eventually new cultural history that have expanded
the scope of French Revolutionary studies in the past decades. In addition to publishing
biographies of prominent women such as Mme Roland, Olympe de Gouges, or Germaine
de Stael, feminist scholars have explored how women appropriated rhetoric about the
rights of man for their own political and social empowerment.
Joan Landes' Women and the Public Sphere has analysed how Jacobins suppressed
female participants in the revolution and then consolidated patriarchal conceptions of
citizenship. Landes discussed the contradictory and complex relationship of women with
the public sphere. During the revolutionary decade women participated wholeheartedly in
the revolutionary events. Right from steering discussions in the salons, articulating their
grievances in the cahiers, participating in the storming of the Bastille, and the march to
Versailles, and writing up the declaration of the rights of women and the citizen, women
were visible almost everywhere. What did they get out of it?
Sarah Maza pursued a similar understanding of pre-revolutionary mentalities, but those of
lawyers and the fledgling bourgeoisie rather than those of the lower classes. In Private
Lives, Public Affairs, Maza revealed how lawyers began to exploit the nascent public
sphere on behalf of their clients, eliciting sympathy for impoverished priests, innocent
commoners subject to persecution by corrupt aristocrats, and all those victimised by a
judicial system that clearly did not recognise equality before the law. Regardless of their
effect on the verdicts, such judicial briefs and pamphlets raised consciousness about
seemingly endemic injustices—that the king did not address—and possible, practical
reforms. They honed the rhetorical skills of future revolutionary leaders, many of whom
were lawyers or journalists, as they learned to persuade the masses through sentimental
appeals as much as (or more than) through appeals to reason.
Maza and other historians who have engaged in cultural histories of the pre-revolutionary
era have confirmed aspects of Jurgen Habermas' argument as presented in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society ,
first published in German in 1965, but popularised and translated much later in the 1980s.
In this famous work Habermas argued that in the medieval society there was no
distinction between public and private, and no clear-cut concept of private property.
Those who exercised power expressed their status in public in a concrete, non-abstract
way, through insignias, gestures, clothing and rhetoric. Power was both exercised and
represented directly as long as the prince and the estates of the realm still were the
country and its representatives. They represented their lordship not for but before the
people. This is what he called the 'representative public sphere'. This public sphere was
confined to those who held power. It assumed an entirely passive view of the population.
It reached its apogee in the chivalric courtly culture of France, which was emulated
elsewhere in Europe and on display at the palace of Versailles, and chateaux or manors.
Long before the political victory was achieved, however, the bourgeoisie succeeded in
establishing non-political forms of new public concepts, a new culture of media: lecture
halls, theatres, museums, concerts, etc. Culture was transformed into a commodity that
could be sold purchased and consumed rather than being just representational as in the
earlier epoch. The historians associated with cultural turn engage with the Habermasian
bourgeois public sphere that had emerged in eighteenth-century France as a byproduct of
journalism, cultural criticism, and other forms of publication that encouraged the king's
subjects—already on their way to becoming citizens—to form their own opinions, to d
ebate events and policies amongst themselves, and otherwise to prepare themselves
(unwittingly) for the revolution.
Lynn Hunt's Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1986) substitutes
process for structure, language for class and symbol for ideology, and form for content in
her thought-provoking thesis to 'uncover the rules of political behaviour' of revolutionary
culture.