Reinterpreting the French Revolution

✍ Scribed by Jack A. Goldstone

• Book ID: 104649354
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1984
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 929 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0304-2421
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00160914

✦ Synopsis

JACK A. GOLDSTONE 1789 is often taken as the date of the great divide between the old world and the new, as the point at which "modern society" -the society of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism, emerges from the old regime almost as a butterfly emerges from a crumbling pupa. "Beginning in 1789, the obsession with origins... came to be centered precisely on the Revolutionary break .... 1789 became the birth date, the year zero, of a new world" (p. 2). 1 This of course is arrant nonsense, and Furet will have none of it. Capitalism, bourgeois political leadership, and social and political equality emerged slowly and painfully in Frane over the course of the entire nineteenth century. Furet reminds us that Republic and Monarchy alternated to 1851, even to 1877. "Only the victory of the republicans over the monarchists at the beginning of the Third Republic marked the definitive victory of the revolution" (p. 4). Explicitly aligning himself with Alexis de Tocqueville, Furet thus stresses the continuity of France's development from the Ancien Regime through the nineteenth century.

Yet if the French Revolution was not a break in France's development, it most certainly was a breakdown -of the government, and much of the social order. Though all were soon to return, the monarchy, the nobility, and the Roman Catholic church were briefly eclipsed. If Furet's first task is to demonstrate the continuity of France's history, his second is to explain why in 1789-1799 there occurred a governmental collapse of exceptional violence and thoroughness. Here Furet turns to another predecessor, though less well known than Tocqueville: Augustin Cochin. Using Cochin's theories of revolutionary ideology, Furet constructs his own views of the process of revolutionary breakdown.