French historians saw themselves as crusaders for political causes in their own times that perpetuated the conflicts of the revolutionary period. Defending a particular point of view about the French Revolution was one way of legitimising the monarchy before 1848, or the Republic in 1848 and again after 1870, or the Empire from 1851 to 1870.
Norman Hampson
Early writings: Burke and de Stäel
More than any other historical event perhaps, the French Revolution has provoked and challenged historians. Sometimes it is dangerous to attach labels to writers, but as we reflect on two hundred years of historiography it is possible to delineate some general positions. Liberal historians have emphasised the progressive gains of 1789 and sought to rescue these from the wreckage of the Terror. Conservative historians have played on the ‘extreme’ and ‘anarchical’ nature of the revolution and argued that, in breaking with tradition, the revolution brought terrible consequences on France. Meanwhile, radical, left-wing historians have upheld 1793 as a significant achievement; moreover, those with Marxist sympathies have argued that the revolution was fundamentally ‘bourgeois’ in nature. There have also been republican and counter-revolutionary historians; historians interested in regional perspectives on the revolution, in the ideological and philosophical background, and in interpretations ‘from above’ and ‘from below’.
Two family lines have formed. ‘The Great Tradition’ denotes that group of historians who viewed the revolution as a positive, pioneering and patriotic phenomenon. It was a ‘good thing’, something to be lauded and upheld. But in time, another line started to emerge and enveloped all those historians who did not naturally fall within its orbit.
Edmund Burke and Madame de Stäel were two of the most famous early observers of the revolution. But neither would have said that they were ‘historians’ in the traditional sense, or that they were actually trying to write ‘history’. How could they when the dust had hardly settled on the revolution and both were ‘involved’, to some degree at least, in the events of the revolutionary era?
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was written in 1790. The book was read all over Europe and as a result he gained great notoriety and fame. ‘It may not be unnecessary to inform the reader,’ explains Burke at the start of the book, ‘that the following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the Author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honour of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions, which then, and ever since, have so much occupied the attention of all men.’ Burke is being honest and nowhere does he imply that Reflections was any kind of comprehensive history.
On the whole, Burke is scathing about the revolution: ‘France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians.’ He could find little in the anarchy and chaos of the period that was either admirable or impressive.
In one sense, Germaine de Staël, daughter of Necker, was an eyewitness to revolution. (‘When the King came into the middle of [the] assembly to take the throne, I felt frightened for the first time. For one thing I could see that the Queen was greatly moved. She came late and the colour of her complexion was altered)’. But it could be argued that, courtesy of Considerations on the Main Events of the French Revolution, published posthumously in 1818, she was also its first proper historian.
Her analysis of the causes of the revolution was clear. The clergy had been inefficient, too political, and ‘had lost a certain amount of public respect’. Also, the nobility, the country’s ‘warrior’ class, had ‘fallen from splendour’, and the estates system in France, more generally, was riddled by ‘unfair privilege’. In her writings, de Staël is preoccupied with the period 1793–94:
Although England, like France, is stained by the murder of Charles I and the despotism of Cromwell, the Reign of Terror is a horrible and unique phenomenon … In 1793 it seemed as if France had no room for any more revolutions. Everything had already been overthrown – Crown, nobility, clergy – and the success of the Revolutionary armies made peace throughout Europe something to hope for. This is just when popular tyrannies do arise, though: as soon as the danger is past. The worst of men control themselves as long as there are obstacles and fears; after they have won, their repressed passions know no bounds.
Her natural sympathies seem to lie with the ‘moderate’ Girondins, for elsewhere she talks about their ‘intrepid eloquence’, ‘their admirable presence of mind’, and the fact that they were the only group of people, ‘still worthy of taking their place in history’. She comes across as being slightly condescending in her attitude towards the ordinary people, with talk of ‘popular tyrannies’, ‘the worst of men’, ‘repressed passions’ and ‘an instinct for savagery’.
Liberals and romantics
During the early years of Napoleon’s rule, Louis Adolphe Thiers and François Auguste Marie Mignet studied law together in Aix-en-Provence, and also developed an interest in literature. Thereafter, their careers as writers, political activists and historians followed a similar path. Along with Armand Carrel, they founded the powerful liberal daily newspaper, Le National, in January 1830. As journalists, they campaigned vociferously against the restored Bourbon monarchy. It was perfectly natural for them to combine political agitation with the writing of history. Hampson states:
The first serious historians of the Revolution were François Mignet and Adolphe Thiers, who began to publish their accounts in 1823 ... Thiers and Mignet began what was to become a Great Tradition, developed by most of their successors over the next century. They saw the Revolution as both political and social: Mignet contrasted it with the revolution in England that had merely changed the government. Thiers claimed that 1789 had put an end to a feudal constitution and a society in which the nobility had clung on to their privileges when the crown had stripped them of their political role and turned them into court pensioners.
Both men viewed the revolution as ‘the inevitable product of circumstances’ and also as a ‘beneficent’ event. This was their liberal perspective: the revolution had the potential to change the course of French history for the better.
In one sense, Thomas Carlyle was an ally of Thiers and Mignet. He had liberal inclinations and shared many of their main concerns. But, in reality, he had little regard for their work. Carlyle’s historical method was an unusual one. The general style is epic, literary and grandiose, almost Biblical in tone and, as such, in keeping with Carlyle’s life as a writer and essayist. To the modern reader, The French Revolution reads more like a historical thriller than a piece of reflection and considered analysis. There is a helter-skelter of anecdote and vivid, colourful picture-painting. As Cobban puts it, ‘He is the word-painter of a society in shipwreck.’
The book is based primarily on memoirs, newspaper reports, minutes of official proceedings and already-published histories of the revolution. It is highly eccentric and individualistic but it is ‘history’ in a way that earlier efforts probably were not or could not be. Moreover, it is ‘history from below’, not particularly in the sense that it focuses on the lives of the lower classes, but in the way that it tells the story of the revolution through tittle-tattle and the everyday lives of key individuals. One way to understand and explain the nature of Carlyle is to examine his commentaries on some of the key events of the revolution. On the convening of the Estates General, he writes:
To say, let States-General be, was easy; to say in what manner they shall be, is not so easy. Since the year of 1614, there have no States-General met in France, all trace of them has vanished from the living habits of men. Their structure, powers, methods of procedure, which were never in any measure fixed, have now become wholly a vague possibility. Clay which the potter may shape, this way or that: – say rather, the twenty-five millions of potters; for so many have now, more or less, a vote in it! How to shape the States-General? There is a problem. Each Body-corporate, each privileged, each organised Class has secret hopes of its own in that matter; and also secret misgivings of its own, – for, behold, this monstrous twenty-million Class, hitherto the dumb sheep which these others had to agree about the manner of shearing, is now also arising with hopes! It has ceased or is ceasing to be dumb; it speaks through Pamphlets, or at least brays and growls behind them, in unison, – increasing wonderfully their volume of sound.
Along with Adolph Thiers, François Guizot is probably the best example of the historian-politician or politician-historian. Of course, in nineteenth-century France there was a significant overlap between the two professions. Guizot stands out as one of the foremost romantic-idealist historians, and also one of the key political figures of the period. He had a long and distinguished political career, which culminated in his role as King Louis Philippe’s first minister during the Orleanist era.
Guizot was born two years prior to the Fall of the Bastille. He studied in Switzerland and moved on to a legal career in Paris. Thereafter he turned his attention to literary matters and his arrival as a historian came in 1812 when he was appointed professor of modern history at the Sorbonne. Elected as a député in 1830, he served Louis Philippe as minister of the interior and public instruction (1832–37), and started to dominate government in the early- and mid-1840s. He was appointed premier in 1847 but was ousted by the revolutionaries of 1848.
The general historical consensus is that Guizot moved more and more to the right as the 1830s and 1840s progressed, coming to personify the selfish, narrow-minded philosophy of Orleanism. From the start he openly paraded his ideology. In a speech of 5 October 1831 he declared:
I have heard equality much spoken of; we have called it the fundamental principle of our political organisation. I am afraid there has been a great mistake. Without doubt there are universal rights, equal rights for all, rights inherent in humanity and which no human being can be stripped of without injustice and disorder … But will political rights be of this order? It is through tradition, through heredity that families, peoples, and history subsist; without tradition, without heredity you would have nothing of that. It is through the personal activity of families, peoples, and individuals that produces the perfectibility of the human race. Suppress it, and you will cause the human race to fall to the rank of the animals.
As regards his view of history, and by implication his view of the revolution, there are mixed signals: the trust in ‘aristocracy’ and ‘tradition’, but also the emphasis on ‘rights’.
Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution, published between 1847 and 1853, is a wonderful book to read because the author is so open and disarming in his prejudices, both positive and negative. As Hampson put it:
With Michelet the Great Tradition found its most eloquent and extreme spokesman. To present the bare outline of his argument is like paraphrasing one of Shakespeare’s tragedies: one can convey a general impression of what it was all about but the real meaning is inseparable from the hypnotic language that is an essential part of it.
When Michelet wrote his history, there was still a little naivety about what the job of the historian entailed. Thus, when he talks about his technique as a historian, he reveals that he establishes and verifies his findings, ‘either by written testimony, or by such as I have gathered from the lips of old men’.
Michelet is unfailingly honest in the way he says the revolution – studying and writing about it – affected him. He sees it as a personal joy to be able to recount such a heroic period:
I am endeavouring to describe to-day that epoch of unanimity, that holy period, when a whole nation, free from all party distinction, as yet a comparative stranger to the opposition of classes, marched together under a flag of brotherly love ... These are the sacred days of the world – thrice happy days for history. For my part, I have had my reward, in the mere narration of them. Never, since the composition of my Maid of Orleans, have I received such a ray from above, such a vivid inspiration from Heaven.
From de Tocqueville to Marxist orthodoxy
Where does Alexis de Tocqueville fit in? He was an ‘anxious aristocrat’, according to Palmer, one who felt that democracy was inevitable but dangerous. It is possible to make a connection between de Tocqueville and the liberal historians of the early nineteenth century. He shared many of their instincts and inclinations and, undeniably, placed a premium on the protection of liberty.
De Tocqueville’s major work was The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). It is important to understand that he was writing in a particular kind of climate. ‘The Springtime of the Peoples’ – the name given to the kaleidoscope of liberal-nationalist revolutions in 1848 – had a distinctly French flavour, for the initial revolutionary moment had taken place in Paris. For de Tocqueville, the revolution of 1848 was an interesting and curious political event. To some extent, he admired the working-class Parisian agitators who were at the forefront of the uprising. They had risked their lives for a principle they believed in, and de Tocqueville, albeit in a somewhat detached and patronising manner, could respect this. But, as an aristocrat, he knew that 1848 was fundamentally ‘bad’, and he knew he could not, or should not, sympathise with its objectives.
The revolution could not but impact upon de Tocqueville’s writings. It had the effect of frightening the middle and upper classes, and as a liberal aristocrat – and someone who was actually present in Paris during the disturbances – he was certainly not immune from feelings of fear and unease. ‘It was ... no laughing matter but something sinister and frightening to see the state of Paris when I returned there,’ he wrote.
In that city there were a hundred thousand armed workmen formed into regiments, without work and dying of hunger, but with heads full of vain theories and chimerical hopes. Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror. There were no longer ties of sympathy linking these two great classes, and a struggle was everywhere assumed to be inevitable soon. There had already been physical clashes with different results between the bourgeois and the people – for these old names had been revived as battle cries – at Limoges and at Rouen. In Paris hardly a day passed without some attack or threat to the propertied classes’ capital or income.
Given these feelings, it was inevitable that de Tocqueville’s attitude to 1848 would come to colour his view of 1789.
Against the backdrop of a new, progressive regime – the Third Republic – historians came to re-evaluate the revolution, often in quite political and ideological terms. It is also important to note that the centenary of the revolution was celebrated during this period, a significant landmark that gave rise to an increase in historiographical writings. Here the two most notable names were Hippolyte Taine and Alphonse Aulard.
Taine offered a sociological interpretation of events that, in time, marked him out as the archetypal conservative onlooker. He had little positive to say about the Jacobins:
Aside from the great mass of well-disposed people fond of a quiet life, the Revolution has sifted out and separated from the rest all who are fanatical, brutal or perverse enough to have lost respect for others; these form the new garrison – sectarians blinded by their creed, the roughs (assommeurs) who are hardened by their calling, and those who make all they can out of their offices. None of this class are scrupulous concerning human life or property; for, as we have seen, they have shaped the theory to suit themselves, and reduced popular sovereignty to their sovereignty.
Neither does Taine hide his emotions. He implies that the Jacobins are dirty and also corrupt and self-seeking.
Aulard was the first professional historian of the French Revolution, and he devoted his life to this study. A professor at the University of Paris, he founded the Société de l‘Histoire de la Révolution and the bi-monthly review Révolution Française. Instead of monarchy, Aulard favoured a brand of democratic republicanism that was very much in vogue with the establishment of the Third Republic.
Essentially, Aulard regarded the conservative interpretation of Taine as subjective, and so, as a corrective, he developed what was, to all intents and purposes, a republican and anti-clerical view of the revolution. This is an illuminating example of the way in which historians have ‘confronted’ each other over the meaning of the revolution. Aulard’s interpretation of the revolutionary decade is political rather than socio-economic in emphasis. And he makes no bones about this:
The economic and social history of the Revolution is dispersed over so many sources that it is actually impossible in one lifetime to deal with them all, or even with the most important. He who would write this history unaided could only here and there attain the whole truth, and would end by producing only a superficial sketch of the whole, drawn at second or third hand. But in the case of political history, if it be reduced to the facts I have chosen, it is possible for a man, in the course of twenty years, to read the laws of the Revolution, the principal journals, correspondences, deliberations, speeches, election papers, and the biographies of those who played a part in the political life of the time.
In the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, the ‘Great Tradition’ of revolutionary historiography was dominated by a group of leftist writers including Jean Jaurès, Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul. The way in which they delineated a ‘bourgeois revolution’ occurring in 1790s France was a defining moment in the history of revolutionary studies. What is more, they put their case in such a convincing manner that the Marxist interpretation of the revolution gradually came to be regarded as the orthodoxy.
The key landmarks in French Marxist historiography were: 1898 – Jean Jaurès, Histoire Socialiste de la Révolution française; 1927 – Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution; 1939 – George Lefebvre, Quatre Vingt Neuf; and 1965 – Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution. The writers who put forward the Marxist line on the revolution began to coalesce under the banner of the ‘Annales School’. It was also interesting that many of the key left-wing historians were not just historians but political activists too, involved in the French socialist or communist parties.
In chapter 2 we considered the Marxist interpretation of the revolution and, in particular, its origins. Now we must place the emergence of left-wing theories in context. For Marx himself, 1789 was an important reference point. He refers to it often in his writings, and talks about it as the ‘old’ and ‘great’ revolution as if in veneration. He was curious about the whole revolutionary tradition in France, and also, for partisan reasons, concerned, if not obsessed, about ‘revolution’ as an idea.
The main question was this: to what extent was the revolution of 1789 a ‘bourgeois revolution’? In other words, did the experience of France in the period 1789–99 conform to Marx’s delineation of the key ‘scientific’ stages in history? And, looking back on the revolution, could the experience of France be made, or forced, to fit in with Marx’s model? It was with these fundamental issues that Marxist and left-leaning historians were made to grapple. The point to be made is this: although, to a large extent, the research of Marxist historians was driven by ideology, there is no doubt that their ideas gained wide currency and acceptance.
Revisionism: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’
‘Soft revisionism’ is the term coined to describe the efforts of a range of post-war historians to discredit the Marxist orthodoxy. Led by Alfred Cobban, these writers continued to place the emphasis on social and economic history; but, they had serious concerns about the narrowness and ‘scientific’ nature of the Marxist line.
Most commentators are agreed that the ‘chief protagonist’ or ‘father of revisionism’ is Cobban, whose most important work was The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964). At the time, this book was slightly neglected, but it gradually acquired the reputation of a path-breaking work. On one level it was a critique of the Marxist standpoint. On another it was a ‘non- Marxist social interpretation’. It still placed the emphasis on social and economic factors, but it veered away from any kind of deterministic approach.
Other independent-minded, non-Marxist revisionists buttressed the Cobban position. In the words of Kates, these writers were ‘not known for their political activism or political labels’. It could be argued that whereas Marxist historians had a general approach to uphold, this new breed of writers came to the subject without any obvious prejudices to propogate. Most notable in this context were G.V. Taylor, ‘Non-capitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution’, American History Review (1967); Norman Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution (1963); and J.M. Thompson, The French Revolution (1966). Taylor’s was a particularly important contribution, as he, like Cobban, argued for an overlap between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy as classes. It is relevant to point out that Cobban was English and Taylor was American, for, very gradually, a shift in power was taking place – with French Marxist historians being usurped by Anglo-Saxon revisionists.
‘Soft revisionism’ was based on a number of key tenets. First, Cobban and his co-accusers objected to the pseudo-scientific nature of Marxist theory. It seemed that Marxist interpretations were determined to put theory first and facts second; the revisionists placed a premium on the facts above all else. Second, this wave of revisionists had serious reservations about the main claims of Lefebvre and his Marxist allies regarding the nature of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie – that is, if they were distinct classes. In short, they argued that the aristocracy was not ‘feudal’, the bourgeoisie was neither ‘united’ nor ‘capitalist’, and it was the peasantry, rather than the middle-class bourgeoisie, who were responsible for the overthrow of the Ancien Régime. Third, the revisionists could not hide the fact that, ultimately, they were actually questioning, and perhaps even downplaying, the significance of the revolution and 1789 as a watershed (although Cobban, for one, refuted this: ‘It must not be supposed, though Georges Lefebvre did, that I am trying to deny the existence of the French Revolution; I merely want to discover what it was’).
‘Hard revisionism’ went even further. It claimed not only that the Marxist interpretation was misinformed, but also that any theory of the revolution based on social factors was inherently faulty. As such, ‘hard revisionists’ put the emphasis on political factors, and other factors less easy to categorise. They ensured that the work of Cobban, Taylor and others was not simply regarded as a ‘blip’. They consolidated, but also enhanced, the revisionist offensive.
The central figure in ‘hard revisionism’ has been François Furet, whose ideas on the revolution cannot be separated from his own personal background. He was an ex-Marxist and wrote much of his history in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as the fortunes of the French Communist Party entered into almost terminal decline and became something of an irrelevance in modern French politics. In Interpreting the French Revolution, he was aware of this context:
I am writing these lines in the spring of 1977, at a time when the criticism of Soviet totalitarianism, and more generally of all power claiming its source in Marxism, is no longer the monopoly, or near monopoly, of right-wing thought and has become a central theme in the reflections of the Left. What is important here, in referring to the historically related entities of Right and Left, is not that the criticism from the Left, which has occupied a culturally dominant position in France since the end of the Second World War, carries more weight than criticism from the Right. Much more important is that in indicting the USSR or China the Right has no need to adjust any part of its heritage and can simply stay within the bounds of counter-revolutionary thought. The Left, on the other hand, must face up to facts that compromise its beliefs, which are as old as those of the Right.
This background explains to a large extent Furet’s derogatory attitude towards Marxist historians of the revolution.
It would be difficult to disagree with the view which says that the French Revolution is one of the most complex, and also one of the most analysed, historical events. Cobban says that, over the decades, interpretations have tended to fall into two main categories – either ‘conspiracy’ or ‘destiny’. Those hostile to the revolution do tend to view it as some kind of ‘plot’ or ‘punishment’ meted out on France, whereas those more favourable can sometimes get carried away by the inevitability and wonder of 1789.
But the real question is this: why has the revolution provoked so many widely differing interpretations? There are a number of angles we could take on this issue. First, the rich tapestry of revolutionary historiography reflects, and almost imitates, the kaleidoscopic nature of France’s history of revolutions. Over the last two centuries the French political landscape has been ever-changing. There have been absolute monarchies, constitutional monarchies, republics and empires – and this has meant that, on occasions, historians, attached to a specific regime, have considered the period 1789–99 from a partisan point of view, with the intention of scoring political points. Thus, we have to treat the views of historians with more caution and scepticism than perhaps is usual.
Second, there is the event itself. In essence, the ‘revolution’ comprised three ‘mini-revolutions’: the liberal revolt (1789–91), the illiberal interlude (1792–94), and the reversion to moderation (1794–99). So, when historians come to examine the event, they can either become fascinated by its evolving trajectory or blinkered by one particular phase with which they seek to identify themselves. Either way, there is a compulsion to discover more.