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The French Revolution at the end of the Cold War

Lynn Hunt

Revolutionary France, 1770-1880 by Franois Furet, translated by Antonia Nevill

Blackwell, 630 pp, 40.00, December 1992, ISBN 0 631 17029 4

In 1989, Franois Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the

context) as the king of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to

be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of

almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the

celebration. Even his absence from the international scholarly meeting at the

Sorbonne in July of that year merited a comment in Le Monde. Furets elevationmarked the apparently definitive defeat of the Marxist interpretation as the

dominant paradigm in studies of the French Revolution, a defeat which coincided

with the collapse of Eastern bloc Communism. Historiography and world politics

seemed to reinforce each other in uncanny fashion in the home of the

revolutionary tradition, and it was as if the historian Furet had proved prescient

about the future as much as the past.

Furets panoramic history of the long French Revolution, 1770-1880, appeared in

French in 1988 on the eve of the Bicentenary celebrations. Given the date of its

writing, it might well have reproduced the slash-and-burn tactics of his previous

criticisms of the Lenino-populist vulgate. In two major works, Penser la rvolution

franaise (English translation, Interpreting the French Revolution, 1981) and with

Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la rvolution franaise (English translation, A

Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1989), Furet demolished the major

tenets of the Marxist interpretation, in particular the notion of a class-based,

bourgeois revolution as a metaphysical monster which suffocated historical

reality in the name of Jacobino-Leninist piety. He struck the pose of liberal St

George taking on the dragons of Marxist and Communist ideological conformity

and seemed never to let his guard down, even for a moment of celebration.

The tone of Revolutionary France is surprisingly serene, in contrast, as if the

author knew that the major battles had already been won. An opening note of non-

belligerence had sounded more faintly in the Dictionary, when on its very first

page, Furet and Ozouf had admitted that the notion of a bourgeois revolution was

not without pertinence or fruitfulness and that the idea of class struggle did

indeed have a legitimate place in a history of the French Revolution. The victors

could afford to show their generosity of spirit to the vanquished. But RevolutionaryFrance is no mopping-up operation. Where the Dictionary was the last volley in a

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barrage of criticism directed at the opposition, Revolutionary France ventures out

onto new territory altogether. Gone is the contentious dialogue with competing

views and Furets previous insistence on the superiority of criticism and analysis

over narrative. Instead, we get the Revolution as longue dure, told in an almost

19th-century way, with the author speaking as national sage.

For some time now, Furet has shown his predilection for the 19th-century

historians of the French Revolution. The Dictionary included a long section on

Historians and Commentators, in which the 20th-century historians of the

Revolution were relegated to one dismissive article. As far as Furet was concerned,

what was left of the academic equated with narrow and ruled by jealous

patrons tradition of Revolutionary historiography ended for good when George

Lefebvre lay down in the Procrustean bed of Marxism-Leninism. Furets few pages

on Alphonse Aulard, Albert Mathiez and Lefebvre (Albert Soboul and his successor

at the Sorbonne, Michel Vovelle, were apparently beneath contempt and so

merited no space at all) paled in comparison to the loving, vivid treatment of

Benjamin Constant, Louis Blanc, Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet and a handful of

other, non-academic, non-positivist, non-specialist writers including Karl Marx

who shared a grand passion for public affairs and sought the secrets of

contemporary France in the heritage of the Great Revolution.