Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (Manson Welsh Gross Lectureship Series) - Hardcover

Hobsbawm, E. J.

3.66

163 ratings by Goodreads

9780813515236: Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (Manson Welsh Gross Lectureship Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813515238 ISBN 13: 9780813515236

Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr, 1990

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We can learn a great deal from studying the French Revolution itself, but we can also learn from studying the ways in which scholars have interpreted the French Revolution, and from the ways their views have changed. For over a century following the Revolution, commentators and scholars spoke of it in glowing terms. But in the past three decades, revisionist historians have become skeptical. Eric Hobsbawm reiterates the centrality of the Revolution for history on a global basis. He argues that those who wrote about the Revolution in the nineteenth century were convinced it had changed their lives dramatically, improving the economy and the lot of peasants. They saw the Revolution as a prototype of of the bourgeois revolution, enabling the middle class to gain power from the ruling class of aristocrats. Many believed proletarian revolutions would inevitably follow. In the years between 1917 and the 1960s, Marxists continued to use the French Revolution as a point of reference, paying increasing attention to the social and economic factors in the Revolution, not only to the political factors. In the 1970s and 1980s, many historians began to argue that the Revolution achieved modest results at disproportionate costs. Hobsbawm argues that this massive historiographical reaction against the centrality of the Revolution reflects the personal politics of those contemporary historians for whom Marxism and communism are now out of favor. They are, he maintains, wrong. The Revolution transformed the world permanently and introduced forces that continue to transform it.

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About the Author:

ERIC JOHN ERNEST HOBSBAWM, CH FRSL FBA (1917-2012) was emeritus professor of history at Birbeck College, University of London, emeritus university professor of politics and society at the New School for Social Research, and a fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He authored more than twenty books, including the collection The Invention of Tradition and the tetralogy The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes.

Review:

"Hobsbawm's brilliant and engaging polemic succeeds both in highlighting what was revolutionary about the French Revolution and showing how people have argued angrily about it ever since." (Peter McPhee author of Liberty or Death: The French Revolution)

"This is a vigorous, refreshing, and learned brief on behalf of a venerable historiographical tradition. It reminds us of the obvious but often overlooked truth: that there are no definitive interpretations, certainly not of an event so primal and transcendent as the French Revolution." (David P. Jordan author of The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre)

"Nobody is better qualified to explore such a theme, for the range and penetration of Hobsbawm's writings on modern European history have long been the envy and admiration of other scholars." (William Doyle author of The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction)

"Much of his argument is addressed to historians of the Left, but his general conclusions will interest all historians of the modern world." (Nancy C. Cridland author of Books in American History: A Basic List for High Schools)

"It is good to rub the revisionist sand from one's eyes and read: 'The absurdity of the assumption that the French Revolution is simply a sort of stumble on the long, slow march of eternal France, is patent.' Eric Hobsbawm is right, of course." (Gwynne Lewis author of The French Revolution and Life in Revolutionary France)

"Eric Hobsbawm is one of the few genuinely great historians of our century." (The New Republic)

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