Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution - Softcover

Hobsbawm, Professor Eric

3.66

163 ratings by Goodreads

9780813515243: Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813515246 ISBN 13: 9780813515243

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1990

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"The French Revolution," writes Hobsbawm, "gave peoples the sense that history could be changed by their action ... [and] demonstrated the power of the common people in a manner which no subsequent government has ever allowed itself to forget."
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 Hobsbawm is a neo-Marxist historian of the Industrial Revolution who pays particular attention to the inequities toward the lower classes, especially in law and politics.

Review:

"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")

"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")

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