Contesting the French Revolution (Contesting the Past) - Hardcover

Hanson, Paul R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405160837 ISBN 13: 9781405160834

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Synopsis

Contesting the French Revolution provides an insightful overview of one of history’s most significant events, as well as examining the most significant historiographical debates about this period.

• Explores the causes, events, and consequences of the French Revolution
  
• Offers a stimulating analysis of the most controversial debates: Were the events of 1789 a social revolution or a political accident? Did they mark the rise of industrial capitalism or the birth of modern democracy? Was Napoleon Bonaparte an heir to the ideals of 1789 or a betrayer of the Revolution?
  
• Shows how historical interpretation of the French Revolution has been influenced by the changing political and social currents of the last 200 years – from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall – and how historical study has shifted from a political focus to social and cultural approaches in more recent years.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Hanson is Professor of History at Butler University in Indianapolis. He has taught courses on French history, European history, and Chinese history, and has published numerous books and articles examining the French Revolution, including The Jacobin Republic under Fire, Provincial Politics in the French Revolution and Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution.

From the Back Cover

Few events in history have generated as much scholarly work as the French Revolution, and lively and often emotional debates about is origins and meaning continue to this day.

Contesting the French Revolution presents an overview of what led up to this pivotal event, the turning points that shaped it, and its far-reaching effects, as well as examining the most significant historiographical debates about this period. Were the events of 1789 a social revolution or a political accident? Did they mark the rise of industrial capitalism or the birth of modern democracy? Was the Reign of Terror a response to foreign war and domestic resistance or the product of Jacobin ideology? Was Napoleon Bonaparte an heir to the ideals of 1789 or a betrayer of the Revolution? In this impressive evaluation of La Révolution Paul Hanson offers an engaging analysis of these debates, showing us how historical interpretation of the French Revolution has been influenced by the changing political and social currents of the last 200 years – from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Contesting the French Revolution presents an overview of what led up to this pivotal event, the turning points that shaped it, and its far-reaching effects, as well as examining the most significant historiographical debates about this period. Were the events of 1789 a social revolution or a political accident? Did they mark the rise of industrial capitalism or the birth of modern democracy? Was the Reign of Terror a response to foreign war and domestic resistance or the product of Jacobin ideology? Was Napoleon Bonaparte an heir to the ideals of 1789 or a betrayer of the Revolution? In this impressive evaluation of La Révolution Paul Hanson offers an engaging analysis of these debates, showing us how historical interpretation of the French Revolution has been influenced by the changing political and social currents of the last 200 years – from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Contesting the French Revolution

By Paul R. Hanson

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Paul R. Hanson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-6083-4

Chapter One

Origins: Inevitable Revolution or Resolvable Crisis?

Could the French Revolution have been avoided? At one level the answer to this question is a simple one: No historical event is inevitable, and certainly no revolution or war need have occurred at precisely the time it did. Our question is a bit more complicated, however, and we might put it in a different way. Could the Bourbon monarchy have survived the crisis that it faced in the 1780s? To be sure, there are monarchists in Paris today who fondly hope for a restoration of the Bourbon throne, but few would consider that hope to be realistic. On the other hand, the other great monarchies of Europe - the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the Romanovs - survived up until World War I, and the Bourbons returned to the French throne for a brief time after the defeat of Napoleon. So while the collapse of the monarchy in France may have been inevitable, eventually, it need not have happened when it did and as it did. This leaves plenty of room for debate about why the French Revolution occurred, and whether or not it could have been averted in 1789.

One of the striking things about the French Revolution, particularly as compared to other major revolutions in world history, is that it occurred in the most powerful, most prosperous, and most populous nation in Europe at the time. No one in the 1780s would have said that the Bourbon monarchy was on the verge of collapse. So what happened? Understanding the roots of the crisis that confronted the French state in 1789 is a crucial first step toward understanding the nature of the Revolution itself.

The tension between individual liberty and the growth of state power will be a theme running throughout this volume, and it points as well to a distinction we might make in considering the origins of the French Revolution. On the one hand we will find them in the aspirations for greater freedom and individual rights expressed by educated French people over the course of the eighteenth century, but we will also find causes of revolution in the challenges confronting the French state in the second half of the century, both internal and external, which in the end the monarchy proved unable to master. These two broad themes - the quest for individual freedom, and problems confronting the state - will be explored in this chapter in three sections. The first will discuss the cultural and ideological origins of the French Revolution. For many years the focus here among historians was on the Enlightenment, on the critique of absolute monarchy and the Catholic Church presented by philosophes such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was not uncontested territory itself. Some argued that these thinkers were really not so revolutionary in their ideas, while others questioned the extent of their influence in the eighteenth century. More recently, however, scholars have begun to consider an expanding array of cultural developments and institutions, including religious currents (especially Jansenism), popular literature, the world of theatre, an emerging newspaper press, and the growing influence in the final decades of the Old Regime of the "public sphere" and public opinion.

The idea of the public sphere points us toward the second section of this chapter, dealing with the social and economic origins of the Revolution. In the Marxist interpretation the focus in this regard was on the rising bourgeoisie and a developing capitalist economy in France. That interpretation, as already noted, has come under serious criticism, and new arguments have been advanced regarding economic change in the eighteenth century and its impact on social categories and political attitudes. An expanding commercial sector was of particular importance, as was the pattern of gradual urbanization. Two major questions will draw our attention in this section: Was the Old Regime economy vibrant and capable of growth, or teetering on the brink of obsolescence? and, Were the elites of the Third Estate virtually indistinguishable from the nobility in their interests and political views, as some have suggested, or were there real tensions and differences between them? In addition, the role of the peasantry as a revolutionary force must be assessed.

The third section of the chapter will focus on structural and institutional origins of the Revolution, some of which are rooted in economic factors. It is clear, for instance, that a financial crisis forced the monarchy to convene the Estates General in 1789. Past scholarship focused largely on the inequality of taxation and an inefficient tax collection system as responsible for this, but very recent work has drawn our attention to the related issue of public debt and the financial institutions of the Old Regime. Some historians have argued that the monarchy made serious efforts to reform judicial and administrative structures in the second half of the eighteenth century, pointing (on the judicial side) to efforts by Chancellor Maupeou at the end of the reign of Louis XV and (on the administrative side) to reforms introduced by Turgot in the early years of Louis XVI's rule. Lomnie de Brienne also attempted reforms on the very eve of the Revolution. All of these efforts failed, however, which has generated debate about the validity of the reforms themselves and the obstacles to their implementation. At the heart of the matter, some would argue, lay the system of privilege upon which the Old Regime monarchy rested.

I would make one final preliminary observation before moving ahead. It is common in the historiography to distinguish between long-term and short-term causes of the Revolution. The inefficiencies of the tax system would be an example of the former, the bad harvests of 1788 and 1789 an example of the latter. I have used the word "origins" more often than "causes" in these introductory remarks, and in the title to this chapter, quite intentionally. In thinking about the impact of Enlightenment thought, for example, it is difficult to see it as a cause of the Revolution, particularly since so few of the philosophes called for any kind of revolutionary upheaval. But there is no doubt that Enlightenment ideas contributed to the ferment of the 1780s and to the constitutional debates in the Constituent Assembly. Similarly, one would be wary of arguing that an expanding "public sphere" and the emergence of public opinion as an acknowledged force in the 1780s caused the Revolution, but these changes helped to create a social and cultural context within which political contestation became more possible than it was earlier in the century, and in this sense we must include these elements among the origins of the French Revolution.

Cultural and Ideological Origins

In nearly every textbook on European history or Western civilization a discussion of the Enlightenment precedes the section on the French Revolution, and in that juxtaposition the Enlightenment has come to be seen as a cause of the Revolution. The most celebrated proponent of a direct connection between the two is almost certainly Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that the abstract ideas of the philosophes, who had no direct experience in government or administration, led to the impractical and ultimately failed experiments of the several revolutionary regimes, from the Constitutional Monarchy through the Jacobin Republic and Directory. In the early twentieth century Daniel Mornet also made a case for the influence of Enlightenment ideas on revolutionary politics, and monarchist critics of the Revolution have long contended that the Enlightenment was to blame for the fiasco of 1789.

It is easier to make a case for the philosophes as critics of the Old Regime than as advocates of revolution. One sees in Montesquieu's Persian Letters and The Spirit of the Laws a critique of royal absolutism, but the latter is more a call for aristocratic restraint on royal power than a call for democratic reform. Many of Voltaire's essays and literary works contained biting criticism of the Catholic Church and religious intolerance, but despite his own deist views he saw religion as essential to the preservation of public morals among the masses. The Revolution would attack both the monarchy and the Church, but not, most historians would agree today, at the call of either Montesquieu or Voltaire.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau went considerably further in his criticism of Old Regime monarchy and society. The Second Discourse on the Origins of Inequality argued that the existing social order was the product of an elaborate hoax played upon the weak by the powerful rather than being the fruit of celestial design, and went so far as to suggest that a despotic monarch could be turned out by his subjects. Rousseau carried this argument further in The Social Contract, in which he developed his concept of the "general will," asserting that sovereignty resided in the people rather than in the person of the king. In 1791 Louis-Sbastien Mercier published De J. J. Rousseau considr comme l'un des premiers auteurs de la Rvolution, clear evidence of the influence he attributed to the philosophe, and it is well-known that Rousseau's writings profoundly shaped the political thinking of Maximilien Robespierre.

That Rousseau's thought was influential during the Revolution, however, does not necessarily mean that his writings were a cause of the Revolution. Joan McDonald argued, for example, that the Social Contract was not widely read before 1789 and that its limited audience was more likely to have included liberal monarchists than future revolutionaries. James Miller took the opposite view in his elegant intellectual biography of Rousseau, pointing out that the key political concepts more fully explicated in the Social Contract were also sketched out, in abbreviated form, in his novels Emile and La Nouvelle Hloise, both of which were enormously popular in the final decades of the Old Regime. Miller credits Rousseau with rehabilitating the idea of democracy, long discredited among European political theorists: "In this respect, the French Revolution has played a major role in determining how we can read Rousseau. The event illuminates the text - for it was the Revolution, after all, which forced the idea of democracy onto the agenda of modern history."

There has been no paucity of scholarly work on Rousseau over the years, but the ascendancy of the Marxist interpretation in the twentieth century and the turn to social history following World War II meant that, for a generation or two, historians of the French Revolution looked away from the Enlightenment toward social and economic causal factors. That trend changed due to the influence of Franois Furet, who particularly emphasized Rousseauist ideas as responsible not only for the upheaval of 1789 but also for drawing revolutionary politics ineluctably toward the Terror. In this Furet echoed an earlier argument of J. L. Talmon, who saw in Rousseau's philosophy the origins of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Keith Baker has also recently reemphasized Enlightenment thought in exploring the origins of the Revolution, although focusing on lesser-known figures such as Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and the abb Gabriel Bonnot Mably, in whose work Baker sees a virtual "script for a French revolution."

The relationship between the Enlightenment and Revolution remains a contested one, however. In response to Furet's argument, Roger Chartier suggested that rather than the Enlightenment having caused the Revolution it was the revolutionaries who self-consciously created the Enlightenment as their intellectual precursor, a dialectical relationship also hinted at by James Miller in the passage quoted above. Darrin McMahon has challenged both Furet and Chartier in Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. As the title suggests, McMahon argues on the one hand that the Enlightenment existed as an intellectual force long before the Revolution occurred - its enemies were in full voice by mid-century - and on the other that this opposition to Enlightenment ideas continued on into the decade of the 1790s, contrary to Furet's assertion that Jacobin ideology, the heir of Rousseau, created its own mythic enemies as justification for the Terror. This is a debate to which we will return in later chapters.

As we see, then, there have been those who have interpreted the Enlightenment as a cause of the French Revolution in a positive sense, others who viewed its influence more negatively as leading to the political excesses of the Revolution, and still others who have called any causal relationship into question. In recent years, post-modernist thinkers have interpreted the Enlightenment in a more broadly negative light, arguing that in its insistence on empirical truth the Enlightenment privileged European culture and paved the way for colonialism, imperialism, and the subjugation of non-European peoples. Daniel Gordon and others dispute that view in a recent collection of essays, in the conclusion to which Gordon writes that "One way to think about Enlightenment political thought is that it was an effort to bring about a double institutionalization of liberty - to proclaim liberty as a basic human right and to set its limits in practice."

If one sees Enlightenment thought as central to the assertion of human rights, then certainly one must count the Enlightenment among the origins of the French Revolution, given the centrality of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Revolution itself. Many years ago Georges Lefebvre argued that one might read the Declaration point by point, despite its claims to universality, as essentially a critique of the failings of the Old Regime. Lynn Hunt has recently contributed two books focusing on the Declaration of Rights and the genesis of those rights in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Given the importance of the Declaration both as an expression of revolutionary ideals and as a window into the abuses of the Old Regime, we will examine it at some length in Chapter Three.

In another important work, Dale Van Kley explored at length the religious origins of the French Revolution, paying particular attention to the Jansenist controversy within the French Catholic Church. Beginning with the papal bull Unigenitus (1713) and culminating with an order of the Archbishop of Paris in the 1750s denying them the sacraments, Jansenists found themselves the targets of concerted royal persecution. The response of the Jansenist minority to that persecution focused criticism not only on the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (by appealing to the conciliar tradition within the church), but also on the sacred character of the monarchy itself. Since many Jansenists were members of the parlement of Paris, they became embroiled in the Maupeou controversy of the 1770s, when Louis XV's chancellor attempted to curtail the authority of the parlements. Maupeou's reforms elicited a wave of critical pamphlets, many of them written by Jansenist parlementaires.

Notable among these pamphlets was one published in Bordeaux by Guillaume-Joseph Saige, a young lawyer whose cousin sat on the parlement of Bordeaux. In his pamphlet, Cathechisme du Citoyen, Saige combined Jansenist and Rousseauist ideas, arguing, on the one hand, that the conciliarist tradition within the French Catholic Church represented a kind of republicanism, and, on the other, that the many communes of rural France represented "so many little republics within the great republic of the French nation." So incendiary was this pamphlet, with its direct challenge to monarchical despotism and its insistence that sovereignty was embodied not in the king but in the nation, that the parlement of Bordeaux itself ordered it to be burned. Van Kley argues that the Jansenist strain within French Catholicism was not only an essential influence on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790, but on the genesis of French republicanism: "religion as mediated by ideology entered into the very texture of revolutionary republicanism, making sense of many of its otherwise paradoxical traits."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405160837
• ISBN 13: 9781405160834
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248