Reading Peter Mcphee on the Social Consequences of the French

r' titles from Palgrave Macmillan: ;ton, Religion and Revolution in France, 1.780-1804 A Social History arrison, A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483-1598 otter, A History of France, 1460-1560 Sowerwine, France since 18.70 Vinen, France, 1934-1970 of France 1789-1914 Second Edition PETER McPHEE 'fJUv ~ (Jn~ " P~XCL~ ~ 1vt,dC./JM-J{'Ct1v, 2. DO 4 , " palgrave ........... ___ : 11 _- THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLUTION 91 Revolution - that dangerous precedent - its historical reality and its specific social and national character'. 5 The 'minimalist' approach to the social significance of the Revolution is lucidly articulated by Roger Price: 'In political and ide0logical terms the ,The Social Consequences Revolution ~ was no doubt of crucial importance, but humanit:y. 'l"'as:no,t trans formed thereby. Most of the population continued to be sabjeCfMlO"ili.6age-old constraints of their environment. At the end of all the political,dp1ieavaJst'Ofi the of the Revolution Revolution and Empire little had changed in the daily life of most F.u~aclnmel1Ilf From this perspective, fundamental changes to the structures of,ailly,>li'fe 'wer,e simply beyond the reach of political reformers. Across the English ,Ohannel, the years 1780-1830 saw a 'revolution' of a different type: there, more Igfaduru but profound transformations to industry and agriculture generated, stliuCnl!lllal changes which left nothing untouched, from the nature of work to demographic From the point of vi~w of the working people of town and country, how patterns, from urban life to crime, protest and family life. Could it not be atgued 'revolutionary' had been the experience of 25 years of Revolution and Empire? that similarly profound changes in France would have to wait for parallel' To be sure, French people had experienced years of political upheaval and changes to economic structures in the half-century after 1830? I, uncertainty but, in the end, was this just a time of dashed hopes and massive Certainly, all historians agree that French political culture had been irre~o sacrifices, whether for national military security or, after 1795, for the territo cably transformed, and that the restoration of monarchy could not reverse rial dreams of the Directory and Napoleon? Well over one million French assumptions of citizenship, even if democratic republicanism could be out people - not to mention those from other countries - had died in internal and lawed.4 The interaction of a new political language, tl1e search for a symbolism external wars between 1792 and 1815: when the bloodshed finally abated, of regeneration and republicanism, and the experience of collective political could the survivors only hope to reconstitute the essentials of daily life as they practices bequeathed a rich legacy of meanings to the idea of citizenship. The had been in the 1780s? years after 1788 unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of the printed word: Responses to these questions go to the heart of important and often acri hundreds of newspapers, perhaps one tllOusand plays and many tllOusands of monious divisions among historians,l For the Marxist historian Albert Soboul, brochures and handbills. Accompanying the heroic canvases of David was a writing in 1962, the Revolution was profoundly revolutionary in its short and proliferation of popular art in the form of woodcuts, prints and paintings. long-term consequences: 'A classic bourgeois revolution, its uncompromising Writing and painting as forms of revolutionary action were paralleled by the uses abolition of the feudal system and the seigneurial regime make it the starting made of the decorative arts and festivals, bringing together sculpture, dress, point for capitalist society and the liberal representative system in the history of architecture, singing and dancing, and with the populace as actor. Collective France.'2 Moreover, argued Soboul, the sans-culottes and the Babouvists in par practices, from national assemblies to thousands of clubs, section meetings and ticular twice tried to push the Revolution beyond its bourgeois limits, prefigur 40,000 local councils, introduced millions of people to the language and forms ing a time - and this is the heart of the political acrimony - when industrial of popular sovereignty. Malcolm Crook has estimated that about three million expansion would enable a larger, socialist working-class to remake the world in men had been involved in voting across the revolutionary decade; indeed, there its turn. were so many elections (several per year), and such lengthy voting procedures, Since the mid-1950s, the collapse of the political authority of Marxism has tl1at a certain lassitude developed.5 encouraged 'revisionist' historians to dispute long-accepted Marxist certainties The meaning of this new political culture varied by class, gender and region; about the origins, nature and significance of the Revolution. They have con it also left a legacy of contrasting ideologies, none of which could claim to rep tested the explanation of the Revolution as the political resolution of a long resent the aspirations of a majority of French people. Those liberal nobles and term and deep-seated social crisis, arguing instead that it was the result of the great mass of parish priests who had tl1fown their weight behind the third short-term fiscal and political mismanagement; nor do they see the increasing estate in 1789 had experienced a protracted nightmare, one which made them violence of the Revolution as simply a regrettable but necessary response to deeply antipathetic towards secular, democratic, egalitarian ideas throughout counter-revolution. Most important of all, they dispute Marxist conclusions tl1e ensuing century. While Bonapartism and Jacobinism claimed the mantle of that the Revolution was a bourgeois and peasant triumph which cleared the way popular sovereignty, both were ambiguous about the forms democratic for the flowering of a capitalist economy. In response, Soboul, Gwynne Lewis government should take. The memory of Napoleon cast a shadow of the strong and other Marxist historians have dismissed this revisionist or 'minimalist' man who could slice through the vacillation and verbiage of politicians, if needs perspective as born of a political antipathy to the possibilities of revolutionary be with the army. The ]acobin tradition of militant republicanism remained transformation, in Soboul's words, 'the vain attempts to deny the French vague about the role of a strong executive, the rights of insurrection in the name u •• ..." ..... ,\, ..... , "\ru ........... , ..&..'V.;l-"&,,.;I,,&,,~ 'and, above all, about the relationship between Paris and the ,Secondly, whatever the grand schemes and . Memories of the Terror, the civil war in the Vendee, :!es.titute continued to constitute a major urban and , iJ? . conscription and war were etched deep into the memories of of crisis by poorer labourers and workers. The re~iliz;a'tii~~ 'bSr ; ~re~Natielnal individual and community.6 The discovery of masses of bones in Lucs mbly that poverty was not simply the result of the ChUf(::h: \ S,i ClllaJltJ'~aJt1a , by the parish priest in 1860 was to result in another myth, still potent today, government could simply not cope with poor relief, had!j~eJleI2tc;d the 'Bethlehem of the Vendee', according to which 564 women 107 work schemes and temporary relief measures which w(~re 'i;a:t%l.ys ; pll~j:m,eal and many men were massacred on a single day, on 28 February i 794.7 never adequately financed by governments preoccupied withl: wi~I'[lI1Ie,)lliqJn~ people were to remain divided about the political system best able to years after 1794, when the collapse of economic regulation 'C(5i't' i~, iidc~t1 ) Wiltll authority, liberty and equality. Was economic freedom a necessary corollary failure, exposed the poor to a starvation against which the !f~~~rity of or inimical to - civil liberties? Could these liberties be reconciled with clergy with fewer resources could never be adequate protection: ~\only in equality? And how was 'equality' to be understood: as equality before the care of abandoned children was there an o~going assumption by thle~$~ate of political rights, of social status, of economic well-being, of the races, of responsibility for social welfare. Artisans could respond to threats posed ~y sexes? enterprise by new organizations - in 1803 the glove-workers of GrenoD'le Whatever the importance of these changes to political culture, created the first mutual-aid society in France - but the poor remained particularly have argued that . ~e essentials of daw life emerged largely unchanged: fo''''-L'-,,,,;., vulnerable.9 of work, the posItion of the poor, social inequalities, and the inferior status Thirdly, France in 1815 remained a sharply inegalitarian, hierarchical society, women. First, most French people in 1815 remained, like their parents, one in which most ancien-regime nobles continued to be eminent. According of small plots, tenants and sharecroppers. As in part a victory for "'~"~U'''' '<' to Donald Greer, 13,925 noble males over 12 years of age had emigrated; in landowners, the Revolution has been seen by historians of all shades as all 1 158 noble men and women were executed during the Terror. But even if 8 ing the transition to agrarian capitalism. The 1790 partible inheritance o;e ~ccepts Chaussinand-Nogaret's low estimate of a total of some 125,000 further codified by Napoleon, ensured that farms would be constantly nobles in the 1780s, it is clear that tlle Revolution was not a holocaust of ened b~ subdivision (morcellement). Decisions taken during the Terror, nobles. to The rhythm of the Revolution may be encapsulated in the struggle to abolish compensation due to nobles for the end of feudal dues and to over the meaning of 'equality', but in the end was restricteq to equality before emigre land available in small plots at low rates of repayment, encouraged the law. In the new France, most nobles retained the bulk of their property and owners to stay on the land.

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