Marxist Historians and the Question of Class in the French Revolution Author(S): Jack Amariglio and Bruce Norton Source: History and Theory , Feb., 1991, Vol

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Marxist Historians and the Question of Class in the French Revolution Author(s): Jack Amariglio and Bruce Norton Source: History and Theory , Feb., 1991, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 37-55 Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2505290

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This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

JACK AMARIGLIO and BRUCE NORTON

In a recent book about Marxist scholarship on the French Revolution, George Comninel notes that in perhaps no other area of historical research has Marxian theory been so dominant among Western scholars. 1 A long line of Marxist and Marx-indebted historians have presented the Revolution as a moment in which the confluence and conflagration of class forces produced a dramatic transformation in Western societies, encompassing sweeping changes in economics, politics, ideology, and culture. The conclusion is supported by an analytical framework known as the "social interpretation" of the Revolution, constructed and elaborated through many decades of work by scholars such as Jean Jaures, Al- bert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and George Rude'2 Dominating French Revolution historiography certainly from the early 1900s to the 1960s, the framework brings to bear concepts related to Marxist theories of the conditions and consequences of class struggle, on the one hand, and more broadly conceived transitions between modes of production, on the other. Thus for many years, whatever else they learned, students of the French Revolution learned that Marxian (or Marx-related) notions of class and class struggle are essential keys to understanding how the modern world came to be what it is. From a formal standpoint, however, the analytical framework that characterizes much of the work of Lefebvre, Soboul, and others, can be maddening. A plethora of often conflicting and confusing concepts of class and class struggle inform this tradition. In our view these confusions, along with other characteristics of these authors' understanding of class, help to account for the more recent collapse of the social interpretation's standing among professional historians. They also help to account for the accompanying judgment that Marxism itself is to blame for the tradition's weaknesses, as well as for an interpretative "iron curtain" which too long protected those weaknesses from criticism and empirical refutation. Charged with a distorting predilection for sociological and economic analysis,

1. George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London, 1987). 2. Well-known works include Jean Jaures, Histoire socialite de la revolution francaise, ed. A. Soboul, 4 vols. (Paris, 1969); Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, transl. C. A. Phillips (New York, 1964); Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, transl. R. R. Palmer (New York, n.d. [copyright 1947]); Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799, transl. A. Forrest and C. Jones (New York, 1975); George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1967).

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 38 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON and a misleading faith in sweeping historical generalizations, Marxian theory as a whole now stands accused rather than acclaimed. As leading "revisionist" historians such as Alfred Cobban, Denis Richet, and Frangois Furet argue, no discernible "bourgeoisie" confronted and defeated a fundamentally feudal ruling class in 1789, thereby breaking legal and political shackles hitherto fettering their growth; only misguided Marxian presuppositions support that view.3 Various of Marx's writings do indeed outline a general conception of the French Revolution supportive of the social interpretation. The story that Jaures, Lefebvre, Soboul, and others tell depends quite heavily on brief discussions, in The Com- munist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Volume One of Capital, of class formations and struggles involved in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the West. That story represents the Revolution as the crowning moment in the demise of "landed property" and its prerogatives at the hands of rising commercial and industrial entrepreneurs and their functionaries. There is no question that Marx outlined such a view; what is less certain (as Comninel points out) is whether the argument in question has any close and compatible relation to the class analysis produced in Marx's "mature" writings in Capital, particularly Volumes Two and Three. This paper concerns the relation of the social interpretation of the Revolution to Marxian class analysis. Our aim is to evaluate the multiplicity of concepts surrounding the word "class" in this tradition. We do that primarily by examining works by two of its leading proponents, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul. Our concern is less to judge the adequacy of particular explanations of the Revo- lution, whether the social interpretation or the revisionist critique, than to bring to the fore certain critical confusions regarding Marxian class analysis which have affected both sides of the battlefield.

Prominent critics of the social interpretation of the French Revolution share a general motivation: to deny "the reality of classes and of class struggle." With this contention Albert Soboul began, in 1974, a defense of the interpretative tradition to which he belonged.4 What then are the classes which, in his view, form the stakes and object of this controversy, and what is the "great drama whose essential characters are (those) classes"?I Georges Lefebvre, Soboul's mentor, starts with the three "orders" recognized

3. The degree to which the social interpretation has fallen into disrepute was clearly evident in lead articles and editorials of major U.S. newspapers during the recent bicentennial celebrations of the Revolution. Furet's by now famous adage that the "French Revolution is over" was repeated on page 1 of the New York Times, serving to underscore the parting of the ways between the social interpreters' emphasis on class and their implied approval of revolutionary action (even, perhaps, the Terror), on the one hand, and more recent supposedly "non-ideological," "historically accurate" interpretations of Revolutionary events, on the other. The bicentennial publicity symbolizes the current abandonment of (presumed) Marxian ideas more generally -even, indeed, among French socialist intellectuals. On the latter issue see Carole Biewener, "Loss of a Socialist Vision in France," Rethinking Marxism (Fall and Winter 1990). 4. Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution, transl. A. A. Knutson (New York, 1988). 5. Jean Jaures, quoted in Soboul, Understanding, 230.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 39 by the French Crown, and thus with a legal category. There were not, however, three main classes, as he quickly clarifies. For "strictly speaking the clergy, as Sieyes said, was a profession and not a social class."6 The clergy included both nobles, centered in the upper clergy, and commoners, centered at the parish and monastic levels. "There were in reality," Lefebvre concludes, "therefore, only two classes, nobles and commoners." Who are the nobles? Lefebvre begins by considering and rejecting various possible differentiating traits: They were not defined by land-ownership, for many commoners also owned land, and indeed manorial land upon which feudal dues were obligated. Nor are they well defined by tax privileges, for many bourgeois, as Lefebvre informs us, were, like the nobles, exempt from the taille, just as various commoners and cities enjoyed other noble privileges. In terms of income, again, they are indeed a heterogeneous group. "What really characterized the nobility," he concludes "was birth; it was possible to become a noble, but in the eyes of everyone the true nobleman was born."7 For Lefebvre, the defining char- acteristic of this particular "class" is not then a directly economic dimension, but the group's social construction in ancestral, or racial, terms. Who then are the commoners? As a category, Lefebvre notes, shifting ground somewhat, this is "purely legal." Its only "real elements were the social ones - and of these the most important, the one which led and mainly benefited from the Revolution, was the bourgeoisie."8 Who belong to this "real element," the bourgeoisie? Again, Lefebvre begins to define his class precisely by stressing the wild diversity of types of people -regarded in various occupational, income, and social dimensions - included in it. As a "class" the bourgeoisie's composition "was anything but homogeneous."9 Lefebvre describes various of its "levels," from financiers, bankers, and merchants to industrial capitalists (notable chiefly for their absence) and on down to skilled workers and craftspeople (whom he terms the "lesser bourgeoisie"). In addition, the "liberal professions also belonged to the bourgeoisie," these educated and articulate people furnishing in fact "a great majority of the revolutionary personnel," particularly in the form of lawyers.10 Thus there is no obvious single dimension along which membership in this class is determined. Merchants and bankers stand alongside teachers, skilled craftspeople next to landowners, the relatively indigent alongside the prosperous in- ternational trader. At points, Lefebvre even seems to identify class position on the basis of political behavior in the revolutionary conjuncture, as when he separates parish priests from upper clergy on the basis of "social distinctions (which) were to become clear at the Estates-General when the parish priests as- sured the victory of the Third Estate."11

6. Lefebvre, Coming, 8. 7. Ibid., 9-10. 8. Ibid., 35. 9. Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, Vol I From Its Origins to 1793, transI. E. M. Evanson (New York, 1962), 43. 10. Lefebvre, Coming, 39, 86. 11. Ibid., 8.

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At a general level the classification criteria ultimately seem to be roughly the following. Nobles are defined by birth (although one must also allow for the further wrinkle, the nobility of the robe, members of commoner families who had joined noble ranks in recent centuries). The bourgeoisie is then defined in part by its exclusion from noble status, just as the Order to which they belong, the Third Estate, was so defined by the Crown. More precisely the bourgeoisie in effect includes everyone in the Third Estate who is economically active and is neither a peasant nor a journeyman or worker. Defined as a residual category, the bourgeois class is naturally extremely varied. Undoubtedly, part of Lefebvre's enormously wide appeal is the very flexibility which these concepts afford him. He develops a class theory of the Revolution (thereby appealing to several constituencies), yet, in part by deploying very flex- ible further concepts of class "levels," and so on, he is able to introduce into his narration all manner of carefully traced differentiations - cultural, political, economic - so that he seems to avoid collapsing the analysis into any abstractly fixed grid. Extended somewhat, the approach also serves nicely to support Lefebvre's general thesis: the claim, common to all advocates of the social interpretation, that the revolution is essentially a "bourgeois revolution." To make this case Lefebvre extends his finely detailed approach to consideration of groups outside the bourgeoisie and the nobility-peasants and "the working class."" Indeed, in part Lefebvre's particular contribution to the historiography of the revolution is to conceive of it as constituted by four distinguishable "acts": the revolts of the nobles, the bourgeoisie, urban popular sectors, and the peasants. Lefebvre managed to affirm the distinctness of intentions and desires on the part of the latter three (Third Estate) groups, even while weaving the events in which they participated into a single seamless cloth, the "bourgeois revolution." How is it that the events which these diverse rebellions precipitated constituted a singular whole whose basic meaning can be expressed in the singular concept, bourgeois revolution? Ultimately, as Lefebvre argues, both peasants and urban popular sectors mounted movements whose central effects were either to "dislo- cate the administration of the Old Regime, to the advantage of the bourgeoisie" (in the case of the urban popular movements), or, perhaps more directly, to de- stroy feudal privileges by smashing the nobility's special prerogatives tied to the land, in particular manorial dues themselves (in the case of the peasant revolution)."3 Thus the effects of the non-"bourgeois" revolutionary group's struggles lent critically necessary support to the bourgeois revolution. This is true even though the groups in question themselves often pursued goals which were pro- foundly anti-"bourgeois," prominently including price controls on bread, roll- backs of commercial inroads on traditional peasant customs and land rights,

12. Ibid., 86. 13. Ibid., 89, 113-132.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 41 and general "restoration of the old system of regulation which blocked the expansion of capitalism."14 Thus in certain respects Lefebvre's class concepts work well for his purposes. As we have seen, they are so general as to encompass major actors under a "bourgeois" label -one way or another.15 At the same time their very generality also allows - virtually requires - the further deployment of a complex, multidimensional analysis of group interests and group behaviors at a much finer level. One thus obtains both historically compelling detail and differentiation -all sorts of groups pursuing disparate and conflicting goals and utilizing distinct ideas and understandings -and a strong general conclusion; the net effect was homogeneous. Through the revolution "the bourgeoisie laid the definitive foundations of the new society."16

Yet the conceptions of class the social interpreters develop remain confusing and fragile. Thus, as we have seen, Lefebvre defines the nobles as a class more or less coterminous with an "order." For its part the "bourgeoisie" is an "element," constituted as we have seen by a bewildering array of occupations and types of revenue sources. Further murkiness awaits in Lefebvre's representation of the non- bourgeois classes included among the commoners, peasants, and workers. As he argues in his classic work The French Revolution, the peasants included both serfs and freemen. Regarding the free peasants, Lefebvre writes: "in the ca- pacity of 'holders' (tenaciers) they held part of an estate's arable soil and oc- cupied most of the rest as tenants (fermiers) or sharecroppers (metayers)."17 After describing the many economic obligations incurred by this "peasantry," and the various forms of rent and tax extracted from them, he asserts that the "rural community . . . too, was marked with inner inequalities." He concludes that "finally, it is erroneous to speak of the peasants as if they were all owners or tenants. Those who had no land actually formed a rural proletariat."", Thus, one could be in the "class" called "peasant," but simultaneously be a member of a different class, the "proletariat." The proletariat was "spread throughout rural as well as urban areas." How- ever, "it lacked class spirit, if not always corporate solidarity. It was not clearly distinguished from the artisans in France, with whom it sided when the Revolu- tion began."19 Lefebvre groups within this "class" not only all of the "employed" and wage-laborers, but also self-employed producers as well as the "unemployed" and "poor."

14. Ibid., 181. 15. Another important way in which this is done is through Lefebvre's contention that Enlighten- ment ideas as a whole, fundamental to the culture which sustained the revolution, expressede] the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie," thereby bringing the entire period into the bourgeois fold in this respect as well. See Ibid., 35-44. 16. Ibid., 182. 17. Lefebvre, The French Revolution, I, 47. 18. Ibid., 48. 19. Ibid., 51.

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To sum up briefly, Lefebvre's discussion of the "social structure" depicts classes within orders, orders within classes, sub-classes within classes, and classes or sub- classes ("levels") arranged according to occupation, ancestry, sources of revenue, property relations, and income level. In some cases, he has members of one class within another, and so on. What is perhaps most striking, however, is that though Lefebvre is cognizant of the complications he introduces, he is generally uncrit- ical of or unreflective about his own uses or concepts of class.

Through this brief discussion we can begin to see why the criticism leveled at Lefebvre's version of the social interpretation by Alfred Cobban has been the basis for a general reevaluation and broad rejection of this framework. Cobban's attack, focusing on Lefebvre's work, counters the view that the Revolution was "bourgeois." Indeed, Cobban claims that, if anything, the Revolution was a tem- porarily successful anticapitalist movement, which in fact delayed the onset of capitalist industrial and commercial development of France until the late nine- teenth century.20 More important than this controversial judgment is the road by which Cobban arrives at it. He first argues that on the eve of the Revolution the "seignorial system," which he identifies with what Soboul and Lefebvre call "feudalism," did not exist except in minor vestiges of a distant past surviving in but a few remote regions. Hence, in Cobban's view, Lefebvre's claim that the four revolu- tions sounded the death knell for the power of the landed feudal aristocracy is meaningless. By the eve of the Revolution, feudalism had long been dead in France. Since the Revolution did not end feudalism, it cannot then have been decisive in inaugurating capitalism and the "rise of the middle classes." Cobban's second and more convincing foray against the "bourgeois revolution" view points to problems and ambiguities in the social and class categories of Lefebvre, and others. "Who were the Revolutionary Bourgeois?" he asks. Not the "bourgeois proper," rentiers and proprietors living off rents or loans -they were part and parcel of the ancien regime. Not industrial capitalists -they were virtually absent. Not the great merchants - they were imbricated among the nobility through marriage or office-holding. In other words, representatives of newly emergent "forces of production," struggling through entanglements placed by the old regime, are conspicuously absent. In their place, representing the "bourgeoisie" in Assembly and meeting-hall, were lawyers and office-holders:

That the officers and the men of the liberal professions prepared and directed the revolution, and that the business men were not its prime movers, was the sounder view of Lefebvre. Professor Marcel Reinhard agrees that the men of business played no leading part in the revolution. An analysis of the membership of the revolutionary assemblies, showing the overwhelming preponderance of baillage officers and members of the liberal professions, helps to confirm the same view. This was the revolutionary bourgeoisie."

20. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (New York, 1971). 21. Ibid., 61.

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Analogously, Cobban emphasizes (again acknowledging Lefebvre's own stress of the point) that the "aristocracy" was composed not only of traditional nobility but also of people of bourgeois extraction who had bought offices or held jobs which entailed the Crown's designation as nobility. Similarly, Cobban asserts that commercial criteria and practices had spread into both agriculture and artisanal production-and not least among the "peasants"- reshaping revenues so that the categories "peasant," "noble," "bourgeois," and so forth cannot be enlivened with distinct empirical meaning. For Cobban the social interpreters' class categories are not fundamentally "economic," nor are they consistent. Since uniformly-defined "classes" cannot be found, and those which are defined contain opposed elements both hostile and receptive to commerce, finance, and industry, argues Cobban, the reduction of this primarily "political" event to a social basis is more myth than good history. In actuality Lefebvre's class categories - at least bourgeois, aristocrat, and sans-culotte - are politically, rather than economically, defined. In effect the social interpreters have produced an enormous delusion:

Three-quarters of a century of revolutionary historical research, including much com- ment on the movement of social groupings, has been conducted under the influence of ideas derived from politics, transferring its categories to the context of social history. This research has itself in the end exploded the ideas which inspired it, and demonstrated the inadequacy of the social terminology employed and the politico-sociological theories it reflects. We know now that there was a much more complicated social pattern in eighteenth- century France than has commonly been recognised and that it demands a more sophisticated historical analysis.22

For Cobban, of course, the problem is in large part Marxism itself, a body of thought he presents in light of the schematic visions of The Communist Man- ifesto. Notably, he challenges not so much the concepts of class which the social interpreters deploy but those concepts' links to identifiable historical agents. For example, he avoids a direct probe of what he takes to be the basic Marxist categories of "bourgeois," "capitalist," or "proletarian." He seeks not to redefine these "Marxian" notions of class but to challenge their usefulness for historical analysis. Francois Furet's more recent fulminations against the "degenerate Marxism" of Albert Soboul and others mirror in several important ways Cobban's offen- sive against Lefebvre. In Furet we find a similar rejection of the notion of a "bourgeois revolution." Furet objects to this notion partly on grounds that it is an over- simplification wrought from modern Marxism's tendency to squeeze complex and contradictory events into the straitjacket of a simplistic teleology, in which the Revolution stands as the great "beginning" for subsequent movements for national liberation and revolutionary class transformation. Furet's further ob- jections are based on his conviction that Marxist historians have, unwittingly perhaps, adopted the "Jacobin" ideology of key figures of the Revolution (such

22. Ibid., 161-162.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 44 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON as Sieyes and Barnave) in portraying the Revolution as a class uprising against noble privileges and the aristocratic state. The "Marxist vulgate," which construes the Revolution as the outcome of either class struggle between the bourgeoisie and nobility or a transition from feudalism to capitalism, reflects a "confused encounter between Bolshevism and Jacobinism."23 Furet joins Cobban in suggesting that, if anything, the Revolution may have been an anticapitalist revolt, at least as regards the participation of the peasantry and those segments of the already "bourgeoisified" nobility and others who were denied access to state power and privileges just as the ancien regime was completing a long commercial and perhaps "bourgeois" transformation. The full force of Furet's criticism of the social interpretation is directed at a Marxism, such as Soboul's, that would substitute broad sociological categories for detailed historical analysis, or "class" for other social entities. Finding nothing either consistent or compelling in Soboul's division of pre-Revolutionary France into nobility, bourgeois, peasants, and urban "lower classes," Furet calls atten- tion, like his predecessor Cobban, to the many fragmentations within each "class" and to the clear discrepancies between the Marxist deduction of class behavior from class position and the historical reality. One example of Furet's attack on this kind of Marxism (which to his credit Furet does not attribute to Marx or Engels) is his demonstration that, contrary to Soboul's assertions, the French peasantry were neither uniformly exposed to increased seignorial dues (the "feudal reaction") during the eighteenth century, nor, therefore, particularly prone to take up arms against "feudalism" as the Revolution took its course in the countryside. Soboul's deduction of the unified class behavior of the peasants from their supposedly increased exploitation is based, according to Furet, on a reductionist Marxism oblivious to the facts at hand. But what are the facts at hand, and how, as Furet implies, do they refute Marxian class analysis, since, after all, Furet does intend his criticisms to bear weight against even more sophisticated Marxian views than Soboul's? After asserting that "as everyone knows, the facts and figures for an analysis on a national scale of the relative weight of seigneurial dues in the total landed revenue -and in the incomes of peasants and nobles -do not exist,"24 Furet does go on to challenge Soboul's claim that prior to the Revolution, landed income was derived from feudal sources. Furet cites several studies which show that by the eighteenth century, many parts of France (including some of the areas most loyal to the Revolu- tion, once it began) were long since emancipated from seignorial payments. For eighteenth-century France, "leases, sharecropping and direct management un- questionably produced more income than seigneurial dues."25 To compound matters, Furet adds that even where seignorial dues were increased over the course of the century, this may well have accompanied another trend: the increasing commercialization of the seignories. This evidence leads Furet to the conclusion

23. Frangois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, transl. E. Foster (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 13. 24. Ibid., 93. 25. Idem.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 45 that: "perhaps we would be well advised to speak, as Alfred Cobban suggested, not of an 'aristocratic reaction' but of an embourgeoisement of the seigneurie. Seen in this light, the peasant's resistance against the seigneurie may well have been not anti-aristocratic or 'anti-feudal,' but anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist."26 For Furet, Soboul's adherence to the notion of an aristocratic reaction is plain: "it can only be because it fits perfectly into the simplistic vision of class struggle and alliances related to it."27 Citing further evidence that peasants' political stances often bore no connection to the form of their exploitation or income, Furet warns that "it is a mistake to seek to unlock the secrets of the peasant's frame of mind and their behaviour by setting up, ex post facto, an imaginary 'anti-feudal' class front consolidated by a hypothetical 'feudal reaction."'28 Like Cobban's, however, Furet's attack against Soboul's Marxism is not a call to reevaluate precise concepts of class, class struggle, and so on. Furet criticizes Soboul by turning his broad and inconsistent notions of class against him. At no point does Furet challenge Soboul's class categories on the terrain of Marxian theory. Instead Marxism in all its varieties stands accused of employing class categories that cannot bear the weight of empirical scrutiny and historical use. Thus Furet refuses to sort out rigorously, in Marxian terms, the many different sources of class income earned by diverse groups during the ancien regime. He implicitly accepts the view that, for Marxian theory, class income and position are linked variously and almost casually to activity or occupation or forms of property or to any number of other things. It is then a simple matter to show the insoluble inconsistencies that arise in attempting to produce, according to these different standards, consistent notions of such broadly designated classes as peasants and nobles. Unable to encapsulate the facts, to produce consistent categories, or to predict political behavior, the class concepts used by Soboul and other such Marxists are useless for constructing an understanding of the Revolution as a whole.

While we respect various aspects of the arguments Cobban and Furet deploy, we disagree with many of their general conclusions, and particularly, of course, those which concern the concepts of class at work in the social interpretation and their relation to Marxian theory in general. Indeed, we agree with Comninel and Gregor McClennan, who have both suggested that by helping to stimulate careful consideration and criticism of conceptions of class, these attacks on the social interpretation may turn out to be providential for Marxian theory.29 Our understanding of the notions of class deployed in the social interpretation identifies several problems, but problems which are in no way inherent in Marxian theory as we understand it. The first relates to the ideas forming this tradition's most general level of class analysis, in particular the distinction between "bourgeois"

26. Ibid., 94. 27. Ibid., 96. 2 8. Idem. 29. Comninel; Gregor McClennan, Marxism and the Methodologies of History (London, 1981).

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 46 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON and "landed" classes. The second problem involves the particular way in which the authors transform their general concepts in order to take account of the complexity and variation of the diverse social forces they encounter in the ancien regime. We take these two issues up in turn below. Lefebvre himself offers a clue to the puzzling generality of the concepts of class deployed in this tradition. In the introduction to The Coming of theFrench Revo- lution, he summarizes his understanding of the revolution in broadest terms. Its "ultimate cause," he writes, goes deep into the history of France and of the western world. At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic. It showed the traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when the pos- sessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and to live... Meanwhile the growth of commerce and industry had created, step by step, a new form of wealth, mobile or commercial wealth, and a new class, called in France the bourgeoisie. ... (I)n reality economic power, personal abilities and confidence in the future had passed largely to the bourgeoisie. Such a discrepancy never lasts forever. The Revolution of 1789 restored the harmony between fact and law.30

The revolution was then the victory of groups empowered by a particular form of property- "mobile or commercial" property - over a social structure shaped in an era when another form of property, land, held uncontested sway. This is an important clue in part simply because it helps to make sense out of the notions of class encountered above. The nobles' special social status by birth is not simply racial, it is linked to - said to ultimately derive from - their former exclusive ownership of the dominant form of property. For their part, the bourgeoisie, however disparate at first glance, are at least vaguely and generally linked by some connection to the new form of wealth -movable, or non- landed, property, in whatever form it comes. Since movable wealth is by nature manifold, "bourgeois" status quite naturally comprehends many kinds of economic and social positions. Lefebvre's preface is also a clue in a second way, for it quite clearly links Lefebvre's work to a much older argument, that of Joseph Barnave. This linkage - declared more explicitly and emphatically by both Jaures and Soboul,31 but not picked up on by Cobban (though recognized by Furet) - is crucial for an understanding of the general perspective developed by the social-interpretation historians. Reading Marx, they also read Barnave, and a very particular understanding of class and the basic nature of "classes" resulted. Barnave was a leading participant in the revolutionary Constituent Assembly who wrote his treatise An Introduction to the French Revolution (1793) while in prison awaiting execution.32 This brief work outlines a general theory of the

30. Lefebvre, Coming, 4. 31. In Soboul's words, "Jaures thus subscribed to the historiographical tradition inaugurated by Barnave." In turn, Lefebvre said of Jean Jaurds that he recognized "no one but him" as master (Soboul, Understanding, 229, 239). 32. Or shortly before being imprisoned - see Power, Property, and History: Joseph Barnave's In- troduction to the French Revolution and Other Writings, ed. E. Chill (New York, 1971).

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 47 evolution of human societies. Barnave maintains that, pushed forward in part by population growth, societies traverse a natural path through four successive stages, roughly summarizable as hunting, pasturing, farming, and commerce. Each stage entails certain patterns of property ownership, and these in turn shape particular constellations of power and consequently legal and political forms. In particular, as Barnave maintained, when societies turn to land cultivation, property ownership steadily becomes highly skewed. Small farmers fall into debt and suffer from ignorance and isolation; large farmers prosper and accrue influence and power. Thus "the moment when a people arrive at the cultivation of the land, and do not yet possess the manufacturing and commercial skill that follows upon it, is the period of organization in which aristocratic power acquires the greatest strength."33 Land as the dominant form of property produces aristocracy as a ruling class. Fortunately, however, the growth of population and spread of skill soon produce a proliferation of non-landed forms of production and property. And

once the [mechanical] arts and commerce have succeeded in penetrating the people and creating a new means of wealth in support of the industrious class [classe laborieuse], a revolution in political laws is prepared. Just as the possession of land gave rise to the aristocracy, industrial property increases the power of the people: they acquire their lib- erty, they multiply, they begin to influence affairs.34

The French Revolution is then simply the inevitable political expression of the shift which the growth of movable or "personal" wealth introduced into the balance of power and influence in modern society. In Barnave's "materialist" analysis, property forms ultimately determine power, and property comes primarily in two forms: landed and mobile. The influence of this argument pervades the social interpretation.35 Compare, for example, a general formulation by Soboul first published in 1954:

The social structure at the end of the 18th century always remained strongly marked by the preeminence of the aristocracy, vestige of an age when the land, being the only wealth,

33. Ibid., 79. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Furet's discussion of the impact of Barnave and Sieybs on the social interpretation takes place within his more general complaint that Soboul and others have uncritically accepted the self-impressions of the revolutionists, thereby embracing the contemporary "ideological" representations that Marxism itself would normally exhort historians to scrutinize critically. Sieybs and Barnave are the darlings of the social interpreters because they not only inveighed against the nobility but also represented the struggles around them as something akin to "class" struggles. Furet accuses Soboul and the others of, therefore, having abandoned Marxism for "Jacobinism": they defend the Revolution in the same terms that Sieyes, Barnave, and others were prone to express their own involvements. For these erst- while Marxist historians, "the Marxist schema. . . is but a veneer superimposed on a far more powerful political commitment to the French Revolution's self-interpretation, its perception of itself as both the fountain-head of the grande nation and the universal liberator of society, in other words, as 'Jacobin' more than as 'Constituent"' (Furet, 88). The outcome of this Jacobinism, claims Furet, is that Marxism sheds any potential critical historical edge and, in its place, takes a teleological turn in which the Russian Revolution represents the final realization of the promise that is present in its true historical origin, the French Revolution.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 48 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON conferred on its proprietors all rights over those who worked it. A long evolution had, however, increased the power of personal wealth, thus of the bourgeoisie who held it. Thus in direct correlation with these relations of production, two classes confronted each other.36

Soboul adds the term "relations of production," without however (in this pas- sage) obviously changing the theory to which the terminology is attached - Barnave's theory. Nevertheless, Soboul is well able to consider his interpretation founded thoroughly and firmly in Marx, or in a particular interpretation of Marx. Clearly, Barnave's vision "fits" in some way with the Marxism of The Communist Manifesto, its paean to the bourgeoisie's transformation of the world and smashing of all fetters. Superficially, at least, it even fits perfectly well with the more general proposition Soboul evidently takes as central to Marxian thought: that history proceeds through the unfolding of an essential contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. Is it not Barnave himself who argues that the spread of mechanical arts and commerce inevitably pushes and shoves its way through the landed regime, becoming inconsistent with and finally overthrowing the political forms of the old society? ("As the natural development of societies is to grow ceaselessly in population and industry until they have attained the highest degree of civilization, the establishment of manufactures and of commerce should naturally succeed agriculture." "Gradually the advances of the social state create new sources of power, weaken the old ones, and change the balance of forces. Then the old laws cannot long endure.... So governments change form, sometimes by a slow, imperceptible development and sometimes by violent shocks.")37 Equally clearly, however, the vision fits not at all with Marx's concepts of exploitation, in which surplus labor production and extraction, rather than property ownershipperse, are of concern. As Comninel rightly argues,38 this penetra- tion of the social interpretation by Barnave's categories (and concepts common to a much larger liberal tradition focusing on a stage-progression of societies produced by "naturally" evolving property forms) means that the tradition's concepts of class turn on forms of possession rather than surplus labor, exploitation, and so on -the concepts of class to be found in Capital. The tradition's central distinction between landed property and mobile or "commercial" property has in itself no particular significance for developed Marxian concepts of class. And what is of particular interest in Marxian theory-exploitation, the appropriation of surplus labor -is not conceived in the social interpretation at all, for neither landed nor "mobile" property in themselves represent any necessary relation of exploitation whatsoever. The general "Marxian" concepts of class which Cobban and Furet criticize are thus utterly different from the notions finally elaborated by Marx himself.

36. Soboul, Understanding, 18. 37. Chill, 82, 77. 38. Commnel, 139-140, 150-152.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 49

The second set of issues we wish to stress concern the argument's mode of "con- cretization," or its particular way of elaborating general concepts of class in order to account for and recognize the complexity of social life. It would be easy to conclude that while the social interpreters were good historians, they were poor Marxian theoreticians in this regard. We do not take this view. Rather, we see in the work of Lefebvre, Soboul, and others particular notions of class and its conditions of existence that have a long history and a firm basis in Marxian thought. What we take as most evident is that Lefebvre and others strained to include in their concepts of class several dimensions of social activity simultaneously. That is, we read the social interpreters to have been heavily influenced by the idea that class is, itself, a multidimensional phenomenon, manifesting itself in economic, political, and cultural forms. Though we do not share this view, we well understand the desire to include "everything" in the notion of class. Moreover, we see such attempts to be not unrelated to the notion of "overdetermination" which another Marxian tradition (from Louis Althusser to Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff) has promoted. Simply put, the frequent elisions among political, economic, ideological, and cultural dimensions of class in the social interpreters' texts speak to the appealing idea that class, itself, cannot be understood except, as Marx claimed (following Hegel), as the result of its many determinations. The discussion of class below, then, should not be read as an attempt to isolate the concept of class and to purify it by stripping it of its noneconomic determinations. Indeed, our aim is precisely to uphold the overdetermination of class by its manifold conditions of existence (and vice versa) - so as to avoid the class reductionism of Lefebvre, and others. The class reductionism of the social interpreters, as we see it, involves their effort to call many diverse social activities class, thereby however depriving these activities of real autonomy in shaping the out- comes of events. As suggested above, several distinct concepts of class circulate in the social interpretation. Among other things class is a question of property (and its forms), of sources of revenue, of income, of occupation, of power, and of the division of labor. In Lefebvre and Soboul, these different notions appear to be deliberate attempts to signify the intricacy- the many internal fractions and divisions - of class relations in the ancien regime. We think it worthwhile to examine the resulting construct more closely. We have seen that perhaps the major distinction in the class categories these theorists utilize turns on property. In the fight between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, owners of landed property confront owners of mobile property. The legal dimensions of property holding are less important in this view than the forms of property which are held, and from which owners' incomes derive. The historic division between agriculture and commerce, between landlord and bourgeois, provides a key to the identity and politics of the propertied classes. That class is sometimes treated in terms of sources of revenue can best be seen in the discussions of the income of nobles, on the one hand, and commercial

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 50 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON groups, on the other. For Lefebvre and others wishing to argue that feudalism was the source of noble power, it was important to establish that the lords were still garnering major portions of their incomes from taxes and rents deriving from their dissipating seignorial rights to land. In contrast, even when bourgeois became nobility, the primary sources of their wealth continued to come from merchant activity or financial holdings. Where the bourgeoisie did take on noble trappings, in this view, their inclination was to commercialize landed property rather than capitulate to indigent, lordly ways. And, as we mentioned above, in the view of Lefebvre and Soboul, when aristocrats tried their hands at commerce and finance their accomplishments were often slight at best, forcing them back on their traditional sources.39 This issue -the sectoral sources of revenue - should not be conflated with the question of the production and distribution of surplus labor, which we argue is the approach Marx takes in defining and explaining the class structure of capitalism in Capital. Lefebvre and Soboul, for example, do not differentiate among various forms of rent. Nor do they distinguish among various forms of revenue deriving from capital on the basis of a surplus-labor approach. Using the Marx of the Manifesto, the class dimension of the bourgeoisie instead simply devolves from the sectoral sources of their income -in commerce, trade, craft production, and so forth. Occupation also plays a role. The bourgeoisie is presented as a group which includes not only merchants, financiers, and industrialists (that is, holders of various forms of mobile property) but also lawyers, civil servants, teachers, and so forth. The "middle classes" included in the bourgeoisie are differentiated from the other classes -the aristocracy, peasants, and sans-culottes - both by the fact that they earn their income through their activity and by the fact that their occupations are related either to commerce or to the running of the state. A quick look at the Manifesto shows a similar tendency to categorize classes in terms of occupations, or niches in the division of labor. Unlike more recent power theories of class,40 the notion of power which informs the social interpretation is less concerned with dominance and subordina-

39. These failures, incidentally, had severe consequences on the French economy during the ancien regime. According to Charles Moraze, the insistence by the aristocrats and their functionaries that the ministry of finance issue currency in times of crisis not on a solid specie basis, but with land as backing, led to several financial impasses and occasional calamity and to the relatively un- derdeveloped state of French financial institutions and credit on the eve of the Revolution. Thus, the inability to raise revenue, the immediate economic crisis which precipitated the calling of the Estates-General by Louis XVI, could be traced, Moraz6 suggests, to the disastrous dominance of landed property and its incompetent entry into financial circles (as a way of augmenting its income) in the years preceding the Revolution. Charles Moraz4, The Triumph of the Middle Classes, transl. G. Weidenfeld (Cleveland, 1966). 40. For an argument against conflating power and class, along with a discussion of their interrela- tion, see Jack L. Amariglio, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, "Class, Power, and Culture," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, 1988), 487-501. For criticism of recent power-theoretic conceptions of economic dynamics, see Bruce Norton, "The Power Axis: Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf's Theory of Postwar Accumulation," Rethinking Marxism 1 (Fall, 1988), 6-43.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 51 tion in the process of production (for example, between feudal lords and serfs) than with the disposition of property and the political rights that derive from property ownership. The class struggles between the estates take the form of dis- putes over political rights and freedoms, but their social basis is found in inequalities of property-holding. Indeed the revolutionary struggle over political power is often presented as the self-recognition (a "class consciousness") of holders of commercial property and the propertyless that the rights of landed proprietors should be extended to all forms of property ownership, or, more radically, to non-property holders as well. Power constitutes the divisions between the classes at the same time as it is a focus of their conflicts. In sum, we find all of these notions of class operating in the pages of the social interpreters. When they are recognized, the contradictions among these notions - for example the idea that class is a question of occupation often contradicts the idea that class is a matter of source of revenue -serve to convey the sense that the class structure of ancien regime France is complex. The retention of these contradictions signifies the multiple determinations of class position and struggle. We, however, find a general problem with this particular solution to the issue of complexity. Without exception, both the social interpreters and their critics rely on an approach to class that specifies a group of people rather than a social activity or process. For Lefebvre and others, class is a noun, designating an essential loca- tion for a group of people within a social framework. This essentialist notion informs the social interpreters' discussion of opposed class interests and the representation of those interests in the political upheavals which mark the revolutionary process in France. After all the fragments and divisions are acknowledged, a bourgeois is still a bourgeois, and the political course of the Revolution bears out the integrity of this essential identity. To be sure, Lefebvre, Soboul, and other members of this school are careful to show the shifting and diverse political positions taken by different elements within the nobility, peasantry, bourgeoisie, and so on. At times it is the lack of class solidarity and shared political vision which chagrins the social interpreters as they depict the activities of the members of these classes - when this occurs, it is noted and men- tion is made of the ineradicably complex and non-"schematic" nature of history. In the last instance, though, they are not willing to give up the idea that class is ordinarily a concept which differentiates whole groups of people from one another, defining interests which are associated with determinate behaviors. Hence they are forced to treat inessential political behaviors and identities as matters of either minor interest or noteworthy secondary refinements which however sur- round and only slightly modify a fixed and well-established basic tendency. In contrast, in the surplus-labor approach to class developed in the three volumes of Capital and exemplified and reformulated recently by Resnick and Wolff, class is a process, not a group.41 That process is quite specifically defined: it is the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. This class

41. Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class (Chicago, 1987).

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 52 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON process indeed shapes and pressures (and is shaped and pressured by) other aspects of social life - whether property possession, income accrual, participation in political struggle, or religious signification. But no social process acts as an essence which other dimensions of a society simply reflect or express, and participation in a particular class process does not in itself mark or stamp a set of people with any necessary behavior, political or otherwise.

Perhaps one way to see how this approach to class could be useful in sorting out the debates between the social interpreters and their critics is to refer to discussions in Marx's Capital, Volumes Two and Three, of the class positions of merchants, financiers, capitalists (both industrial and agrarian), and landlords. The importance of this work for this debate, we should note, is suggested to some extent by Comninel and McClennan, and more clearly by the work of RWgine Robin.42 As Comninel tells us, Robin's Althusserian intervention points directly to discussions in Marx's Capital, Volume Three, of capitalist ground rent and the forms of "pre-capitalist surplus extraction." Thus (according to Comninel), unlike the social interpreters, Robin recognizes that the mode of producing and appropriating surplus on capitalist farms, feudal manors, and peasant plots differs significantly both in terms of the social conditions of existence of these modes and the class positions these modes partly determine. In our view, these differences are what permit the Marx of Capital to differentiate types of class processes and class positions from one another, and Robin is entirely right to emphasize their importance for a class-theoretic understanding of the ancien regime. Where Lefebvre treats "landed property" mostly of a piece, for example, Marx carefully differentiates between different economic "forms" landed property might be associated with - different modes of producing and appropriating surplus. Marx discusses in class terms the distinctions that result from feudal forms of rent and the capitalist form of ground rent. Likewise, Marx presents variations that these forms (particularly feudal rent) might take, while he preserves the in- sight that what constitutes each form of rent is a particular mode of producing and appropriating surplus labor. Thus, when surplus is produced by serfs and peasants and extracted through rents and taxes by lords, Marx is certain that we are witnessing a feudal class structure. Capitalist ground rent, however, has its origins not in the direct appropriation of the results of the productive activities of serfs and peasants, but, predominantly, in the surplus labor extracted by the capitalist farmer or indus- trialist and distributed to the landlord because of his/her relative "monopoly" in land. Marx's analysis allows us to see that the collection of rent by landlords is significantly different in the two systems and, therefore, places the landlords in dissimilar class positions depending upon whether the landlord is a direct ap- propriator of this rent (in the form of labor services, rent-in-kind, or money)

42. RWgine Robin, La Societefranpaise en 1789: Semur-en-Auxois (Paris, 1970); RWgine Robin, "La nature de 1'6tat a la fin de 1'ancien regime: Formation sociale, 6tat et transition," Dialectiques 1-2 (1973), 31-54.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 53 or whether the landlord's rent is a deduction from the surplus labor (as surplus value) generated in the (agrarian or industrial) capitalist sector, and distributed by the capitalist to the lord as payment for providing a necessary condition of existence for capitalist production. Of course, landlords can be paid rent from other sources as well, and the source of the rent and its mode of payment can position these landlords and their tenants in additional class positions. Indeed, using the analysis presented by Resnick and Wolff we can see that the payment of rent to landlords need not involve an appropriation or distribution of surplus labor at all. For example, if the tenant borrows to pay rent or if the tenant pays the rent out of his/her wages, rent would not represent a portion of surplus and, hence, would not involve landlords and tenants in a class relationship. In a similar vein, Marx's presentations on the nature of merchant capital problematize the social interpreters' tendency to treat merchants as cut from the same class mold as other "bourgeois," indeed to personify the "high level" bourgeoisie itself. Warning of the danger of reducing different forms of capital to a single category, Marx differentiates between money-lenders', merchant, and industrial capital. Only with the latter is there an expansion of value (an addition to previously produced surplus labor). Neither money-lending nor merchanting create value directly. Therefore, interest and merchant profit are not direct ap- propriations of surplus from the surplus producers. Furthermore, we must once again stress that merchants can receive their revenue from feudal surplus just as they can from surplus value. In Volume Three of Capital Marx devotes many pages to a discussion of the share of surplus value that merchants receive as a distribution from capitalist enterprises. However, if merchants receive their surplus as a result of their activities on behalf of a class of feudal nobles, merchant profit can be a deduction from feudal surplus labor. Further, merchants may receive income by buying cheap and selling dear to "ancient" surplus producers (for example, independent, self-exploiting peasant proprietors), thereby receiving a share of ancient surplus labor. In addition, again, their revenues may represent no deduction of surplus at all, as for example when merchant profit comes from "extorting" a portion of the wages of a proletarian. In this last case, merchants may occupy no position in a class process, that is, the production and appropriation of surplus labor. It is this understanding of Marxian analysis which particularly leads us, perhaps ironically, to endorse one aspect of the revisionists' labors. In Marxian class terms, the general category of a bourgeoisie - a class containing merchants and industrialists, artisans and financiers, lawyers and teachers, and so on -is un- tenable, precisely because no class sense has been made out of the processes participated in by the people who are lumped under that label. Hence we agree with the revisionists that the notion of a "bourgeois revolution" is problematic as a starting point for a class analysis of the Revolution. We support the revisionists' effort "to break down," as Cobban puts it, "the large omnibus classes which are calculated to accept practically any passenger who can pay a minimum set fare," even while we reject Cobban's empiricist belief that assorted "classifications based on historical actualities" (which he presents as the alternative to the theoreticism

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 54 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON of Marxism and "sociology") are readily waiting to fill more productively the space thus cleared.43 In the current context we are however more concerned with the suggestive critical light this analysis throws on the revisionist critique itself. As we have seen, a great deal of the attack on the social interpretation involved demonstration that the "bourgeois" and "landed" classes were in fact entirely intermixed in terms of the economic activities they engaged in (as well as through marriage and so on). Thus for example "bourgeois" heavily invested in land-ownership, including land upon which seignorial dues were due. In the realm of financial investments and rentes of various kinds, nobles and bourgeois participated alike. Playing perhaps the ultimate trump card, at least in symbolic terms, George V. Taylor found indeed that "a substantial number of nobles participated as entrepreneurs in commerce, industry, and finance." As he further concludes, "there was, between most of the nobility and the proprietary sector of the middle classes, a continuity of investment forms and socioeconomic values that made them, economically, a single group."44 Our point is that however clearly established this intermingling of forms of wealth-holding (and even intermingling of class positions) may be, in itself that does not show an absence of conflict or tension. The presumption in this literature that it does relies upon the notion that "class" is supposed to designate people, or groups of people, so that to find a mixing of class positions is to find evidence that "class" is not a meaningful historical category. The as- sumption shows clearly in the general conclusion Taylor formulates:

By one of the unexamined postulates of current historiography we expect [the Revolu- tion's political conflicts] to be explained by a conflict of social classes and the contradictions between a "rising" economic order and the order that it challenges. The position taken here is that we have now learned enough to see that this cannot be done, that to divide the wealthy elements of prerevolutionary society into a feudal aristocracy and a capitalist bourgeoisie forces the concealment of too much evidence, and that the whole classic concept of a bourgeois revolution has become impossible to sustain.45

In our view, however "intermixed" in aggregate terms, contradictions and tensions involving interacting class processes remain to be investigated - even when the processes in question interact in part via the participation of a single person in those (multiple) processes. For example, Comninel suggests that the state's control of access to rents accruing to holders of state offices formed an issue of grave importance to both bourgeois and aristocrat.46 Such an issue may be potentially volatile, despite evidence of a "continuity of investment forms" between "bourgeois" and noble in other dimensions. Cobban's quite similar criticisms of the integrity of the social interpreters' class categories are also called into question. Cobban makes much use of the fact that

43. Cobban, 8-14, 24. 44. George V. Taylor, "Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution," Amer- ican Historical Review 72 (1966-1967), 469-496, at 487. 45. Ibid., 490. 46. Comninel, 196-205.

This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 55 authors such as Lefebvre and Soboul arbitrarily regard "bourgeois" landholders as having greater allegiance to the bourgeoisie than to the landed aristocracy, and so forth. In Cobban's view, there is no reason to believe this to be true. Yet, as we believe, if the class approach of Marx's Capital is used, it may indeed be shown to be the case that there can be class differences within this supposed "class" of landowners. A landowner deriving rents from leasing to a capitalist farmer holds a different class position from one deriving rent from feudal dues. It is possible that tensions stemming from such different class positions and the processes that partly constitute them may not only exist but help to stimulate sharp political difference. Cobban ridicules Lefebvre, for example, for positing "bourgeois peasants," "bourgeois nobles," and so forth, but here, concerning the distinct class positions various peasants and nobles may occupy, Lefebvre's work may be more suggestive than Cobban's. The social interpretation has the virtue of suggesting that occupants of one class position (such as Lefebvre's bourgeoisie) may occupy another (such as Lefebvre's aristocracy), though there may well be a price involved, an uneasy tension concerning the different commitments the two class positions entail. A class analysis following such an approach -Marx's approach in Capital- would radically reformulate the social interpretation of the French Revolution. The rethinking would necessarily be thoroughgoing. Differences among the "class fractions" Lefebvre and Soboul identify, for example, would be understood in quite a different way if theorized via analysis of the diverse class positions members of the same "class," as defined by these authors, held. Relations among political participation, cultures, and class processes would likewise require general refor- mulation. We believe, however, that neither class analysis nor indeed some of the basic insights of the social interpretation tradition need be discarded in the face of the revisionist critique. To the extent that historians like Lefebvre and Soboul have emphasized the complexity of class structure and the many determinations of class, they have distinctly contributed to the larger tradition. If their general concepts of class are too broad and sometimes only vaguely related to exploitation, the tools they developed - their introduction of class fractions and the multiple dimensions of and pressures on class -beckon to a renewed, and different, Marxist analysis. That analysis might resolve some of the theoretical dilemmas they encountered while retaining their dual commitment, a commitment to both complexity and class.

Merrimack College and Wellesley College

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