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Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution Author(s): Michel Vovelle, Timothy Tackett and Elisabeth Tuttle Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 749-755 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/286317 Accessed: 09-09-2020 04:27 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to French Historical Studies This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution Michel Vovelle Within the historiographical debate that has marked the Bicentennial of the French Revolution there is a widely held opinion in both France and abroad that "revisionism" has triumphed over the "traditional" or "Jacobin" interpretation of the revolutionary era. In France this theme has been largely orchestrated by the media, and television has crowned Franois Furet the "King of the Bicentennial." In the Spanish newspaper El Pais I happened to read a major interview with this same historian under the headline "I've won!" Terms such as these are hardly appropriate for pursuing the debate, for they imply, perhaps a bit prematurely, that the debate is over. First of all, we need to ask the meaning of "revisionism," this critical current of thought developed over the past thirty years, long confined to a small circle of specialists and only recently propelled into the public forum by the events of the Bicentennial. In fact, the term is rather unfortunate because of its ambiguous connotations and particu- larly because of its confusion in the French language with another "revisionism" which puts into question the reality of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the term has been widely accepted, and I will use it as others do, for want of anything better. The very definition of revisionism presumes that it is to be placed in counterpoint to an established orthodoxy, to a previously hege- monic interpretation, viewed by some as an ossified and repetitive "vulgate." In question is the "classical" interpretation of the Revolu- tion, sometimes called "Jacobin" or "Marxist," as it was developed in its broad features from Jean Jaures to Albert Mathiez to Georges Michel Vovelle holds the chair in the French Revolution at the University of Paris I (Sor- bonne). Among his numerous books on the social and cultural history of the Old Regime and the French Revolution are La Chute de la monarchie (Paris, 1972), Pi&tt baroque et dechristianisa- tion (Paris, 1973), Religion et Revolution (Paris, 1976), La Revolution francaise, images et recit, 5 vols. (Paris, 1986), and La Revolution contre l'Vglise:De la Raison d l'Etresupre&me (Paris, 1988). French Historical Studies, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Fall 1990) Copyright ? 1990 by the Society for French Historical Studies This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 750 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES Lefebvre and then to Albert Soboul. The designation of this strand of history under a single rubric is not without its oversimplification, for historians such as Marcel Reinhard or Jacques Godechot who identi- fied themselves with this current were not Marxists, whereas Lefebvre and even Soboul took care to distinguish their positions from that of strict orthodoxy. Nevertheless, all of these historians did link them- selves to a social reading of the revolutionary upheaval, an interpreta- tion whose basic features they helped to construct: from the peasant revolution of Lefebvre (Les Paysans du Nord, La Grande Peur de 1789) to the urban mobilization of Soboul (Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l'an II). For them, the French Revolution destroyed not only the insti- tutional Old Regime of the absolute monarchy but also and even more profoundly the social Old Regime of a society of orders supported by the privileges of a noble aristocracy; and it brought about the union of a bourgeois revolution with the popular revolutions-Parisian and urban movements and the peasant revolution-as evoked by Georges Lefebvre. It was the confrontational effect of a "bourgeois revolution with popular support" (Soboul) which explains the radicalism of the revolutionary process and its "ascendant development" from 1789 to 1793. In opposition to this explanatory schema, is it possible to speak of a single revisionist discourse? I think we must distinguish several strata leading to several rather different formulations. A first stratum, dating to the late 1950s, corresponds to the reexaminations of certain Anglo- Saxon researchers, whether English-like Alfred Cobban-or Amer- ican. They put into question the concept of a bourgeois revolution by questioning the very existence in the late eighteenth century of a modern form of bourgeoisie. So too, they reevaluated the idea of a backward aristocracy by stressing the progressive characteristics of this group (as in the articles of George V. Taylor).' Such questioning led them to reexamine the inevitability of the Revolution and to grant a determining influence to politics and contingent events in the origins of the revolutionary movement (cf. The Origins of the French Revolu- tion by William Doyle). In France, this same interpretive tendency can be associated with the initial itinerary of Francois Furet, who collaborated with Denis Richet to publish the book La Revolution franfaise in 1965. For Furet and Richet a compromise would have been possible in 1789 through a I George V. Taylor, "Types of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France," Economic His- tory Review 79 (1964): 478-97; and "Non-capitalist Wealth and the Origin of the French Revolu- tion," American Historical Review 72 (1966-67): 469-96. This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE REVISIONIST INTERPRETATION 751 reformist evolution based on the consensus of a noble-bourgeois elite, associated in their subscription to the ideology of the Enlightenment. As they put it, the Revolution "skidded off course" through the unde- sirable intervention of the masses, workers and peasants whose slogans and demands were essentially backward in nature. Hence the escala- tion which led to the terrorist episode of 1793-94 and which, for them, was anything but an "ascendant development. " Such were the stakes of the debate in the 1970s-greatly simplified but without exaggeration, I hope-emerging from a polemic that was scarcely notable for its ele- gance on one side or the other. At the risk of appearing incurably optimistic, I do consider this debate to have been fruitful and productive. Criticized and challenged in this manner, Jacobin historiography has had to take up once again certain strands of fundamental inquiry. Thus, for example, the anal- ysis of Regine Robin has greatly contributed in developing the defini- tion of an old-style or transitional bourgeoisie and in demonstrating the ambiguities and misinterpretations of the theory of "elites."2 Moreover, without rejecting the continued exploration of social his- tory, this strand of historiography has learned to reevaluate the role of politics in relation to certain themes such as the development of Jaco- binism and also to grant greater importance to cultural and mental phenomena in the investigation of new areas of revolutionary history. For this reason, when one encounters a historian like Jacques Sole scoffing at the Marxist "myth" of a conquest of power by the industrial bourgeoisie (La Revolution en questions),3 one may well wonder what could be more vulgar than crude Marxism-unless it is perhaps crude anti-Marxism. Moreover, as his 1978 essay Penser la Revolution franfaise makes perfectly clear, the revisionist discourse employed by Francois Furet has also considerably evolved. Some of the most spectacular affirma- tions of 1965, notably the idea of the Revolution's skidding off course, were put into question. In the explanatory model that now emerged, the revolutionary process once again took on a real unity. Henceforth, the Revolution is to be read in a political vein, as an experience whose roots are to be traced to the previous decades, to the development of the "democratic sociability -a concept borrowed by Furet from the histo- rian Augustin Cochin-of the Masonic lodges and the societes de pen- see, developed under the auspices of the Rousseauist notion of popular 2 RWgine Robin, La Soci&tt franpaise en 1789: Semur-en-Auxois (Paris, 1970). 3 In English as Questions of the French Revolution: A Historical Overview, trans. Shelley Temchin (New York, 1989). This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 752 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES sovereignty. The year 1789 saw the opening of a period in which "his- tory was set adrift." In this context it was the application of both the principles and the social practices of "democratic sociability" that led to the creation of a Jacobin "machine" within the framework of an experience which made the Revolution the "matrix of totalitarianism'' (Penser la Revolution franfaise, p. 180). In Furet's view it is essential to put an end to this episode, for its consequences have been as pernicious in the development of French political culture as in the construction of a model adopted by modern totalitarianism.
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