Kolla on Popkin, 'A New World Begins: the History of the French Revolution'

H-High-S Kolla on Popkin, 'A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution'

Discussion published by Joshua Ward Jeffery on Thursday, September 3, 2020

Dear Colleagues, for those of you teaching World History, this book offers some new content.

Review published on Sunday, July 19, 2020 Author: Jeremy D. Popkin Reviewer: Edward J. Kolla

Kolla on Popkin, 'A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution'

Jeremy D. Popkin. A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution. New York: Basic

Books, 2019. 640 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-09666-4.

Reviewed by Edward J. Kolla (Georgetown University)Published on H-Diplo (July, 2020) Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55012

The French Revolution is perhaps the most over-studied event inWestern history. So, “why a New History of the French Revolution?,” as Jeremy Popkin titles his preface (p. 1). One of his generation’s leading scholars of the Revolution, Popkin offers an explicit and simple answer. He aims to include two groups neglected in most previous surveys of this sort, women and the enslaved peoples in France’s overseas colonies, especially Saint-Domingue—today’s Haiti. It also seems, right from the opening vignette and from my prior conversations with Popkin, that he intends for this book to be read by a popular American audience. In addition to these aims, Popkin delivers much more, an account of this famous event that is at once learned and gripping, for both an academic and other audiences. He more than justifies his own question “why.”

Counterintuitively, Popkin never claims to advance an unambiguously novel interpretation of the Revolution, aside from the obvious and regular inclusion of women and enslaved people. On the contrary, he emphasizes the partisan, even Manichean nature of scholarship on the Revolution, which has often cast its actors as either “heroes” or “villains,” and his own inclination, running counter to this trend, to achieve a “balanced view” (p. 5). But readers should not mistake this book for an anodyne chronicle. Although he does not browbeat his readers with the street fights of its recent and longstanding historiography, Popkin still delivers deep analysis.

Popkin’s Revolution is, first and foremost, a political one, driven by its dominant personalities. Impersonal social or economic history this is not. His message seems to echo French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, in part 3 of his 1856 classic, The Old Regime and the Revolution: in the midst

This is the crux of Popkin’s argument, although he does not characterize it as such. The Revolution, as an event of colossal hopes and clashing interests, he contends, became something of a ping-pong game, back and forth, between various values and groups—liberty and order, landowners and urban workers, economic enterprise and regulation (or, in the beliefs of French political activist Gracchus Babeuf, something like “communist ideas” [p. 466]). The drama of the Revolution comes in the constant struggle between certain people trying to achieve their more extreme ends and others trying to steer a middle course between the opposing poles of counterrevolution and anarchy.

Notwithstanding his attempt at balance, between historiographic camps, Popkin still makes comments every now and then that specialists know are controversial. For instance, he claims that events in 1786 and 1787 “set in motion ... the complete overthrow of [the] monarchy” or that as early as July 1789 actors would be haunted by suggesting that “the Revolution justified actions that violated ordinary norms of justice” (pp. 79, 152). The latter is a clear allusion to the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Terror, and, indeed, both points show the influence of historian François Furet’s revisionist and “polemic essays” about the catastrophe inherent in the Revolution, a view vehemently opposed by those who hew to more traditional accounts of the Revolution as progenitor of liberalism and human rights (p. 3). This is a point to which I will return.

One comment, which I do not mean as a weakness, is necessary given this review is for H-Diplo: for readers interested in diplomatic or global history, while this work provides an excellent overview, it does not provide much that is new or provocative aside from the foregrounding of France’s colonies in the revolutionary story. The main international incidents are covered, from the pre-revolutionary American War of Independence and 1787 crisis in the Netherlands, through the Pillntz Declaration and Brunswick Manifesto before the outbreak of war, to French military victories like Fleurus and an extended treatment of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. Although the international repercussions of the Revolution are interspersed throughout, readers looking specifically for diplomatic history would be most satisfied in chapters 10, 13, 17, and 18.

On to the book’s strengths, one of the greatest is Popkin’s supreme ability to counterpoise the truly world-changing goings-on, and something that is often lost in works on legendary events—the fact that the actors themselves have no idea how this well-known and dramatic saga would unfold or end. Indeed, Popkin regularly invokes what was then and still is one of the supreme questions: when was the Revolution over? As much as different actors, at different points, sought to drive the Revolution forward, and others worried its gains might be reversed, still others thought or hoped that it was all at an end. Witness deputy Antoine Barnave in the summer of 1791, near the completion of France’s first, but by no means last, constitution or the challenge of “exiting the Terror” in 1794 (p. 420).

Another of Popkin’s fortes is writing. Much like his 2010 book,You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, sections of A New World Begins read like a fast-paced thriller. There are parts of this book, such as the coup of 18 Brumaire that brought Napoleon to political power or the dramatic denouement in Saint-Domingue, where readers might not be able to

But there is also much here to fully please the specialist, for instance, the sections where he explains with great clarity and insight complicated episodes, like the process for selection to the Estates General. Readers might also be tickled by new (to me, at least) and amusing facts, such as thetrue origin of La Marseillaise (spoiler: not Marseille!); or the anecdote of children, at the Revolutionary War’s most perilous moment, crawling through “damp cellars” to find the potassium nitrate, that is, the saltpeter necessary to make gunpowder, on “brickwork” that had reacted “with moisture” (p. 390).

For all its virtues, this book is not above some criticism. Minor quibbles include that, for this non- American, some of the connections Popkin seeks to make between the Revolution’s events or ideals, and the United States, seem overwrought or forced. One illustration is the paean to the Marquis de Lafayette as the “embodiment of the revolutionary movement for liberty and equality” (p. 198).

There is also some looseness with chronology. At times, the narrative jumps backward and forward confusingly. It might seem surprising, given that history gets a bad rap for being “all about dates,” but I believe better signposting of precisely those—or even the inclusion of a timeline—might have helped the lay reader. Also, while the first few chapters provide useful background on French history and its absolutist system of government cleverly, via the tuition of the soon-to-be king, Louis XVI, the fact that this book about the Revolution does not actually get to the Revolution until well after page 100 might test some readers’ patience.

I also was surprised to read, from someone aiming to write a “balanced view,” that he chose to describe the guillotine as “the Revolution’s most enduring symbol” (p. 286). It might be so for reactionary royalists, or for Furet and his acolytes who connect the Revolution intrinsically with violence; but it is not for me, nor does it seem to be for Popkin, given his work as a whole. Similarly, as much as Popkin nicely distinguishes Maximilien Robespierre from modern “revolutionary dictators in the mold of V. I. Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung,” and thereby carefully avoids anachronism, elsewhere, the connection between the September massacres—in 1791 of prisoners suspected of sympathizing with counterrevolution—and atrocities by “the Nazis, the communists, and the instigators of recent genocides” is both jarring and, in my opinion, patently wrong (pp. 349, 291). For all his skill avoiding teleology and over-determinism during the Revolution, later, Popkin’s attempts to make connections to Otto von Bismarck’s unification of Germany or the pronouncement of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870 also seems off.

The most important weakness, however, is not these connections between the Revolution and later events and atrocities, not least twentieth-century totalitarianism, which Furet is infamous for drawing. It is Popkin’s depiction of a closer bogeyman—Boney, as British contemporaries derisively called Napoleon. Whereas Popkin is generally successful in his aim to achieve balance, and to portray the seesaw of revolutionary politics without taking sides, in the final chapters one very much gets the impression that Napoleon’s takeover was normatively bad. There is little attempt at nuance, or balance (yes, I am overusing the term) between Napoleon as the savior or perpetuator of the Revolution and Napoleon as betrayer. For example, Popkin observes but does not develop the

Citation: Joshua Ward Jeffery. Kolla on Popkin, 'A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution'. H-High-S. 09-03-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14773/discussions/6397010/kolla-popkin-new-world-begins-history-french-revolution Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-High-S ultimate contradiction between Napoleon’s rising authoritarianism, clampdown on representative government, and reversal of freedoms that were central to the earlier Revolution, on the one hand; and the fact that he maintained or at least still paid lip service to other revolutionary values and was genuinely very popular all the way through the declaration of empire, in 1804, on the other—a popularity Popkin otherwise admits. These episodes are no longer on a spectrum, or part of a pendulum-swing, like others before, this time heavily swaying toward order. Despite some valiant opposition by activist-turned-philosopher Benjamin Constant or the woman of letters Madame de Staël, this period is, according to Popkin, an aberration, a repudiation, or, as the final chapter title asserts, a “death”—of the republic, if not the Revolution itself.

I shall end where Popkin does, with his excellent epilogue. I was struck by the emphasis placed throughout the narrative on a relatively minor revolutionary, Jean-Marie Goujon—until Popkin explains why. Popkin uses Goujon to illustrate one of a series of lessons Popkin draws from these momentous events, and a career spent studying them. Scholars and laypeople alike will find in this tome a worthy survey of one history’s greatest dramas, written for the most part with flair and judiciousness. But this book is worth the read for Popkin’s lessons alone.

The lesson taught by Goujon returns us to Popkin’s genius for depicting the attempts by revolutionaries to balance opposing values, ideas, and worldviews—or in this particular instance, the forces of idealism and pragmatism. A precept Popkin identifies at both start and finish is timely: consensus with respect to values, or even the definition of individual values, is hard if not impossible. “Liberty and equality turned out to mean very different things to different people at the time, as they have ever since” (p. 6). Finally, keenly on guard against teleology or (although he does not frame it this way) Enlightenment narratives about the certainty of human progress from which revolutionaries drank deeply, Popkin portentously warns us that the Revolution demonstrates how “liberty and equality are not inevitably bound to prevail” (p. 559).

Edward Kolla teaches history at Georgetown University’s campus in Qatar. He is the author of Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (2017) and is currently writing a book on the history of passports.

Citation: Edward J. Kolla. Review of Popkin, Jeremy D., A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. July, 2020.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55012

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.