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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 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. 1 H-High-S of the crises and failed reform attempts of the 1780s, a fissure opened up—in French politics, society, and political philosophy—in which new and often contradictory ideas and ideals swarmed. As Popkin writes of the Estates General’s challenge in 1789: “To satisfy so many contradictory expectations and calm so many conflicting fears would be a monumental challenge” (p. 114). 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 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. 2 H-High-S put it down. Perhaps if Popkin-the-scholar had not included quite as much comprehensive analysis, at times, and Popkin-the-dramatist had been given freer rein, the entire book might have read like a gripping page-turner. 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.
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