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Home , Albert Soboul, Culture of France, Georges Lefebvre, Revolutionary terror, Social revolution

in the Historiography of the French *

Mash Khazeni

uring the first half of the twentieth century, the social interpretation of the prevailed among historians. The social interpreters of the Revolution D described it as the outcome of the struggle between the and the nobility. The social interpretation was a classic Marxist analysis of the material and social changes in eighteenth century . Since the 1950s, however, new explanations have challenged this stance. Post-social historians have suggested that the French Revolution cannot be understood as a manifestation of the rise of the bourgeois class. To many scholars, the age in France was an illusory world invented by the words and ideas of French political . These historians use linguistic approaches to understand revolutionary and politics. The social interpretation and the post-social/linguistic interpretation are twentieth century reconstructions of the French past. However, these explanations are related to theories that have existed since the time of the French Revolution itself. A basic conceptual question has remained since the beginning. This question asks whether the Revolution was the result of circumstance or “the dissemination of ideas.” It is true that historians continue to examine the Revolution through the concepts of circumstance and ideas.2 The social interpretation, with its emphasis of rising social forces, overlaps with the thesis of circumstance. While the post-social interpretation, through its emphasis on language and culture, revives the old notion that the Revolution was caused by “bad books” and dangerous ideas.3 One of the areas in which the social and post-social interpreters have tested whether the French Revolution was the result of inevitable circumstance or books has been the realm of revolutionary violence, a subject traditionally classified as “the Terror”, a period lasting from September 1793 to July 1794 (Year II until 9 Thennidor on the Republican Calendar). Such accounts of “the Terror” depict great revolutionary leaders in who motivated the French masses to act by providing the legal and systematic justification of revolutionary violence.4 Thus, “the Terror” generally refers to an official government policy. “Terror” by contrast, often suggests factors beyond the Year II and the exclusive realm of famed writers and politicians. “Terror” refers to the wide, fragmented array of social institutions and mentalities that existed in France before, during, and after Year II. It can be said that “terror” has become the focus of most social and post-social interpretations of revolutionary violence, for “terror” cannot be limited to its institutional fonn during the Year II. The social interpretation of the French Revolution shifted the emphasis of scholarship towards more ordinary found amongst the “crowd”, the sans-culottes, and the popular . Terror was viewed from “below” rather than from “above.” In the process, the histories of philosophes and diplomats were complemented by accounts of common people. And although many scholars continued to focus on the Year II, their arguments moved beyond “the Terror” proper, as an official policy of government. The often fragmentary forms of “terror”, in general, were uncovered by the social interpretations of , , George Rude, and .

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InfLuenced 60 61

The People’s Armies (originally published as Les Armëes Révolutionnaires) is Cobb’s most substantial work. It is also the easiest work by Cobb to place upon a historiographical spectrum. In Les Armées Révotutionnaires, Cobb concentrates upon the institutions and mentalities of the popular armies.18 Seeking to correct the slanderous depictions of the armees that began with the accusations of the Thermidorean period, Cobb claims that the list of epithets used in the pamphlets of Year III were resurrected in nineteenth century historiography. Thermidoreans and historians had dismissed the armées révotutionnaires as elements of la derniere pleb, the lowest people.19 With The People ‘sArmies, Cobb intends “to assess the place of the armëes in the history of the Terror and the popular movement of the Year II.20 According to Cobb, the armées represent the primordial violence of France raised to a spontaneous institution under revolutionary circumstances. During the emergency of Revolution, “the triumph of violence [wasJ exalted to a political system.”2’ But Cobb is not merely concerned with the structure of the people’s armies; he also considers the various individuals within them. Cobb finds that not everyone in the armées became “revolutionaries through circumstance.” Some were “militants by choice.”22 The Revolution was an outlet for fundamentally violent temperaments that were, in certain cases, intensified during the Terror. The armées révotutionnaires were a phenomenon irreducible to, but nonetheless affected by, general prevailing circumstances. Cobb’s later works became more dissonant. In the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, Cobb increasingly viewed the Revolution as the sum of innumerable biographies. His subject, more so than ever, became the idiosyncrasies of people on the margins of society. In Reactions to the French Revolution, Cobb retreats from the discussion of the overarching concepts of circumstances and ideas, and examines the minutiae of terror conveyed through the biographical approach. In Reactions, Cobb admits to “an inability, in the last resort, to sympathise with those who seek to exercise power, be their motives good or evil.”23 Noting his “extreme repulsion for Robespierre,” he seeks to study individualism, dans la durée, over a period of time.24 The works of Lefebvre, Soboul, Rude, and Cobb inspired future scholars to examine the variety of unexplored aspects concerning the Revolution. A more complex picture of revolutionary violence and terror had emerged. In the process the thesis of circumstance was revamped through the social interpretation of the French Revolution. However, the social interpreters’ emphasis upon mentalités paved the way for post-social historians of public opinion and political culture, who returned to the claim that books and ideas had caused the events of 1789. Post-social interpretations return to the sphere of politics in their contention that political space in eighteenth century France was not limited to the realm of the government apparatus. Some historians of the French Revolution use the concept of political culture to reveal that politics was integral to public life. Political culture refers to the codes that define political action. It refers to the discourses and symbolic practices that order reality. Historians such as Mona Ozouf, Francois Furet, Robert Damton, and Bronislaw Baczko have suggested that language resulted in the communication and creation of the eighteenth century French world. Festivals and the French Revolution (1976) by Mona Ozouf revives the notion that ideas make . Ozouf upholds the rete révolutionnaire as a prime example of the Revolution’s inner contradictions in the quest for utopia. The revolutionary festival combined liberty and coercion; the idea of a new order was tainted by a preoccupation with unanimity that 62 manifested itself in terror.25 In seeking to put everyone on the same level, the revolutionary festival “in theory, annihilated variety” and made “the intellectualization of activities total.”26 The Revolution and its utopian ideal were flawed by a unitary impulse that was intolerant of dissent. According to Ozouf, utopian festivals “were merely a false celebration of peace and unanimity of feeling, a camouflage, a facade plastered onto a gloomy reality”.27 Ozouf traces the violence of the Revolution back to utopian ideas. Shaped in an atmosphere of terror, the “utopian festivals left no room for the free play of liberty.” Utopian festivals were not places for deviants; they made “a crime of isolation.” 8 Ideas of a utopia precipitated terror:

Revolutionary violence appears as not that which perverted the utopian festival but that which brought it to fulfillment: Prairial, Year II, was the radiant month in which the festival of the Supreme Being claimed to establish regenerated mankind in an innocent dawn; it was also the baleful month in which the mechanics of the Terror went into operation... As ideas often contradict human nature, [leadersJ often entrust the task of establishing them to . When the course of things does not go their way, it must be forced to do so by arbitrary authority.29

Ozoufs return to the concept of ideas provides a more antagonistic view of the Revolution than that of the followers of the thesis of circumstance. The Revolution is not seen as a consequence of the rise of a new social class, but rather as the creation of a pervasive political culture. In War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1985), Ozouf provides perhaps the most explicit refutation of the thesis of circumstance. She charges the previous historians of the French Revolution for being tra,jed by the original rationalization of the Terror offered by the revolutionary actors themselves. She contends that both revolutionaries and historians have engaged in a discourse that dismisses terror as a response to internal and external war.31 Ozoufs focus is language. Language, not circumstances, justified the Revolution for contemporaries and the generations of historians that followed. She fmds a homogenous discourse prevalent during the Revolution and the subsequent “200 years” of historiography. According to Ozouf, the discourse of the was adopted by these historians of the French Revolution. They defined Jacobinism, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a policy of public safety and dreamed of a threatened and endangered nation defended by “the miracle performed by a strong central power.”32 Ozoufs linguistic approach problematizes the basis and evolution of the thesis of circumstance. In “Terror” (1989), francois Furet explicitly states that the Revolution “cannot be reduced to circumstances,” for it was also a political idea.33 Ideas, “present in the Revolution of 1789, predated the circumstances and enjoyed an independent existence, which was associated with the nature of French revolutionary culture.”34 Similar to Ozouf, Furet views terror and the Revolution as the inventions of a discursive world. for Furet, revolutionary violence represented the degeneration of politics, a time when language reigned supreme over reality, and uniformity threatened pluralism and contestation. Furet suggests that terror sprang from “sets of ideas” which “predated the circumstances.”35 Before terror was made the order of the day, and before it established the 63 repressive institutions used by the Republic to defeat its adversaries and establish “domination on a basis of fear,” it was an idea. Terror was “a demand based on political convictions and beliefs.”36 The French Revolution was a product of the philosophes, such as Rousseau, who had imagined through their literature how a new society could be. Furet suggests that these ideas induced revolutionary violence. Ozouf and Furet, as well as a disciple of theirs, Bronislaw Baczko,37 offer a negative view of language. For them, language distorts reality; it obscures and veils it. The horrors of revolutionary violence were masked by language and other discursive practices. However, this is not the opinion of all historians of political culture. Some contend that language constitutes reality itself.38 From this perspective, language is seen as the most basic human activity. In effect, language gives the world meaning. A good example of this approach can be found in Robert Damton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984). In The Great Cat Massacre, Damton uses an incident involving the killing of cats to suggest that French revolutionary violence belonged to a specific idiomatic world. In other words, the meaning of a particular event was determined by the time and the place. The massacre of cats acquired meaning in the context of eighteenth-century Paris, and in accord with the rules of the contemporary political culture. These rules justified certain acts of revolutionary violence. The obvious fact that such a massacre of cats would have a different meaning in the late twentieth century proves that material activity has no significance until defined by the cultural rules of a given community. Reality is thus unfixed and imbedded in language.39 Damton also criticizes the tendency to derive cultural systems from social conditions. for Damton, culture is idiomatic and shaped by texts.40 His focus is clearly upon the thoughts and ideas that made violence possible in eighteenth century France. For Damton, words are not just a record of what has happened, they are a part of the happening. Yet, not all post-social historians writing today would agree with the claim that the revolutionary age in France was evoked by language. In “Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror,” (1994) Cohn Lucas argues that violence is latent in all societies. It is a permanent threat.4’ The fact that the revolutionaries “consciously or unconsciously” examined the place of violence in society did not mean that the existence of violence was based on an idea.42 Revolutionary violence existed throughout eighteenth century France and the radicals of the Terror were seeking to isolate that violence. Violence was itself the emergency that necessitated the Terror. Lucas claims that the Jacobins sought to impose a “theory of revolutionary violence” upon the violence already rampant in French society.43 Despite its position in the political culture of France, the Terror cannot be understood as just an ideological creation: “The Terror, it seems, was as much, if not more, the product of the failure of a theory of revolutionary violence as it was the product of its invention.”44 Terror is once again seen as the result of pressing circumstances. Revolutionary language and ideas did not create reality. They gave meaning to it. A debate on circumstances and ideas has persisted in histories of terror written since the 1950s. The social interpretations of Lefebvre, Soboul, Rude, and Cobb and the post-social, often linguistic, works of Mona Ozouf, francois Furet, Robert Damton, and Cohn Lucas continue to discuss whether the Revolution was a response to necessities or the result of books. The diverse 64 areas of scholarship on terror cannot be reduced to this pervading discussion. The French Revolution is perhaps the most written about event in history, terror its most recognizable subplot. As noted above, Richard Cobb in Reactions to the French Revolution (and earlier Thomas Carlyle) was concerned with biographies. Some historians, writing during the revolutionary years, had seen progress and destiny as the driving force behind the Revolution in France.45 Still other currents might be deciphered in the vast body of works. But none have been as prevalent as the thesis of circumstance or the claim that the Revolution was born out of the spread of books.

Arash Khazeni completed an MA. in the History of since 1500 at San Francisco State University in May 1999. His emphasis has been upon the French Revolution and the Modern Middle East. Khazeni is currently working on a history of the city of Isfahan and the civilization of .

The original version of this essay was presented during a course onthe French RevolutionaryAge in the spring of 199$ at San Francisco State University. The ideas presented here are based upon the discussions raised in that seminar. I here express my gratitude to Dana Young, Kimberly Davis, Jeff Wittington, Giovanni Ruffmi, Katie Gomez, Anthony Swanson, and Mark Rempel, all of whom read and commented on various drafts of this essay. I am indebted to Professor Frank Kidner for the fortuitous experience of having been his student. Daniel Roche. “Censorship and the Publishing Industry.” Revolutionin Print: ThePress in France, 1775-1200. Edited by Robert Darnton and Roche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 3. 2 The thesis of circumstance, first employed by francois Mignet and later on by Alphonse Aulard, regards the events of the French Revolution as real responses to real circumstances. It deems the Terror as a terrible but necessary defense of the Republic. The Terror is thus a response to pressing political, social, and economic conditions. The concept of revolution as a result of ideas descends from the plot theory of Abbé Augustin Barruel, who claimed that the Terror was caused by bad ideas written by men in books that instigated mass revolutionary actions. The emphasis on ideas, also detected in the works of Hyppolyte Tame and Cochin, isoftenassociatedwitha fear and disapproval of revolutionary behavior. In the late twentieth century, this line of thought has been updated in works on political culture by Francois Furet, Mona Ozouf, and Keith Michael Baker. Roche. “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” 5. R.R. Palmer. TwelveWhoRuled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. New York: Athenium, 1966. Palmer presented a defmitive account of the “Year of the Terror” in Twelve Who Ruled. He focused on the circumstances which led to the formation of the Committee of Public Safety. His subjects were the leading politicians who made the Terror a policy of government. Influenced by the works of Alphonse Aulard, Palmer agrees that the Terror was an emergency “made necessary by circumstances” (57). Yet, Palmer goes further to state that “the chief of these circumstances was the internal chaos [and disunity] which the Revolution had produced” (57). Unlike Aulard, who viewed the Terror as a patriotic defense by ardent revolutionaries, Palmer fmds it “inescapable in a country so habituated to violence, so demoralized by suspicion and torn by irreconcilable parties.” Eighteenth-century France was a placeof : “[t]he Terror was born of fear, from the terror in which men already lived, from the appalling disorder produced by five years of Revolution, and the lawless habits of the old regime” (56). However, these popular and social factors are cursorily mentioned by Palmer; he generally depicts the Terror as an official policy of government instigated by an elite group of men. The Annales school and journal were founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien febvre in 1929. The group of historians associated with the Annales strived for a new type of history. Though they were not a monolithic group, all were interested in the analysis of the history of everyday life, “la vie quotidienne dans l’histofre.” Two of the most prolific descendents of Bloch and Febvre were femand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949) and and Material Lfe (1967) revealed the immobile physical factors and structures as more significant and pervasive than theworldof 65

events. for Braudel, events were “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” He advised that scholars “learn to distrust them” (On History, 21). Mountains, seas, and the materials and structures of civilization were history’s true motor. In The of (1966), Le Roy Ladurie returns to a concept that Bloch had earlier explored, “outillage mentale,” mental tools. In the course of writing a “total” history of a community in southern France, Le Roy Ladurie examined the collective thoughts, the mentalites of everyday people. 6 Georges Lefebvre, “Revolutionary Crowds,” New Perspectives on the French Revolution. Ed. Jeffry Kaplow. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1965, 175. Originally published as “Foules revolutionafres” in Lefebvre’s Etudes sur la Revolution Francaise, 1954. 7Ibid., 1$1-182. 8lbid., 177 and 180. 9mid., 183. ‘°Ibid., 182. Ibid., xxxiv. 12 Albert Soboul. The Sans-Culottes. Trans. Remy Inglis Hall. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, xvii. 13 Literally, “without breeches,” sans-culottes refers to small property-owners and wage-earners of town and countryside: in its Parisian context, the small shopkeepers, petty traders, craftsmen, journeymen, labourers, vagrants, and city poor. 14 Soboul. Sans-Culottes, xxviii. George Rude. The Crowd in the French Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Exemplified by Tame’s unsympathetic use of the term canaille —“rabble”. Ibid., 232. t7 Frank Kidner. “French Revolutionary Age”. San Francisco State University, 2/23/98. Literally “half world” or “half lifes”, le demi monde designates people on the fringes of society. jg A citizen army, composed of sans-culottes, raised in 1793 to ensure that agrarian stocks reached Paris and other cities. They were discredited and disbanded in 1794. 19 The men of the armees revolutionnaires were also called “highwaymen”, “bullies”, “ravenous wolves”, “vagrants”, “adventurers”, “banlcrupts”, “lackeys without employment”, “wigmakers without clients”, “robbers”, “deserters”, “cowards”, “vagabonds”, “wretches”, “vicious bloodthirsty hooligans”, “myrmidons”, “boors”, “guttersnipes”, “septembriseurs”, “butchers”, “informers”, and “ultra-Jacobins”. The People’s Armies, 4-5. 20Ibid., 14. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 426. 23 Cobb. Reactions to the French Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1972, 5. 241b1d.,10. 25 Mona Ozouf. Festivals and the French Revolution. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988, 12. Originally published as La fête révolutionnaire, 1976. 26Ibjd 8. 27Ibid., 11. 28 Ibid., 12. 29Ibid., 12. 30Ozouf. “War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1792-1794)”. The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution. Edited by T.C.W. Blanning. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. p. 272. Ozoufnotes Robespierre’s infamous question - “Do you want a revolution without revolution?” - as a classic defense of the Terror on the grounds of exceptional circumstances. 31 Ibid., 267. 32 Ibid., 283. Francois furet, “Terror,” The French Revolution in Social and Political Perspective. Ed. Peter Jones. New York: St.‘ Martin’s Press, 1996, 463. These ideas, rooted in French revolutionary political culture, are placed by Furet under the categories of “man’s regeneration”, political will, and absolute popular sovereignty, 463-464. Ibid., 463.

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Robert

Kidner.

Ibid., Ibid.,76.

‘ 42Ibid.,59.

40Thid.,

41

Books,

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merged

“the

University

‘

36 66