chapter 10 Marx, the French Revolution, and the Spectre of the Bourgeoisie

Revisionism has been the dominant trend in the study of the French Revolution since the 1970s. This is especially the case in the English-speaking countries, but its influence is felt as well in France as a result of the authority of François Furet. As is well known, the object of revisionism has been to challenge the long-established Marxist view of the revolution. The Marxist school of his- torians, which included Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, flourished in the first part of the twentieth century. It looked upon the revolu- tion as a bourgeois revolution whose power was based on the development of capitalism in the eighteenth century. In a multitude of ways revisionists have attempted to deny the significance of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the revolution. They have questioned the link between the two terms. They have cast doubt on the strength of both capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Some have even sought to deny the meaning of the terms. Finally they have questioned the significance of the revolution to French history, which, it is claimed, is a history of continuity rather than change. Among prominent historians who continue to defend the Marxist view has been Michel Vovelle. In his recent work Les mots de la Revolution, Vovelle puts forward the following assessment of the still evolving character of the bourgeoisie at the time of the revolution:

It is a bourgeoisie of a mixed sort. It associates the ‘self-defined’ ren- tier bourgeoisie with the representatives of the commercial bourgeoisie which is beginning to become industrial and is connected to the world of services.

This balanced view of the evolving and changing nature of the bourgeoisie allows Vovelle to conclude: ‘With due caution and with a consciousness of the evolution of language it does not misrepresent things to maintain the classic designation of the revolutionary historiography of the French Revolution of a bourgeois revolution based on popular support’.1

1 Vovelle 2004, p. 16.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004345867_011 128 chapter 10

Revisionism has multiple and contradictory threads, as I have noted. Some adherents have argued that capitalism was weak or even that it did not exist. Others allow that it was strong but derailed or retarded rather than advanced by the revolution. Still others argue that capitalism had nothing to do with the revolution. As for the leading role of the bourgeoisie, it has been asserted by revisionists that this class was non-capitalist, or even that the nobility rather than the bourgeoisie were capitalism’s avant-garde. The implication of the lat- ter point is that the overthrow of this class was in retrospect a retrograde step.2 Such revisionist arguments have in common their focus on trying to refute the social and economic aspects of the Marxist interpretation of the revolution. The present chapter focuses on cultural revisionism, an approach pioneered by Furet. Turning his back on attempts to explain the revolution’s causes by trying to tie together a multiplicity of factors including the social and eco- nomic, Furet and other cultural revisionists lay emphasis on the development of a radical political culture which had its own internal momentum and logic. A cataclysmic event like the revolution could not have been the result of the mere oscillations or cycles of French social and economic history as detailed ad infinitum by the Annales school. To the contrary, the revolution was the consequence of a fundamental cultural and ideological shift. In consequence, historical understanding comes through the hermeneutical analysis of the new revolutionary discourses, political cultures, and identities which in themselves are seen as the causal agents of this transformation. Perhaps the foremost advocate in France of this view is Mona Ozouf, who with Furet is the editor of a revisionist historical encyclopedia entitled Dic- tionnaire critique de la Revolution française (1988). Ozouf has been described as a sentinel who guards the gates against the intrusion of any kind of social explanation that could contaminate the closed realm of discourse analysis. For Ozouf all attempts to link discourse to social and economic forces are arbitrar- ily dismissed as discredited, inherently constraining, and reductionist.3 As the Marxist school perhaps did not pay sufficient attention to the creation of a new revolutionary and republican culture, this current of revisionism in reaction has gained credibility among some historians who take seriously the import- ance of culture.This line of interpretation gains intellectual credibility from the fact that all parties agree that the revolution represented a change of epic pro- portions. The depth of cultural transformation inherent in this profound event, it is then argued, cannot be reduced to economic and social factors. Not only can this momentous event not be reduced to the socioeconomic, argue these

2 Heller 2006, pp. 9–23. 3 Kaplan 1995, pp. 54, 61–2.