Marxist Historians and the Question of Class in the French Revolution Author(s): Jack Amariglio and Bruce Norton Source: History and Theory , Feb., 1991, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 37-55 Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2505290 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2505290?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. 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 and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Theory This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION JACK AMARIGLIO and BRUCE NORTON In a recent book about Marxist scholarship on the French Revolution, George Comninel notes that in perhaps no other area of historical research has Marxian theory been so dominant among Western scholars. 1 A long line of Marxist and Marx-indebted historians have presented the Revolution as a moment in which the confluence and conflagration of class forces produced a dramatic transfor- mation in Western societies, encompassing sweeping changes in economics, pol- itics, ideology, and culture. The conclusion is supported by an analytical frame- work known as the "social interpretation" of the Revolution, constructed and elaborated through many decades of work by scholars such as Jean Jaures, Al- bert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and George Rude'2 Dominating French Revolution historiography certainly from the early 1900s to the 1960s, the framework brings to bear concepts related to Marxist theories of the condi- tions and consequences of class struggle, on the one hand, and more broadly conceived transitions between modes of production, on the other. Thus for many years, whatever else they learned, students of the French Revolution learned that Marxian (or Marx-related) notions of class and class struggle are essential keys to understanding how the modern world came to be what it is. From a formal standpoint, however, the analytical framework that characterizes much of the work of Lefebvre, Soboul, and others, can be maddening. A plethora of often conflicting and confusing concepts of class and class struggle inform this tradi- tion. In our view these confusions, along with other characteristics of these authors' understanding of class, help to account for the more recent collapse of the social interpretation's standing among professional historians. They also help to account for the accompanying judgment that Marxism itself is to blame for the tradition's weaknesses, as well as for an interpretative "iron curtain" which too long protected those weaknesses from criticism and empirical refutation. Charged with a distorting predilection for sociological and economic analysis, 1. George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London, 1987). 2. Well-known works include Jean Jaures, Histoire socialite de la revolution francaise, ed. A. Soboul, 4 vols. (Paris, 1969); Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, transl. C. A. Phillips (New York, 1964); Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, transl. R. R. Palmer (New York, n.d. [copyright 1947]); Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799, transl. A. Forrest and C. Jones (New York, 1975); George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1967). This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 38 JACK AMARIGLIO AND BRUCE NORTON and a misleading faith in sweeping historical generalizations, Marxian theory as a whole now stands accused rather than acclaimed. As leading "revisionist" historians such as Alfred Cobban, Denis Richet, and Frangois Furet argue, no discernible "bourgeoisie" confronted and defeated a fundamentally feudal ruling class in 1789, thereby breaking legal and political shackles hitherto fettering their growth; only misguided Marxian presuppositions support that view.3 Various of Marx's writings do indeed outline a general conception of the French Revolution supportive of the social interpretation. The story that Jaures, Lefebvre, Soboul, and others tell depends quite heavily on brief discussions, in The Com- munist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Volume One of Capital, of class formations and struggles involved in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the West. That story represents the Revolution as the crowning moment in the demise of "landed property" and its prerogatives at the hands of rising com- mercial and industrial entrepreneurs and their functionaries. There is no ques- tion that Marx outlined such a view; what is less certain (as Comninel points out) is whether the argument in question has any close and compatible relation to the class analysis produced in Marx's "mature" writings in Capital, particu- larly Volumes Two and Three. This paper concerns the relation of the social interpretation of the Revolution to Marxian class analysis. Our aim is to evaluate the multiplicity of concepts surrounding the word "class" in this tradition. We do that primarily by examining works by two of its leading proponents, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul. Our concern is less to judge the adequacy of particular explanations of the Revo- lution, whether the social interpretation or the revisionist critique, than to bring to the fore certain critical confusions regarding Marxian class analysis which have affected both sides of the battlefield. Prominent critics of the social interpretation of the French Revolution share a general motivation: to deny "the reality of classes and of class struggle." With this contention Albert Soboul began, in 1974, a defense of the interpretative tra- dition to which he belonged.4 What then are the classes which, in his view, form the stakes and object of this controversy, and what is the "great drama whose essential characters are (those) classes"?I Georges Lefebvre, Soboul's mentor, starts with the three "orders" recognized 3. The degree to which the social interpretation has fallen into disrepute was clearly evident in lead articles and editorials of major U.S. newspapers during the recent bicentennial celebrations of the Revolution. Furet's by now famous adage that the "French Revolution is over" was repeated on page 1 of the New York Times, serving to underscore the parting of the ways between the social interpreters' emphasis on class and their implied approval of revolutionary action (even, perhaps, the Terror), on the one hand, and more recent supposedly "non-ideological," "historically accurate" interpretations of Revolutionary events, on the other. The bicentennial publicity symbolizes the cur- rent abandonment of (presumed) Marxian ideas more generally -even, indeed, among French so- cialist intellectuals. On the latter issue see Carole Biewener, "Loss of a Socialist Vision in France," Rethinking Marxism (Fall and Winter 1990). 4. Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution, transl. A. A. Knutson (New York, 1988). 5. Jean Jaures, quoted in Soboul, Understanding, 230. This content downloaded from 103.77.40.126 on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:31:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MARXIST HISTORIANS AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS 39 by the French Crown, and thus with a legal category. There were not, however, three main classes, as he quickly clarifies. For "strictly speaking the clergy, as Sieyes said, was a profession and not a social class."6 The clergy included both nobles, centered in the upper clergy, and commoners, centered at the parish and monastic levels. "There were in reality," Lefebvre concludes, "therefore, only two classes, nobles and commoners." Who are the nobles? Lefebvre begins by considering and rejecting various pos- sible differentiating traits: They were not defined by land-ownership, for many commoners also owned land, and indeed manorial land upon which feudal dues were obligated. Nor are they well defined by tax privileges, for many bourgeois, as Lefebvre informs us, were, like the nobles, exempt from the taille, just as var- ious commoners and cities enjoyed other noble privileges. In terms of income, again, they are indeed a heterogeneous group. "What really characterized the nobility," he concludes "was birth; it was possible to become a noble, but in the eyes of everyone the true nobleman was born."7 For Lefebvre, the defining char- acteristic of this particular "class" is not then a directly economic dimension, but the group's social construction in ancestral, or racial, terms. Who then are the commoners? As a category, Lefebvre notes, shifting ground somewhat, this is "purely legal." Its only "real elements were the social ones - and of these the most important, the one which led and mainly benefited from the Revolution, was the bourgeoisie."8 Who belong to this "real element," the bourgeoisie? Again, Lefebvre begins to define his class precisely by stressing the wild diversity of