The Real Bicentennial of the French Revolution

This Wednesday will be the 200th anniversary of the women’s march on Versailles--an event as critical for the outcome of the French Revolution as the storming of the Bastille. On Oct. 4, 1789, about 7,000 poor Parisian women made desperate by the high price of bread and furious over the insults reportedly done to the “national cockade” at a recent military banquet welcoming the royalist Flanders Regiment, picked up whatever weapons lay at hand and trudged 29 kilometers to Versailles, dragging several heavy field cannon with them.

These women--the sort of French revolutionary that English readers remember from Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” (see Page 13)--came, ostensibly, to threaten the National Assembly, but the presence that loomed over Versailles was not parliamentary but regal. Within 12 hours of their arrival, the women broke into the Louis XVI’s chateau, slew two of his bodyguards and would undoubtedly have severely manhandled his queen had not the Marquis de Lafayette and the National Guard shown up in the nick of time.

But Lafayette could not prevent the excited women from forcing the king and the National Assembly to move the seat of office back to the ancient capital of the kingdom, Paris, where they remained inescapably accessible to popular justice. Had the March on Versailles known no other consequence than this (and it knew many), it would loom every bit as large, if not larger, in revolutionary accomplishment and symbolism as the fall of the Bastille.

French governments ever since have uneasily recognized the radical valence of the Versailles march. In 1889, when the Third Republic was debating the question of what date should serve as the festive center of gravity of the Centenary of the revolution, Oct. 4 nearly won. If it did not, neither did July 14--because both dates were deemed too divisive by harried governors striving to effect national reconciliation. (They settled on May 5, the day of the opening of the Estates-General.)

Not only governors but most historians of the present-day Fifth French Republic are resonating to the conciliative motives of the fin-de-siecle parliamentarians. Indeed, given the drift in some of the leading books published in this anniversary year, one has the impression that if intervening years had not immutably hallowed the Quatorze Juillet as the revolution’s feast day, we might lately see Aug. 24, 1775 chosen. This was the date when the brilliant minister Turgot took charge of the king’s council and launched a reform program that could well have obviated the need for revolution.

Or so it is argued. The new word in these bicentennial days is that the French Revolution was not only avoidable and unfortunate, but also deeply beholden to the Old Regime for all that was useful and commendable in it. One might anticipate such a perspective in the 28 essays of Keith Baker’s “The Political Culture of the Old Regime” (Pergamon)--specifically oriented as it is to the 18th Century--but it is no less implicit in the essays of Colin Lucas’ companion collection, “The Political Culture of the French Revolution” (Pergamon) or in Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf’s “Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution” (Harvard University Press). Thanks to this “New School” of French historians, what we now know about ideas like absolutism, corporatism, citizenship, Jansenism, popular and representational sovereignty and 10 or 20 other related concepts, and of their indissoluble ties to the revolution, would strike a historian of the 1960s quite dumb with admiration. And not only for the new information and insights offered. The philosophical acuity of the methods applied herein surpasses totally what even the finest practitioners of the old “intellectual history” were able to bring off. Having perhaps annulled a revolution in history, the politically centrist or conservative contributors to these collections have indubitably made another revolution--this one in historiography.

Yet I remain as dubious about the New School’s grasp on the revolution itself as I am impressed with their insight into its precursor ideologies and movements. There is a self-enclosed quality about these essays that impart a reassuring sense--as though we were at tea in an English garden--but which makes one nervous about what may be happening outside the garden gate. The limitations of the New School become somewhat clearer when we inspect a full tableau, as it were, and not simply a collection of miniatures.

Any book whose title begins “The Oxford History of” is liable to read as if the publisher wrote it. It is therefore to William Doyle’s credit in “The Oxford History of the French Revolution” (Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press) that, despite a certain ponderous judiciousness and balance, he has marked these pages with a viewpoint while refraining from the idiosyncrasies of style, organization and judgment that mar Simon Schama’s “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution” (Alfred A. Knopf).

Doyle is in certain key ways a New Schooler. For instance, he unabashedly believes the French Revolution to be a failure. He also breaks sharply with the traditional Marxist view of a “bourgeois revolution” that launched the triumph of capitalism, though in fairness one must add that these days even many Marxists have jettisoned this baggage. Actually, Doyle’s brilliance--and in this he is quintessentially New School--is manifest in a sort of legerdemain that consists in having his cake and eating it too--in downplaying the import of socioeconomic conflict while introducing quantities of evidence pointing to the unavoidable (if unstated) conclusion that the French Revolution both arose from social conflict and ushered in something like a triumph of the middle class. Doyle need feel no shame here; the spiritual father of all latter-day revisionism--Alexis de Tocqueville--talks with abandon about la bourgeoisie .

Doyle’s preference (and talent) for the neat study of origins leads him, not surprisingly, to give pride of place to the courtly political and ideological set-battles of the 18th Century. (We are a third of the way to the end of his 400 pages of text before 1790 dawns.) The unimplication here is that if an idea, event or institution has an identifiable precursor, then it is “inevitable” or “logical” and, in any case, non-revolutionary. Unfortunately, these very qualities leave Doyle--and his reader--quite unprepared for the headlong pitch into vortex and slaughter that suddenly takes place in 1792. Hereafter, Doyle must cleave for dear life to his great skill as a narrator.

So the new school, it seems, does best with intensive political analysis, not general historical synthesis--at essay, not book, length, focusing on concepts and ideologies, not messy events (such as the march on Versailles). Thus, Francois Furet’s 90-page preface to “Marx and the French Revolution” (University of Chicago Press), his tremendously useful compilation of Marx’s writings on French history, masterfully compares and contrasts Marx’s thinking with Hegel’s and Tocqueville’s, while forgoing the sighs of contempt or impatience with Marx that we have become used to in New School writing. He also shows brilliantly how Marx achieved occasional profundity: He “never stopped reworking his illusions.”

It is a serious lacuna, however, that in the English edition of this essay, Furet chose not to come to grips with the remarkable book of a Canadian historian. Aimed expressly at Furet’s school, George C. Cominel’s “Rethinking the French Revolution” (Verso, 1987, with an introduction by George Rude) demonstrates brilliantly that the supposedly Marxist idea of bourgeois revolution wasn’t mainly Marxist, wasn’t fleshed out systematically by old Karl--who certainly never intended it be taken for gospel--and, in any case, can easily be dumped overboard by Marxists looking for their very own (non-New School) view of the French Revolution.

The New School of historical writing on the French Revolution has taken a very great deal of criticism lately, some of it unfair. Thus, just as you can’t hold Nietzsche responsible for Nazism, you cannot blame Furet for the truly counterrevolutionary uses often made of their work these days by sundry reactionaries and royalists hoping to restore Louis XX to the throne of France.

But what remains troubling is an unstated assumption underlying what the New Schoolers do best: the analysis of political and ideological language. Throughout these works, the reader is constantly given the impression that historical reality is best grasped when reduced to its literary (or verbal) representations. “The ordering power of language,” is surely one way to discuss the importance and function of newspapers in the old regime. One can even say, as another contributor to the Lucas volume does, that “the Old Regime was held together by language as well as force,” though I fail to see how this isn’t a truism.

There is, however, a sense in Furet and especially in Baker that one of these days a general theory of language is going to be proffered that will explain not only the stately political unfolding of the old regime but the cavalcade of regimes that France beheld in 1789-1815 (or 1870, or 1958). History isn’t physics (even physics isn’t physics anymore), and the notion that some unified field theory of French history can emerge from the analysis of “discourse” amounts to, in “new school” language, a “speech-act” that future generations of historians will find rather funny, when they don’t find it pretentious.