by Annette Chapman-Adisho
History Department

Annette Chapman-Adisho

In a graduate seminar on the French Revolution, the conversation turned to the ‘chaotic’ nature of this revolution of revolutions. I’ll admit, the observation took me aback a bit. A student of the revolution for a decade now, I had not been struck by its chaotic nature. It was chaotic, that was a given, weren’t all revolutions? The seminar participants begged to differ. The American Revolution, with which they were more familiar, was clearer in its aims and more confident in its movement towards them. I’ll leave to my colleagues in American history the task of defending or disputing this interpretation. The conversation, however, reminded me of the blinders we all wear. Of how our ‘historical knowledge’ serves to reinforce our perceptions of the norm, and in doing so creates a constant foil against which we judge experiences or histories that are different from our own. In this essay, I want to invite you into my world, the history that I’ve adopted, and to discuss the flurry and frenzy of the historical conversation about it. In drier terms, into the revolutions’ historiography.

Now, before you skip on to the next essay, let me provide you with a rationale for reading further. My contention is that the never-ending, ever-evolving conversation about the French Revolution points us toward a great truth of history: the past is never static. Its lessons are formed in the present as we struggle to make sense of it. Why engage in this struggle? Because whether the object of our study is the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Robespierre’s role in the reign of terror, the Qing conquest of Ming China, or any other topic, we will come to understand it as we begin to ask our questions about it. This is not history as encyclopedia entry, but history as a tool, for intellectual and, dare I suggest, personal growth.¹

Contemporary historians of the French Revolution are in the possession of an exciting development, a paradigm shift. Because it is the work of historians, this shift is a bit drawn out but it continues to fuel the thinking and rethinking of French revolutionary history. Let me be brief. Through most of the twentieth century, study of the French Revolution was dominated by a social and economic interpretation that owed quite a bit to Karl Marx. What this meant in terms of understanding the revolution was that a miller was not free to be merely a miller, but was a member of a social class, and it was through analysis of class and economic dynamics that one came to the truth of the revolution. Much stellar historical research and writing was done as historians engaged with the problems posed by the Marxist framework. A few examples will demonstrate these achievements. Georges Lefebvre drew attention to peasant dynamics and communities in the revolution; Albert Soboul brought the sans-culottes of Paris to life; and Georges Rudé put faces on the crowds active in the Revolution’s riots.² At the end of the 1970s, however, François Furet blew the roof off of this productive and dominating edifice, challenging historians who had constructed a social interpretation of the Revolution to take it seriously as a political event.³

Furet was uniquely positioned to pose this challenge. A member of the French Communist Party early in his life, he left the party in protest after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Furet spent most of his career at the School of Higher Studies of Social Sciences (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. His challenge rippled across the 1980s, finding adherents among a group of scholars who began to ask questions not about the social origins of the revolution or its actors, but about the political and philosophical convictions that lay beneath and connected the revolution’s riotous days and chaotic power shifts. I’ll spare you a second list of historians and their works to move my story along. By the 1990s, the terrain of the revolution had evolved remarkably. Our miller appeared now as an actor connected to others through a web of social, personal, and political relationships all of which potentially influenced his decisions at different points in the revolution. Our appreciation of the ideological content of this revolution and its manifold expressions also expanded as historians turned their attention to its image making whether through pamphlet and broadside, festival, or song. These cultural historical approaches have mined new forms of evidence.⁴ Among the exciting developments for teaching the revolution that have come out of these studies are two websites developed by Lynn Hunt and Jack Censor: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and Imaging the French Revolution. These sites bring the revolution’s pamphlets, songs, and images to a wider audience, in English translations, and also provide introductory essays on major topics in the revolution’s history. The frenzy of the Furet inspired revision, however, has not produced a new dominant paradigm. Even Furet’s focus on the ideological and the political has been challenged as scholars have delved deeply into the experiences of women, Caribbean slaves, and various sectors of French society and political office holders during the Revolution.⁵

So, the French Revolution was chaotic, and the work of its present historians reflects this chaotic, or one might say multi-vocal reality.  A new Revolution has not been unearthed, but by posing new questions and using unconventional analysis historians of the French Revolution have produced a number of rich, new historical studies.  In their preoccupations and questions, these studies reflect our times as they probe those of Robespierre, Mirabeau and Lafayette.

The times we live in today seem almost as changing and chaotic as those faced by the French citizens of 1789. Students of history are fascinated by this interaction between the present and the past. Historical study is engagement with the past. This is not to say that the past must ‘serve’ the present. It is rather to say that when we turn to the past we can never leave the present behind us. Why bother to engage the past? There are many answers to this question. The one I prefer is the power of history to expand our humanity, to confront us with the human experience, whether familiar or foreign, and force us back on our heels as we consider it in all its complexity.

1There are of course, many ideas about the value of history. In proposing this particular framework, I am building on Sam Wineburg’s impassioned plea for history as a humanizing force in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 5-6, 23-24.

2Lefebvre wrote two important books on France’s peasantry during the Revolution. Unfortunately, Les Paysans du Nord Pendant la Révolution (Bari: Laterza, 1959) has yet to find a translator. More accessible is The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, intro. George Rudé, trans. Joan White (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). Lefebvre is also the author of the classic, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Soboul’s signature work, The Sans-Culottes, trans. Remy Inglis Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), is still in print, as is his A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799, trans. Geoffrey Symcox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). George Rudé’s long career began brilliantly with The Crowd in the French Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press reprint; New Ed. ed., 1986). Rudé’s long career has taken him in and out of French history. In a more recent work, however, The French Revolution: Its Causes, Its History and Its Legacy after 200 Years (New York: Grove Press, 1994), he returns to the revolution and considers the present revisionist tumult.

3 Furet was not the first to critique the Marxist framework. Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), called into question the conclusions that were being arrived at based upon the social historical research being conducted. Furet’s challenge was different, however, in that he called into question the focus on social history and challenged his colleagues in France to free the revolution and its history from partisan politics. A favorite phrase of Furet’s was “The revolution is over.” Furet’s critique came into its most prominent articulation in his work Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

4Lynn Hunt’s work with the revolution’s images and metaphors has been particularly influential in inspiring new types of studies of the revolution. Among her works are Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

5few fairly recent studies that touch upon these concerns are: Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and the French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA by the University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

This article is part of ASpect’s November 2008 issue, Teaching the Big Issues.