Anushka Pareek

Roll No.- 2020/48

Q. Analyse the causes for the outbreak of the French Revolution keeping in view the
historiography of the Revolution.
A. French revolution, which began in 1789 in Paris, has been seen as a watershed event in
the history of the modern world. Although there were a few continuities from the Old
regime, the revolution effected major changes, like transition from feudalism, curtailment of
clerical privileges, establishment of a centralized government structure etc. Within a span of a
decade, the French scene had radically transformed itself owing to the happenings and
aftermath of the French revolution. The legacy of the achievements and failures of that period
are still with us and therefore the study of the revolution becomes significant to understand
the course of history after 1789.
Gary Kates, in her book “The French Revolution: Debates and Controversy”, infers that
much of the problem with studying the French revolution has to do with sorting through what
others have said about it, i.e., the historiography of this event. Various schools of historians
have grappled with different aspects of the revolution, like economic, social, intellectual,
cultural and gender. While they attribute different causes to it, most of the historians agree on
the significance of this event. Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine were the first to argue
about the Revolution’s meaning and since then, the debate on its nature has spilled over into
neighbouring disciplines of political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, literary critics, and
art historians.
One well known interpretation of the revolution is the Marxist interpretation. This classic
view holds that the French revolution was actually a “bourgeoise revolution”, representing a
deeper shift from feudalism to capitalism. It was led by an alliance between the bourgeoise
elite and popular classes against the landowning nobility. This alliance succeeded in 1789 but
by 1791, there emerged a class conflict within the alliance, between the capitalist bourgeoise
and popular classes, which in turn produced an urban political movement by the sans-
cullotes. The Terror represented the pinnacle of the sans-cullotes movement. Thus, the
French Revolution was essentially a class struggle in which the nobility was destroyed, the
class of the sans-cullotes was awakened and the bourgeoisie won control of the state.
The Marxist interpretation was led by Alphonse Aulard who was awarded the first chair of
the History of the French revolution at the Sorbonne by the Paris City Council. His writings
promoted democratic republicanism and had no sympathy for the monarchy. According
to him, the violent uprisings of 1789 were a result of despotic abuses of the Ancien Regime.
He admired the courage of the Constituent Assembly deputies but felt that the Constitution of
1791 was a flawed document that allowed the monarchy too much power. He praised the
efforts of Paris militant activists like George Danton in the declaration of France’s first
democratic republic based upon universal male suffrage. the establishment of a republic
under the National Convention marked the “zenith of the Revolution”.
Albert Mathiez, on the other hand, challenged Aulard’s views by rejecting Danton as a
corrupt bourgeoise politician and by saying that The French revolution was a result of a class
conflict in which prospering bourgeoisie triumphed over both the established nobility
and the emerging proletariat. His Marxism was pragmatic, but he passionately defended
the Terror as Robespierre’s efforts to save France. In Mathiez’s view, Robespierre was not a
dictator but a democratic politician responding to popular pressure from Parisian workers.
Mathiez also founded Société des Etudes Robespierristes (Society of Robespierrist Studies),
which published, among other things, the scholarly journal Annales historiques de la
révolution française.
Mathiez’s successors include Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and Michel Vovelle, all of
whom combined the Sorbonne’s Chair of the History of the Revolution, and the editorship of
the Annales historiques, with a commitment to Marxism. Georges Lefebvre, in his book
‘The Coming of the French Revolution’, puts forward the view that French Revolution
originated with the rise of the bourgeoise which eventually toppled the aristocratic ruling
class in France. He divided the revolution into 4 stages- the Revolt of the Nobles or the
Aristocratic Revolution, the Bourgeois Revolution, the Popular Revolution and the
Peasant Revolution. He paid special emphasis on ordinary people and their responses to
revolutionary ideas, and said that all the classes united to get rid of absolutism. Following
WWII, Lefebvre’s work became the leading work of the Marxist school of thought on the
French Revolution.
According to Albert Soboul, a conflict emerged between the nobility and the bourgeoise
mainly because of two causes- political and economic. On the political front, the legal and
social inequality faced by the rising bourgeoise spurned the masses to revolt, while on the
economic front, the bourgeoise class found the old feudal system of production and
exchange to be incompatible with the expansion of its capitalist businesses. According to
Soboul, the masses involved themselves in the revolution and their actions proved to be
decisive in taking down the Old Regime and assuring the victory of the bourgeoisie. Michelle
Vovelle, on the other hand, emphasized on the inevitability of French Revolution. He
believed that the revolution began in the provinces and defined itself as it went along and
spread all over France.
There has been a total collapse of orthodox Marxist interpretation during the past twenty-five
years. An alternative school of scholars who argued that class struggle played little role in the
revolution were the Revisionist historians. Kates identifies two major trends within the
revisionist school which include- 1) Liberals and 2) Neo-conservatives. Liberals, or Whigs,
held the internal contradictions, which had ossified and paralyzed the Old regime, as the
primary cause for French Revolution. According to them, this revolution was necessary to
move France and Europe from a pre-modern to a modern society. The liberal approach
divides the revolution into two periods- a moderate and constructive early phase (1789-92)
and a more radical and violent period (1792-94). They explain away the excessive violence of
the Terror by noting the grave circumstances that led to its establishment: war, economic
dislocation, and counter revolution.
One of the forerunners of this movement was Alfred Cobban whose approach to interpret
French revolution was a direct reaction against Marxist historians. Cobban casted his doubts
on the leading role assigned to the bourgeoise class and noted that only 13% of the leaders
were merchants, manufacturers or financiers. He instead argued that it was a “social
revolution” led by “notables”, which included administrators, prosecutors, judges etc.
Cobban also felt that the Ancien Regime was so plagued with structural problems and
contradictions that nothing short of revolution would reform the country. However, the
revolution was not all about senseless violence as the construction of a liberal political order
would have been impossible without the clashes of 1789 and the achievements of the
Constituent Assembly. Apart from Cobban, George Taylor made a significant contribution
to the revisionist stockpile. Taylor held that French revolution was a political contest for
power. However, most historians didn’t agree with Taylor and the view that the revolution
began purely for political purposes. The works of Cobban and Taylor brought the nobles and
the bourgeoisie closer together, both socially and economically.
The recent revisionism, however, has turned against its liberal foundations. Marked by the
ascendancy of Neo-conservationist ideas, this new school turned against the whole idea of
revolutionary change as itself. Since the early 1950s, Neo-conservative thinkers have had
their own pet history of French revolution. In his 1952 classic, The Origins of Totalitarian
Democracy, Jacob Talmon argued that the French state became a “totalitarian democracy”
during the Terror in the sense that its social programs were designed to alter the course of
every citizen’s life, producing a secular version of a messianic age. Talmon traced the idea of
totalitarian democracy back through Sieyes to certain key Enlightenment figures, Rousseau
most prominent among them. He saw the Terror as the essence of French revolution.
Francois Furet, another proponent of the neo-conservative school, restored the French
revolution to its political dimension. He ignited a new interest in the cultural history of the
revolution by studying the ideological change that occurred in the way Frenchmen thought
about politics. The relationship of the Enlightenment to the French Revolution was
resurrected into a burning issue for debate and controversy. According to Furet, the advanced
democratic ideas of enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau became the
‘heart and soul’ of the French Revolution. The revolution was based on a radical ideology
of popular sovereignty which justified any abuse of power as long as it was done in the name
of the people. He argued that from the very beginning, the state didn’t have any regard for the
human rights and this tendency culminated in the Terror, the pinnacle of dictatorship as well
as democracy. Furet also considered the early years of the revolution as a prologue and the
Napoleonic wars as an epilogue of the Terror. For Furet, the Terror was not an accidental
phase of the revolution but rather “characteristic of the entire revolution”. His attitude
towards the revolutionary era is profoundly conservative, but his scholarship provided a
greater visibility to Anglo-American school in France and furthered the collapse of Marxist
historiography.
Furet’s views were strongly supported by Keith Baker who highlighted the intellectual
causes of the revolution by tracing Rousseauian strands of Enlightenment political ideology
to revolutionary Jacobinism. He held Sieyes as responsible for interjecting Rousseauian
notions of national sovereignty into assembly’s debates. According to him, the Terror was an
outcome of Constituent Assembly’s repeated adoption of Rousseauian political principles. By
the 1989 bicentennial celebrations of the revolution, Neo-Conservative Revisionism had
clearly become the dominant interpretation of the historical establishment in England, France
and the United States.
The Neo-conservative position laid out by Furet and his colleagues was challenged by a
group of scholars whose shared set of attitudes may be together classified as Neo-Liberal.
These scholars take three broad positions- a) aristocracy should be seen as a distinct
political group with interests separate and opposing to those of commoners; b) the period of
Constituent Assembly must be seen as substantively different than the Jacobinism of Terror;
and c) the collective violence of Revolution’s early years was purposeful and necessary to the
establishment of a liberal and free state. The neo-liberals believe that the revolutionaries
successfully destroyed the Ancien Regime and therefore the revolution was not a failure. The
Neo-Liberals define class more in terms of specific professions and occupations with varied
social interests than in terms of a solid group with political interests. These writers stress on
culture as opposed to the Marxists social or the Revisionists political reasons for the start of
the French Revolution.
Apart from the above-mentioned strands of scholarship, a recent trend in historiography of
French revolution has been a maturation of women’s and gender history. In the 1970s, the
pace was set towards a new history that used gender as a tool of analysis in the general
histories or document collections on the revolution. By 1979, a new research agenda was
established which pointed out that women participated in every major event in the revolution.
However, this new research was classified under ‘women’s history’ and was easily ignored.
In the recent times, there has been a shift in the research from identifying women as primary
subjects to exploring how gender might be used fruitfully as a tool of analysis. The major
focus of this research has been to understand the ways in which the revolution refashioned
the gender roles and vice versa.
Lynn Hunt discussed the hostility directed toward aristocratic and revolutionary women who
entered the political sphere. In a study from the 1980s, Hunt explored why the Jacobins
replaced Marianne with Hercules as the anthropomorphic symbol of the French nation. Hunt
also demonstrates how attitudes towards the French queen reveal much about the ways in
which French revolutionary leaders hoped to shape sexual roles in the new republic. Joan
Landes, on the other hand, argued that the formal exclusion of women from political life of
the French revolution is a crucial aspect of scrutiny. There was a more pervasive gendering of
the public sphere during the revolution and the Old Regime was far more tolerant for public
women. Therefore, her research pointed out that the omission of women from Declaration of
rights of man and citizens was a reflection of an exclusively masculine public sphere rather
than merely a prejudicial oversight. Landes blamed this development on Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
The feminist histories of French revolution were appropriated for Neo-conservative purposes
as the two schools shared two essential attitudes about French revolution-firstly, both groups
believed that the French revolution marked a step backwards for women’s rights.
Secondly, both gave credence to the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and it was his highly
contentious ideas that gave rise to new notions of “female domesticity”. While the post-
revisionists did analyse the discourse on gender equality and shared participation, they did
not come up with an ultimate theory of origins of French revolution.
Thus, as we have seen from the above-mentioned discussion, there have been diverse theories
about the causes of the French revolution by different schools of historians. While the
Marxist historians held class conflict to be the primary reason, the liberals believed that the
revolutionary spirit stemmed from the internal contradictions of the Old Regime. Neo-
conservatives like Furet explored the political and intellectual causes while on the other hand,
the neo-liberals sought an explanation in the cultural reasons. Gary Kates points out that the
first problem confronting any historian is deciding which document to investigate and what
questions to ask about it. Thus, an understanding of the historiography becomes important to
adopt a critical approach towards the existing sources. While much has been already written
about the French revolution, the debate about this monumental period still goes on in the
present times and the historiography keeps changing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY-

● Kates Gary,1998, The French revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies,
Taylor and Francis group, London and New York Press
● McPhee Peter, 2004, The Social History of France 1789-1914, Palgrave Macmillan
Press.