List of historians of the French Revolution
Encyclopedia
The historiography of the French Revolution
stretches back over two hundred years, as commentators and historians have sought to answer questions regarding the origins of the Revolution, and its meaning and effects.
politician Edmund Burke
's Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790). In it he established the conservative stream of opinion, wherein even the revolution of July 1789 went "too far". His book is not so much studied today as part of Revolution studies, but rather as a classic of conservative political philosophy
. In France, conspiracy theories were rife in the highly charged political atmosphere, with the Abbé Barruel
, in perhaps the most influential work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
(1797-1798), arguing that Freemasons and other dissidents had been responsible for an attempt to destroy the monarchy and the Catholic Church.
A simplified description of the liberal approach to the Revolution was typically to support the achievements of the constitutional monarchy of the National Assembly
but disown the later actions of radical violence like the invasion of the Tuileries
and the Terror
. French historians of the first half of the nineteenth century like the politician and man of letters François Guizot
(1787–1874), historian François Mignet
(published Histoire de la Révolution française in 1824), and famous philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville
(L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856) established and wrote in this tradition.
Other French historians in the nineteenth-century (listed in rough chronological order):
One of the most famous English works on the Revolution remains Thomas Carlyle
's two-volume The French Revolution, A History (1837) http://www.gutenberg.net/etext98/frrev10.txt. It is a romantic
work, both in style and viewpoint. Passionate in his concern for the poor and in his interest in the fears and hopes of revolution, he (while reasonably historically accurate) is often more concerned with conveying his impression of the hopes and aspirations of people (and his opposition to ossified ideology—"formulas" or "Isms"—as he called them) than with strict adherence to fact. The undoubted passion and intensity of the text may also be due to the famous incident where he sent the completed draft of the first volume to John Stuart Mill
for comment, only for Mill's maid to accidentally burn the volume to ashes, forcing Carlyle to start from scratch. He wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson
that the writing of the book was the "dreadfulest labor [he] ever undertook".
An often overlooked (and arguably minor) work is The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy by British writer Nesta Webster
, published in 1919, which advanced the theory that the progress of the French Revolution was considerably influenced by a conspiracy conducted by "the lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati". This theory was believed by Winston Churchill, who wrote in 1920: "This [Jewish movement] conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt ... as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution."
and historian Albert Mathiez
, historians such as Georges Lefebvre
and Albert Soboul
developed this view.
Lefebvre was inspired by Jaurès and came to the field from a mildly socialist viewpoint. His massive and reputation-making thesis, Les paysans du Nord (1924), was an account of the Revolution among provincial peasants. He continued to research along these lines, publishing The Great Fear of 1789 (1932, first English translation 1973), about the panic and violence which spread throughout rural France in the summer of 1789. His work largely approaches the Revolution "from below", favouring explanations in terms of classes. His most famous work was Quatre-Vingt-Neuf (literally Four-Twenty-Nine, the French way of saying the number 89, published in 1939 and translated into English as The Coming of the French Revolution, 1947). This skilfully and persuasively argued work interprets the Revolution through a Marxist lens: first there is the "aristocratic revolution" of the Assembly of Notables
and the Paris Parlement in 1788; then the "bourgeois revolution" of the Third Estate
; the "popular revolution", symbolised by the fall of the Bastille; and the "peasant revolution", represented by the "Great Fear" in the provinces and the burning of châteaux. (Alternately, one can view 1788 as the aristocratic revolution, 1789 the bourgeois revolution, and 1792/3 the popular revolution). This interpretation sees a rising capitalist middle-class overthrow a dying-out feudal aristocratic ruling caste, and held the field for almost twenty years. His major publication was La Révolution française (1957, translated and published in English in two volumes, 1962–1967). This, and particularly his later work on Napoleon and the Directory, remains highly regarded.
Some other influential French historians of this period:
Some of the significant conservative French historians of this period include:
The following five scholars have served as Chairs in the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne:
Although dismissed and attacked by the mainstream journals at first, Cobban was persistent and determined, and his approach was soon supported and modified by a flood of new research both inside and outside of France. American historian George V. Taylor's research established that the bourgeoisie of the Third Estate were not quite the budding capitalists they were made out to be; John McManners
, Jean Egret, Franklin Ford and others wrote on the divided and complex situation of the nobility in pre-revolutionary France. The most significant opposition to arise in France was that of Annales
historians François Furet
, Denis Richet, and Mona Ozouf. Furet in the 1960s worked in terms of the Annales School
, which locates the 1789 revolution in a "long" history of nineteenth century revolutionary France.
Another seminal figure in the revisionism debate is the Francophile Englishman Richard Cobb
, who has produced a number of immensely detailed studies of both provincial and city life, avoiding the revisionism debate by "keeping his nose very close to the ground". Les armées révolutionnaires (1968, translated as The People's Armies in 1987) is his most famous work.
William Doyle
, professor at Bristol University, has published The Origins of the French Revolution (1988) and a revisionist history, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (2nd edition 2002). Another recent American historian working in this tradition is Keith Michael Baker. A collection of his essays (Inventing the French Revolution, 1990) examines the ideological origins of the Revolution.
Tackett in particular has changed approach, preferring archival research to historiographical dialectics. He challenges the ideas about nobility and bourgeoise in Becoming a Revolutionary (2006), a "collective biography" via letters and diaries of the third estate deputies of 1789. His other major work is When the King Took Flight (2004), a study of the rise of republicanism and radicalism in the Legislative Assembly in 1791/2.
Simon Schama
's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) is a popular, generally moderate/conservative history of the period. It is ostensibly a narrative of "Persons" and "Events", and more in the tradition of Carlyle than Tocqueville and Lefebvre. Its narrative- while massive- focuses on the most visible leaders of the Revolution, even through its more "popular" phases. The book's allegiance is to historical literary styles rather than schools. Thus Schama is simultaneously able to deny the existence of a so-called "bourgeois" revolution, reserve apotheoses for Robespierre, Louis XVI
, and the sans-culottes
alike, and utilize historical nuance to a degree usually associated with more liberal historians. Borrowing from the Romantics for imagery (the introduction closely follows that of Michelet's "History..."), "Citizens" also argues against the Romantics' belief in the necessity of the Revolution. Schama concentrates on the early years of the Revolution, the Republic only taking up about a fifth of the book. He also places increased emphasis on insurrectionary violence in Paris and violence in general, claiming that it was "not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, [but] the source of its energy."
Lynn Hunt, though often characterized as a feminist interpreter of the Revolution, is a historian working in the wake of the revisionists. Her major works include Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), both interpretative works. The former focuses on the creation of a new democratic political culture from scratch, assigning the Revolution's greatest meaning here, in a political culture. In the latter study she works with a somewhat Freudian interpretation, the political Revolution as a whole being seen as an enormous dysfunctional family
haunted by patricide: Louis as father, Marie-Antoinette as mother, and the revolutionaries as an unruly mob of brothers.
Some other modern historians include:
(1927-97) was the leading figure in the rejection of the “classic” or “Marxist” interpretation. Desan (2000) concluded he "seemed to emerge the victor from the bicentennial, both in the media and in historiographic debates."
Furet, a disillusioned ex-Communist, published his classic, La Révolution Française in 1965-66. It marked his transition from revolutionary leftist politics to liberal Left-center position, and reflected his ties to the social-science-oriented Annales School
. He then moved to the right, re-examining the Revolution from the perspective of 20th century totalitarianism (as exemplified by Hitler and Stalin). His Penser la Révolution Française (1978; translated as Interpreting the French Revolution 1981) was a breakthrough book that led many intellectuals to reevaluate Communism and the Revolution as inherently totalitarian and anti-democratic. Looking at modern French Communism he stressed the close resemblance between the 1960s and 1790s, with both favoring the inflexible and rote ideological discourse in party cells where decisions were made unanimously in a manipulated direct democracy. Furet further suggested that popularity of the Far Left to many French intellectuals was itself a result of their commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution.
Working much of the year at the University of Chicago after 1979, Furet also rejected the Annales School
, with its emphasis on very long-term structural factors, and emphasized intellectual history. Influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin, Furet argues that Frenchmen must stop seeing the revolution as the key to all aspects of modern French history. His works include Interpreting the French Revolution (1981), a historiographical overview of what has preceded him and A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989).
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
stretches back over two hundred years, as commentators and historians have sought to answer questions regarding the origins of the Revolution, and its meaning and effects.
Contemporary and 19th century historians
The constant stream of books could be said to begin with Anglo-IrishAnglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until...
politician Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
's Reflections on the Revolution in France
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Reflections on the Revolution in France , by Edmund Burke, is one of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution...
(1790). In it he established the conservative stream of opinion, wherein even the revolution of July 1789 went "too far". His book is not so much studied today as part of Revolution studies, but rather as a classic of conservative political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
. In France, conspiracy theories were rife in the highly charged political atmosphere, with the Abbé Barruel
Augustin Barruel
Abbé Augustin Barruel was a French Jesuit priest. He is now mostly known for setting forth the conspiracy theory involving the Bavarian Illuminati and the Jacobins in his book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism published in 1797...
, in perhaps the most influential work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is a book by the French Jesuit, the Abbé Augustin Barruel....
(1797-1798), arguing that Freemasons and other dissidents had been responsible for an attempt to destroy the monarchy and the Catholic Church.
A simplified description of the liberal approach to the Revolution was typically to support the achievements of the constitutional monarchy of the National Assembly
National Assembly (French Revolution)
During the French Revolution, the National Assembly , which existed from June 17 to July 9, 1789, was a transitional body between the Estates-General and the National Constituent Assembly.-Background:...
but disown the later actions of radical violence like the invasion of the Tuileries
10th of August (French Revolution)
On 10 August 1792, during the French Revolution, revolutionary Fédéré militias — with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the "insurrectionary" Paris Commune and ultimately supported by the National Guard — besieged the Tuileries palace. King Louis XVI and...
and the Terror
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror , also known simply as The Terror , was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of...
. French historians of the first half of the nineteenth century like the politician and man of letters François Guizot
François Guizot
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848, a conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, and worked to sustain a constitutional...
(1787–1874), historian François Mignet
François Mignet
François Auguste Marie Mignet was a French journalist and historian.-Biography:He was born in Aix-en-Provence , France. His father was a locksmith from the Vendée, who enthusiastically accepted the principles of the French Revolution and encouraged liberal ideas in his son...
(published Histoire de la Révolution française in 1824), and famous philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...
(L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856) established and wrote in this tradition.
Other French historians in the nineteenth-century (listed in rough chronological order):
- Jules MicheletJules MicheletJules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...
- his Histoire de la Révolution française, published after the Revolution of 1848, is one of the lesser works of a generally highly esteemed writer. To quote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "in actual picturesqueness as well as in general veracity of picture, the book cannot approach CarlyleThomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
's; while as a mere chronicle of the events it is inferior to half a dozen prosaic histories older and younger than itself." More recently, though viewed still as a flawed work, it has seen renewed influence for its appraisal of the Revolution in its own terms. Michelet has, with Carlyle, disciples in several schools of modern history, whose common aim is to approach the subject matter through involvement rather than objectivity. - Louis BlancLouis BlancLouis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc was a French politician and historian. A socialist who favored reforms, he called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor....
- Blanc's 13-volume Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–1862) displays utopian socialistUtopian socialismUtopian socialism is a term used to define the first currents of modern socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen which inspired Karl Marx and other early socialists and were looked on favorably...
views, and sympathizes with Jacobinism. - Théodore GosselinThéodore GosselinLouis Léon Théodore Gosselin was a French historian and playwright who wrote under the pen name G. Lenotre. He wrote articles in publications such as Le Figaro, Revue des deux mondes, Le Monde illustré and Le Temps...
(1855–1935) - writing under the name "G. Lenotre", - F.A. AulardFrançois Victor Alphonse AulardFrançois Victor Alphonse Aulard was the first professional French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon.He was born at Montbron in Charente...
- founded the Société de l’Histoire de la Révolution and the bimonthly review Révolution française. Numerous works develop his republican, bourgeois, and anticlerical view of the revolution. - Hippolyte TaineHippolyte TaineHippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism, and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate...
- among the more conservative of the originators of social historySocial historySocial history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
, his most famous work is his Origines de la France Contemporaine (1875–1893). - Albert SorelAlbert SorelAlbert Sorel , was a French historian. He was born at Honfleur and remained throughout his life a lover of his native Normandy. His father, a rich manufacturer, wanted him to take over the business but his literary vocation prevailed. He went to live in Paris, where he studied law and, after a...
- diplomatic historian; L'Europe et la Révolution française (8 volumes, 1895–1904); introductory section of this work translated as Europe under the Old Regime (1947). - Edgar QuinetEdgar QuinetEdgar Quinet was a French historian and intellectual.-Early years:Born at Bourg-en-Bresse, in the département of Ain. His father, Jérôme Quinet, had been a commissary in the army, but being a strong republican and disgusted with Napoleon's 18 Brumaire coup, he gave up his post and devoted himself...
- late Romantic anti-Catholic nationalist.
One of the most famous English works on the Revolution remains Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
's two-volume The French Revolution, A History (1837) http://www.gutenberg.net/etext98/frrev10.txt. It is a romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
work, both in style and viewpoint. Passionate in his concern for the poor and in his interest in the fears and hopes of revolution, he (while reasonably historically accurate) is often more concerned with conveying his impression of the hopes and aspirations of people (and his opposition to ossified ideology—"formulas" or "Isms"—as he called them) than with strict adherence to fact. The undoubted passion and intensity of the text may also be due to the famous incident where he sent the completed draft of the first volume to John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
for comment, only for Mill's maid to accidentally burn the volume to ashes, forcing Carlyle to start from scratch. He wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
that the writing of the book was the "dreadfulest labor [he] ever undertook".
An often overlooked (and arguably minor) work is The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy by British writer Nesta Webster
Nesta Webster
Nesta Helen Webster , was a controversial historian, occultist, and author who revived conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. She argued that the secret society's members were occultists, plotting communist world domination, using the idea of a Jewish cabal, the Masons and Jesuits as a...
, published in 1919, which advanced the theory that the progress of the French Revolution was considerably influenced by a conspiracy conducted by "the lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati". This theory was believed by Winston Churchill, who wrote in 1920: "This [Jewish movement] conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt ... as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution."
The Marxist/Classic interpretation
The dominating approach to the French Revolution in historical scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century was the Marxist, or Classic, approach. This view sees the French Revolution as an essentially 'bourgeois' revolution, marked by class struggle and resulting in a victory of the bourgeoisie. Influenced by socialist politician Jean JaurèsJean Jaurès
Jean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. Initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. Both parties merged in 1905 in...
and historian Albert Mathiez
Albert Mathiez
Albert Mathiez was a French historian, known for his work on the French Revolution.He was a student of Alphonse Aulard. His La Révolution française appeared in three volumes . He wrote it as a socialist , pro-Robespierre interpretation, where Aulard had been pro-Danton...
, historians such as Georges Lefebvre
Georges Lefebvre
Georges Lefebvre was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He coined the term "history from below", which was later popularised by the British Marxist Historians...
and Albert Soboul
Albert Soboul
Albert Marius Soboul was a French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was Chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation.-Early life and education:Albert Marius Soboul...
developed this view.
Lefebvre was inspired by Jaurès and came to the field from a mildly socialist viewpoint. His massive and reputation-making thesis, Les paysans du Nord (1924), was an account of the Revolution among provincial peasants. He continued to research along these lines, publishing The Great Fear of 1789 (1932, first English translation 1973), about the panic and violence which spread throughout rural France in the summer of 1789. His work largely approaches the Revolution "from below", favouring explanations in terms of classes. His most famous work was Quatre-Vingt-Neuf (literally Four-Twenty-Nine, the French way of saying the number 89, published in 1939 and translated into English as The Coming of the French Revolution, 1947). This skilfully and persuasively argued work interprets the Revolution through a Marxist lens: first there is the "aristocratic revolution" of the Assembly of Notables
Assembly of Notables
The Assembly of Notables was a group of notables invited by the King of France to consult on matters of state.-History:Assemblies of Notables had met in 1583, 1596–97, 1617, 1626, 1787, and 1788. Like the Estates General, they served a consultative purpose only...
and the Paris Parlement in 1788; then the "bourgeois revolution" of the Third Estate
National Constituent Assembly
The National Constituent Assembly was formed from the National Assembly on 9 July 1789, during the first stages of the French Revolution. It dissolved on 30 September 1791 and was succeeded by the Legislative Assembly.-Background:...
; the "popular revolution", symbolised by the fall of the Bastille; and the "peasant revolution", represented by the "Great Fear" in the provinces and the burning of châteaux. (Alternately, one can view 1788 as the aristocratic revolution, 1789 the bourgeois revolution, and 1792/3 the popular revolution). This interpretation sees a rising capitalist middle-class overthrow a dying-out feudal aristocratic ruling caste, and held the field for almost twenty years. His major publication was La Révolution française (1957, translated and published in English in two volumes, 1962–1967). This, and particularly his later work on Napoleon and the Directory, remains highly regarded.
Some other influential French historians of this period:
- Ernest LabrousseErnest LabrousseCamille-Ernest Labrousse was a French historian specializing in social and economic history.Labrousse established a historical model centered on three nodes—economic, social and cultural—inventing the quantitative history sometimes now called "cliometrics"...
, who performed extensive economic research on eighteenth-century France. - Albert SoboulAlbert SoboulAlbert Marius Soboul was a French historian of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was Chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation.-Early life and education:Albert Marius Soboul...
. Although his reputation has fallen in recent years under the weight of the revisionist school, Soboul performed exhaustive research on the lower classes of the Revolution. His most famous work is The Sans-Culottes (1968). - George RudéGeorge RudéGeorge Rudé was a British Marxist historian, specializing in the French Revolution and "history from below," especially the importance of crowds in history.-Summary:...
- another of Lefebvre's protégés, did further work on the popular side of the Revolution: The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959) is one of his most famous works. - Daniel GuérinDaniel GuérinDaniel Guérin was a French libertarian and author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the...
- an anarchist, he is highly critical of the Jacobins.
Some of the significant conservative French historians of this period include:
- Pierre GaxottePierre Gaxotte-Biography:Gaxotte was born in Revigny-sur-Ornain, Meuse. He began his career as a history teacher at the Lycée Charlemagne and later worked as a columnist for Le Figaro...
- royalist: The French Revolution (1928) - Augustin CochinAugustin Cochin (historian)Augustin Cochin was a French historian of the French Revolution. Much of his work was posthumously published in an incomplete state after he was killed in action in World War I....
- a conservative historian working at the beginning of the twentieth century, he found the origins of the Revolution in the activities of the intelligentsiaIntelligentsiaThe intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them... - Albert SorelAlbert SorelAlbert Sorel , was a French historian. He was born at Honfleur and remained throughout his life a lover of his native Normandy. His father, a rich manufacturer, wanted him to take over the business but his literary vocation prevailed. He went to live in Paris, where he studied law and, after a...
- diplomatic historian: Europe et la Révolution française (8 volumes, 1895–1904); introductory section of this work translated as Europe under the Old Regime (1947).
The following five scholars have served as Chairs in the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne:
- Hippolyte Taine
- Alphonse Aulard - 1891 (for more than thirty years)
- Georges Lefebvre - 1937-1959
- Albert Soboul - 1967-1982
- Michel Vovelle - 1982
Revisionism and modern work
In 1954, Alfred Cobban used his inaugural lecture as Professor of French History at the University of London to attack what he called the "social interpretation" of the French Revolution. The lecture was later published as "The Myth of the French Revolution", but his seminal work arguing this point was The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1963). The main point he made was that feudalism had long since disappeared in France; that the Revolution did not transform French society, and that it was principally a political revolution, not a social one as Lefebvre and others insisted.Although dismissed and attacked by the mainstream journals at first, Cobban was persistent and determined, and his approach was soon supported and modified by a flood of new research both inside and outside of France. American historian George V. Taylor's research established that the bourgeoisie of the Third Estate were not quite the budding capitalists they were made out to be; John McManners
John McManners
John "Jack" McManners CBE FBA was a British clergyman and historian of religion who specialized in the history of the Church and other aspects of religious life in 18th century France...
, Jean Egret, Franklin Ford and others wrote on the divided and complex situation of the nobility in pre-revolutionary France. The most significant opposition to arise in France was that of Annales
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
historians François Furet
François Furet
-Biography:Born in Paris on 27 March 1927, into a wealthy family, François Furet was a brilliant student who graduated from the Sorbonne with the highest honors and soon decided on a life of research, teaching and writing. He received his education at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and at the faculty...
, Denis Richet, and Mona Ozouf. Furet in the 1960s worked in terms of the Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
, which locates the 1789 revolution in a "long" history of nineteenth century revolutionary France.
Another seminal figure in the revisionism debate is the Francophile Englishman Richard Cobb
Richard Cobb
Richard Charles Cobb was a British historian. He became Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, after an initially unconventional academic career in which he spent a dozen years working as an independent scholar in French archives. His work was recognised in France by the award of...
, who has produced a number of immensely detailed studies of both provincial and city life, avoiding the revisionism debate by "keeping his nose very close to the ground". Les armées révolutionnaires (1968, translated as The People's Armies in 1987) is his most famous work.
William Doyle
William Doyle (historian)
William Doyle is an English historian, specialising in 18th-century France, who is most notable for his one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution .He is one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution....
, professor at Bristol University, has published The Origins of the French Revolution (1988) and a revisionist history, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (2nd edition 2002). Another recent American historian working in this tradition is Keith Michael Baker. A collection of his essays (Inventing the French Revolution, 1990) examines the ideological origins of the Revolution.
Tackett in particular has changed approach, preferring archival research to historiographical dialectics. He challenges the ideas about nobility and bourgeoise in Becoming a Revolutionary (2006), a "collective biography" via letters and diaries of the third estate deputies of 1789. His other major work is When the King Took Flight (2004), a study of the rise of republicanism and radicalism in the Legislative Assembly in 1791/2.
Simon Schama
Simon Schama
Simon Michael Schama, CBE is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain...
's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) is a popular, generally moderate/conservative history of the period. It is ostensibly a narrative of "Persons" and "Events", and more in the tradition of Carlyle than Tocqueville and Lefebvre. Its narrative- while massive- focuses on the most visible leaders of the Revolution, even through its more "popular" phases. The book's allegiance is to historical literary styles rather than schools. Thus Schama is simultaneously able to deny the existence of a so-called "bourgeois" revolution, reserve apotheoses for Robespierre, Louis XVI
Louis XVI of France
Louis XVI was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792, before being executed in 1793....
, and the sans-culottes
Sans-culottes
In the French Revolution, the sans-culottes were the radical militants of the lower classes, typically urban laborers. Though ill-clad and ill-equipped, they made up the bulk of the Revolutionary army during the early years of the French Revolutionary Wars...
alike, and utilize historical nuance to a degree usually associated with more liberal historians. Borrowing from the Romantics for imagery (the introduction closely follows that of Michelet's "History..."), "Citizens" also argues against the Romantics' belief in the necessity of the Revolution. Schama concentrates on the early years of the Revolution, the Republic only taking up about a fifth of the book. He also places increased emphasis on insurrectionary violence in Paris and violence in general, claiming that it was "not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, [but] the source of its energy."
Lynn Hunt, though often characterized as a feminist interpreter of the Revolution, is a historian working in the wake of the revisionists. Her major works include Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), both interpretative works. The former focuses on the creation of a new democratic political culture from scratch, assigning the Revolution's greatest meaning here, in a political culture. In the latter study she works with a somewhat Freudian interpretation, the political Revolution as a whole being seen as an enormous dysfunctional family
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
haunted by patricide: Louis as father, Marie-Antoinette as mother, and the revolutionaries as an unruly mob of brothers.
Some other modern historians include:
- Marcel GauchetMarcel GauchetMarcel Gauchet is a French historian, philosopher and sociologist.Gauchet is professor at the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and head of the periodical Le Débat .Gauchet is one of France's most prominent contemporary...
, author of La Révolution des droits de l'homme (1989) and La Révolution des pouvoirs (1995). - Patrice Higonnet, author of Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins in the French Revolution (1998).
- Owen Connelly - The French Revolution and Napoleonic Era (1993).
- Henry Heller - Marxist historian of the Revolution. Author of the "The Bourgeois Revolution in France: 1789-1815". His work maintains a defence of the Classic (Marxist) Interpretation of the Revolution.
- Olwen HuftonOlwen HuftonDame Olwen H. Hufton, DBE, FBA, FRHistS is a historian of early modern Europe and a pioneer of social history and of women's history. Hufton is an expert on Early Modern, western European comparative socio-cultural history with special emphasis on gender, poverty, social relations, religion and work...
- writes on women in history. Her work with regard to the Revolution is Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (1999) - Dale K. Van KleyDale K. Van KleyDale K. Van Kley is an American historian and professor of History at The Ohio State University.Van Kley is the author of numerous books and articles and has taught and conducted research throughout North America and Europe...
- a historian of religion, particularly with regard to eighteenth century France. - Mark SteelMark SteelMark Steel is a British socialist columnist, author and comedian. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party from his late teens until 2007.-Early life:...
- a Marxist stand up comedian authored the humorous and accessible Vive La Revolution (2003)
Furet
François FuretFrançois Furet
-Biography:Born in Paris on 27 March 1927, into a wealthy family, François Furet was a brilliant student who graduated from the Sorbonne with the highest honors and soon decided on a life of research, teaching and writing. He received his education at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and at the faculty...
(1927-97) was the leading figure in the rejection of the “classic” or “Marxist” interpretation. Desan (2000) concluded he "seemed to emerge the victor from the bicentennial, both in the media and in historiographic debates."
Furet, a disillusioned ex-Communist, published his classic, La Révolution Française in 1965-66. It marked his transition from revolutionary leftist politics to liberal Left-center position, and reflected his ties to the social-science-oriented Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
. He then moved to the right, re-examining the Revolution from the perspective of 20th century totalitarianism (as exemplified by Hitler and Stalin). His Penser la Révolution Française (1978; translated as Interpreting the French Revolution 1981) was a breakthrough book that led many intellectuals to reevaluate Communism and the Revolution as inherently totalitarian and anti-democratic. Looking at modern French Communism he stressed the close resemblance between the 1960s and 1790s, with both favoring the inflexible and rote ideological discourse in party cells where decisions were made unanimously in a manipulated direct democracy. Furet further suggested that popularity of the Far Left to many French intellectuals was itself a result of their commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution.
Working much of the year at the University of Chicago after 1979, Furet also rejected the Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
, with its emphasis on very long-term structural factors, and emphasized intellectual history. Influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin, Furet argues that Frenchmen must stop seeing the revolution as the key to all aspects of modern French history. His works include Interpreting the French Revolution (1981), a historiographical overview of what has preceded him and A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989).
Works mentioned
Works mentioned, by date of first publication: Usually translated as The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Introductory part translated as Europe under the Old Regime (1947). Translated as The Great Fear of 1789 (1973). Translated as The Coming of the French Revolution (1947). Translated in two volumes: The French Revolution from its origins to 1793 (1962), and The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (1967). Translated as The People's Armies (1987). Translated as The Sans-Culottes (1972). Translated as Interpreting the French Revolution (1981). Translated as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989).Further reading
- Baker, Keith Michael, and Joseph Zizek, "The American Historiography of the French Revolution," in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton U.P., 1998), pp 349–92;
- Cavanaugh, Gerald J. "The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond," French Historical Studies, Fall 1972, Vol. 7 Issue 4, pp 587-606
- Censer, Jack. "Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after the Bicentennial," French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 139–67.
- Censer, Jack. "The Coming of a New Interpretation of the French Revolution," Journal of Social History 21 (1987): 295–309. in JSTOR
- Conner, Susan P. "In the Shadow of the Guillotine and in the Margins of History: English-Speaking Authors View Women in the French Revolution," Journal of Women's History Volume 1, Number 3, 1990, pp. 244-260 in Project MUSE
- Davies, Peter. The Debate on the French Revolution (Manchester U.P. 2006) 210 pp. Basic survey of the historiography
- Desan, Suzanne. "What's after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography," French Historical Studies, Volume 23, Number 1, Winter 2000, pp. 163-196 in Project MUSE
- Kaplan, Steven Laurence. Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies: France, 1789/1989 (1995)
- Kaplan, Steven Laurence. Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud: France, 1789/1989 (1995)
- Kates, Gary. The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (2005) excerpt and text search
- Lewis, Gwynne. The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (1993)
- Maza, Sarah. "Politics, Culture, and the Origins of the French Revolution," Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 703–23, in JSTOR
- Parker, Noel. Portrayals of Revolution: Images, Debates and Patterns of thought on the French Revolution (1990)