Amalgamating the social in the French Revolution.

Despite its status as a political event, the French Revolution has been very heavily associated with social explanations. From the revolution of the "people" of Jules Michelet through the Marxist interpretation of Georges Lefebvre, (1) probably the greatest academic historian of the subject, and up to the present, explanations of the revolution have hinged on understanding one or another social group. Such interpretations, including Lefebvre's, have been intensely "social" in that the makers of the revolution acted in large part because of felt or lived experience. Thus, scholars have understood the revolution as issuing from social strains, economic deprivations, and the like.

Although this historiographic ground has been trodden many times before, it is worth reviewing quickly that not only a social--but a Marxist--interpretation dominated the study of the French Revolution for most of the first three quarters of the twentieth century. (2) In this version, the bourgeoisie, thwarted by the nobility, realized its identity as a class and first sought power against their social betters and then against those from below who wished to empower themselves. To explain the fact that the nobility fired the first shot required a revision of Marx who, as these practitioners understood him, had made this landed elite solely a target. Accordingly his successors envisioned divisions among the aristocrats as a necessary crack in Old Regime solidarity, but not the core of the revolution. For that they agreed with Marx that it must be the bourgeoisie. By the 1950s, across the Channel and the Atlantic, numerous scholars attacked the Marxist perspective, but most then sought to replace it with other social explanations. (3) A few hardy souls wanted to make the Revolution a political one with an unexpected social result, but these were isolated voices, especially as they were completely ignored in France where the debate was centered. (4)

Few might have predicted the eclipse of this model, but it nevertheless occurred. Its most successful opponent was the late Francois Furet who proclaimed the Marxist interpretation mere propaganda. (5) According to Furet, Marxists--who were Communists at the ballot box--controlled the teaching of the Revolution. Furet argued instead that the Revolution might best be understood as the victory of the Enlightenment--particularly the Rousseauian version--over social interests. He envisioned a dominant and irresistible logic of popular sovereignty in which leaders competed against one another to see who could best claim to embody most completely the desired goal. In this version, France slid toward a radical equality in which any difference became suspect. The Terror was the obvious conclusion. Only after the fall of Robespierre was the inexorable mystique of ideas broken, and social factors might reassert themselves.

This linguistic interpretation, in which language set the tone, spread rapidly. Furet's ability, his charisma, his authority in France as head of the history section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, his Anglophone connections--all pushed his theory to the forefront. The simultaneous decline of the traditional university in France, which housed most of the Marxist school historians, helped clear the field for him. Keith Baker, Furet's most eminent ally in the United States, developed a theory, evidently modeled after J. G. A. Pocock's conception of the working of political theory, (6) which also embraced the world of language. For Baker, three competing discourses circulated in the second half of the eighteenth century. (7) The language of will promised rights to the majority while other loci on justice and equality also played important roles before 1789. Justice emphasized history and the desire to maintain contracts; proponents of equality wanted reason to prevail in governmental decision making. According to Baker, only rather suddenly, during the summer of 1789 as the revolutionaries were struggling with the basic founding documents, did they end up embracing the language of will. Once embarked on this course, the Terror followed from their insistence that the majority should realize its ambitions. Political and social circumstance would be unnecessary to arrive at this unfortunate result; instead it was the embrace of certain linguistic features that drove the revolution.

While Furet and Baker primarily sought explanations in ideas and discourses, they themselves did not accept all the implications of the "linguistic turn" associated with postmodernism. Such latter theorists might argue that though social "facts" exist, humans could not grasp them beyond their own perceptions. Baker asserts, it seems to me, that languages have a somewhat looser grip on the imagination than some postmodernists believe. For example, he posits that in truth social facts were evident, but people must resort to shared languages. But more significantly, he associates two of his three eighteenth-century discourses with a particular group--justice with the parlements and equality with the bureaucracy. Will, which turned out to be the dominant discourse, emerged from the pen of Guillaume-Joseph Saige, a radical parlementarian and Jansenist. That Baker can see that a link between language and source implies a social basis for various viewpoints. And, of course, Furet himself saw the domination of Rousseauianism as aberrational, finally and happily broken by the fall of Robespierre and the reassertion of social interests.

Nonetheless, the overall impact of the Furetian school of interpretation has been to elevate a focus on ideas, discourses, and languages. Some of Baker's own recent work highlights the autonomy of ideas and leaves out social matters. (8) Likewise, some of Furet's acolytes have also traveled this route. (9) One must insist, moreover, that this approach is the most recognizable, coherent method available at this writing. Important studies of this genre continue to emerge such as Ran Halevi's investigation of the political education of Louis XVI. (10)

Nonetheless, in a less systematic way, social histories of the revolution have recently rebounded in a number of books and articles. What is less in evidence are the local, more quantitative studies that abounded and even dominated until the arrival of Furet. In such works, scholars plied their trade analyzing income, assessing wealth and its transmission as well as strategies for and even rates of upward mobility. A major purpose of such inquiries was to describe the social structure and its changes as a way of understanding the social conflict that led to and occurred during the revolution. As interest in the social explanation of the revolution faltered, fewer scholars launched these kinds of inquiries. Although valuable case studies continued to be produced and to enrich the picture of France, there is no doubt that this once mighty genre of studies has slipped in popularity.

New approaches that again emphasize the social are apparent in recent bibliographies. One indicator of the significance of social factors may be observed in James Livesay's much discussed Making Democracy in the French Revolution. (11) This book seeks to chronicle the rise of a democratic ideology during the French Revolution. Readers of this work might reasonably expect an ideational analysis, but Livesay specifically claims to focus on the social base and cites approvingly the approach of sociologist Barrington Moore. (12) Livesay in fact finds the arrival of democracy largely in commercial practice. Even though some reviewers have argued that Livesay really does not capture social practice, this work nevertheless promotes the social as the structural base of ideas. (13)

Livesay's book also gives us some idea of the shape of some of the new social history that is currently emerging. Just as his book title obviously refers to E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, (14) so does his study follow Thompson by treating democracy as an ideal reached through the accretion or assemblage of notions. Further, social practice is mediated through discourse to create a new ideology.

Another important book, with a clear Thompsonian reference, is David Garrioch's The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830. (15) This study explains the creation of the middle class as a social event, energized and confirmed by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the legislation and goals of the Revolution. The liaisons--personal and business--created by commerce become class consciousness through their intersection with politics and beliefs. Like Thompson, Garrioch sees an evolution toward class consciousness and mixes social factors with ideas in a very interesting stew. He specifically positions his study in opposition to Furet's school: "The suggestion that the whole series of events could be explained by political ideology seemed to me to run counter not only to my study of the sources but also to the testimony of modern politics. This book arises partly, therefore, from a desire to explore ways in which political and social history interact." (16)

Another way of illuminating this emerging approach--the social as a copartner with factors from other realms--may be more generally illustrated through feminist approaches to women and gender in the French Revolution. The first major effort to write women and gender into the Revolution relied on a linguistic approach parallel to Furet's. In her pathbreaking Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Joan Landes argued that the philosophes relied on sexism as a key operative value in their thinking. (17) Thus excluded by discourse, women either sought to expand the Revolution to accomodate them or simply rejected it. This inclination carried over into the Revolution and, reinforced there, persisted through the period. Olwen Hufton, a well-known social historian, immediately disagreed through her book Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution, which portrayed women acting because of their experiences instead of being confined or energized by assigned gender roles. (18)

Most feminist scholars such as Suzanne Desan and Elizabeth Colwill have, it seems to me, tended toward more middle ground than either Landes or Hufton. (19) Exemplifying this tendency toward mixing social with other factors is a very recent work by Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. (20) Space does not allow a comprehensive treatment of this work, but Hesse's book posits that "modernity" enabled women as much as men to imagine themselves individuals capable of self-definition. In the Old Regime, women deployed this heightened individualism to become writers of fiction and nonfiction. Books fared according to their content, not the sex of the author. Such an expertise, developed in the marketplace, allowed women to compete for political attention in the Revolution and beyond. To be sure, in the end, disapproval from men--oppression--pushed women out of public debate (as well as from holding positions) into fiction writing where, according to Hesse, they maintained a significant place by imagining roles that eclipsed the dependency demanded by this society.

Hesse's explanation depends both on linguistically opened opportunities (a notion of modernity) and on the social (commercialization in publishing). Like Garrioch and Livesay, the social explanations exist, but not quite with the same autonomous role they enjoyed a generation ago. Linked to ideational explanations, the social has returned.

The examples, selected here, also point to an interesting evolution in the definition of social history. All three works, in focusing on the development of a middle class, concern the rise of commercial ties. For Hesse it is the industry of printing, for Garrioch private and business lives in Paris, and for Livesay it is a more generalized construct of commerce. This provides a new twist on a subject that scholars previously described as the "rise of the bourgeoisie." In this earlier rendition, historians seemed to mean an ethos emanating from an ethic of work that sprang from the circumstances of the middle class. Emphasizing commerce strikes me as considerably different; it shows an interest in the sinews of society rather than the immediate and private reaction of middle-class individuals and families. Thus, the bourgeoisie achieves its consciousness as scholars had imagined for workers--in a social context. Even though the family may remain a central place for acculturation, it is only in the ties of commerce where class sentiment matures. The source for this emphasis in commercial ties, if it endures, may be as simple as the desire of historians to avoid the rather tired "rise" theory. It may also indicate the continued influence of Jurgen Habermas who outlined a similar theory in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Moreover, it suspiciously resembles the view proposed by Colin Jones in his influential article in the American Historical Review. (22) Yet it may also relate to the effect of the long economic boom just now ending in which commercial connections in the form of technology and globalism made the independent individual and his/her response appear an even greater cipher than before. Admittedly prediction is difficult both in the future of the social, in general, and regarding this specific rendition of commercialism. Yet the current verdict on the historiography of the Revolution is that social explanations, modified and sharing the spotlight, have re-emerged.

Department of History and Art History

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ENDNOTES

(1.) Jules Michelet, Histoire de la revolution francaise, 7 vols. (Paris, 1847-53); and Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J., 1967).

(2.) See, for example, Jack R. Censer, "The Coming of a New Interpretation of the French Revolution?" Journal of Social History 21 (1987): 295-309.

(3.) For example, see Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1960).

(4.) A very notable study is William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1980).

(5.) Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981).

(6.) J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time : Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago, 1989).

(7.) Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 109-27.

(8.) Keith Michael Baker, "Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France," Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001): 32-53.

(9.) See Marcel Gauchet, La Revolution des droits de l'homme (Paris, 1989).

(10.) "Le Testament de la royaute. L'Education politique de Louis XVI," in Ran Halevi, Le Savoir du prince. Du Moyen Age aux Lumieres (Paris, 2002), pp. 311-61.

(11.) James Livesay, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 12. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

(13.) Review by David Bell on line for H-France (www3.uakron.edu/hfrance/reviews/ bell2.html/).

(14.) E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York 1999).

(15.) David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

(16.) Ibid., p. 6.

(17.) Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988).

(18.) Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992).

(19.) Suzanne Desan, "'War Between Brothers and Sisters': Inheritance Law and Gender Politics in Revolutionary France," French Historical Studies 20 (1997): 497-634; and Elizabeth Colwill, "Pass as a Woman, Act like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution," in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (New York, 1996), pp. 54-79.

(20.) Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, N.J., 2001).

(21.) Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass. 1993).

(22.) Colin Jones, "The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisements, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 13-40.