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The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815
In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by François Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public. Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.
184 pages, Library Binding
First published May 1, 2006
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About the author
Henry Heller
18 books9 followersHenry Heller is a Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Heller is a historian whose primary interests are the French Renaissance and Reformation, as well as early modern Europe.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 25, 2017
This book is a restatement and defence of the classical historiographical interpretation of the French Revolution, namely that of a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Heller provides a pretty convincing account of the revolution, and provides a significant study of the French economy in the lead up to, and during, the French Revolution.
His central contention is that the revolution was bourgeois in character, due to the emergence of a capitalist economy. He writes:
It was only the bourgeoisie, increasingly self-conscious as a class and endowed with sufficient economic, political, and cultural resources, which in the first instance could challenge and overthrow the absolute monarchy and the feudal order and establish a new state…It is this political capacity of the bourgeoisie that makes it possible to refer to the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. But appreciating the Revolution as a bourgeois also entails understanding the relationship between control of the state and the development of class power. The initial success of the bourgeoisie did not mean that France was a fully developed capitalist economy led by a fully conscious and self-confident bourgeois class. It only meant that the bourgeoisie had develop enough economic as well as political strength to get rid of the ancien regime. It would take an extended process over the next twenty five years for it to mature as a class while further developing its economic underpinnings (p. 7).
Heller explores this idea through a robust study of the French economy prior to, and during the revolution. He also links the institutions of the State to the consolidation of the bourgeois as a class and capitalism as a system. He situates the emergence of capitalism within the structure of feudalism, exploring the continuity and change of capitalism as it emerged from feudalism. He writes:
…profits did play an expanding role in the French economy throughout the eighteenth century. But the dominance of rents, feudal relations, and the regulations of the ancien regime constituted an ongoing break on profit-making activity. Increasing rents and the ongoing state control of the grain trade restricted profits and limited if it did not entirely block investment in the agricultural sector. The feudal system and administrative apparatus of the ancien regime checked the emergence of a unified national market (p. 6).
For Heller, it was the growth of capitalism within the confines of the feudal system in France that ultimately boiled over into a political crisis, after first manifesting as an economic and fiscal crisis, that turned very rapidly into a revolutionary situation and the abolition of feudalism through the state.
But his book is not just a study of the French economy. Answering to the challenge of the revisionists, Heller takes time to explore the emergence an extension of a bourgeois mode of thought through the course of the revolution, whether organically in rising class-political consciousness, or through the establishment of institutions to reinforce this process. He points the Ecole Polytechnique as one example, a school for the science of the revolution where ‘they embraced an essentially industrial vision of the power of science to transform society and nature,’ where young and talented members of the emergent bourgeois class would theorise the mathematics of machines, engineering and science. He suggests that such ‘new state institutions perfectly illustrate the way the revolutionary state helped constitute the bourgeois as a class (p. 136). In this connection, and against the revisionists, Heller stresses that:
In a quite balanced way, Marxists have generally stressed that the strength of political consciousness – revolutionary or otherwise – must be related to the existing social and economic context. Ideology, and culture, alone could never have induced a revolution. Accordingly, the social and economic context on the eve of the French Revolution is far from irrelevant, Marxists quite rightly insist (p. 18).
He stresses this against the postmodern and revisionist interpretations of the revolution that argue that ideology and culture alone created the conditions for such a violent change in French society. These liberal-revisionist interpretations of course make no effort to study the economy and then deny that it has anything to do with the emergence of the revolution. Their interpretation is weak and unfounded, and of course the easiest way to deny that something has no causal weight is to not even discuss it in the first place. Which often the revisionist interpretations do, since to study the economy on the eve of the revolution would be to suggest it has some role to play in the emergence of grand political and social events.
One of the more interesting arguments that Heller counters revisionists with pertain to the composition of the Estates General. The revisionists suggest that since so few of the delegates of the third estate were bourgeois capitalists, it means that the revolution cannot have been bourgeois. Heller counters this by arguing that ‘As a new class develops within the world of economic production, it tends to create from out of itself a stratum of intellectuals that help to give it a sense of homogeneity and a sense of its economic as well as its social and political functions. With respect to the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, such organic intellectuals [were] above all lawyers’ (p. 72). Heller also counters by point out the effort that merchants and manufacturers took to gain representation at the Estates General. He highlights that some 56 chambers of merchants from major towns requested direct representation in the Estates, only to be rebuffed by the Assembly of Notables in December 1788. Heller goes on to say:
The representations made by these chambers reflect the point of view of the leading merchants, financiers, and manufacturers of each of the principal cities of the Kingdom. They embody a call for recognition of the status and expertise of this group and its right to deliberate over the affairs of the Kingdom. Although these requests are couched in respectful terms, they demonstrate an undeniable emergence of class awareness. At the same time, the denial of the request of the urban economic bourgeoisie for direct representation in the Estates General must be kept in mind when analyizing the social composition of that body (p. 73).
Based on these robust arguments and elucidation of the social and political composition and action outside the grand bodies of political institutions, Heller concludes that ‘to demand why business people and not lawyers were to be found sitting in the Estates General for the third estate in 1789 is to invoke an argument based on a crude reductionism’ (p. 72). Heller also wryly notes that of course the bourgeois class would sponsor lawyers who understand the feudal legal system to represent them, rather than they themselves being present, because that would be the most efficient and astute political way of seeing their interests represented. By focussing the historical light on the political and group actions outside formal institutions of power, namely the Estates General, Heller provides a more robust and full picture of the political and social conditions in the lead up to the revolution. In doing so he also exposes the weakness of political history and liberal historiography, namely the shallow and limited capacity of this kind of analysis to understand the course of history, while simultaneously highlighting the strength of social and economically oriented materialist conceptions of history.
Heller also makes an important observation about the role of the state in establishing capitalist social relations that is often missed in general interpretations of liberalism, market capitalism and their historical emergence. He writes:
In capitalist states the conditions of production are not all furnished by market forces. The provision of a more or less trained and disciplined labour force, a reliable currency, law and order, and an infrastructure of roads and bridges are not provided directly through the market but require state intervention. Markets, insofar as they are not already in place, have to be fostered by the state. Through tariffs, treaties or military interventions, the state expands the national market and increases foreign exports. Indeed, the weaker the market, the more necessary is state intervention (p. 126).
He elaborates this in the context of the Napoleonic period of the revolution, although in previous sections of the book provides a convincing exposition of the role of the successive revolutionary governments and states in the abolition of feudalism, and the consolidation and advancement of capitalism and its institutions; the advancement of market structures and the bourgeois as a class. More broadly, this penetrating insight provides a robust understanding of the state as a necessary condition for the emergence, consolidation and continuation of the capitalist mode of production.
Heller throughout the book stresses ‘the importance of capitalism to the upheaval’ of the French Revolution (p. 79). Through a relatively strong study of the French economy prior to and during the revolution, he produces a convincing narrative that the revolution was indeed a bourgeois and capitalist revolution that swept away feudalism. His core fault is that he does not study as carefully the interactions of feudalism and capitalism as he does the emergence of the bourgeois. But this is a relatively small fault in a book that is otherwise convincing, well-argued and can answer revisionist critiques of the classical Marxist school with robust arguments, strong evidence and viable materialist explanation of the role of emergent capitalism and the bourgeoisie in causing and leading the French Revolution.
His central contention is that the revolution was bourgeois in character, due to the emergence of a capitalist economy. He writes:
It was only the bourgeoisie, increasingly self-conscious as a class and endowed with sufficient economic, political, and cultural resources, which in the first instance could challenge and overthrow the absolute monarchy and the feudal order and establish a new state…It is this political capacity of the bourgeoisie that makes it possible to refer to the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. But appreciating the Revolution as a bourgeois also entails understanding the relationship between control of the state and the development of class power. The initial success of the bourgeoisie did not mean that France was a fully developed capitalist economy led by a fully conscious and self-confident bourgeois class. It only meant that the bourgeoisie had develop enough economic as well as political strength to get rid of the ancien regime. It would take an extended process over the next twenty five years for it to mature as a class while further developing its economic underpinnings (p. 7).
Heller explores this idea through a robust study of the French economy prior to, and during the revolution. He also links the institutions of the State to the consolidation of the bourgeois as a class and capitalism as a system. He situates the emergence of capitalism within the structure of feudalism, exploring the continuity and change of capitalism as it emerged from feudalism. He writes:
…profits did play an expanding role in the French economy throughout the eighteenth century. But the dominance of rents, feudal relations, and the regulations of the ancien regime constituted an ongoing break on profit-making activity. Increasing rents and the ongoing state control of the grain trade restricted profits and limited if it did not entirely block investment in the agricultural sector. The feudal system and administrative apparatus of the ancien regime checked the emergence of a unified national market (p. 6).
For Heller, it was the growth of capitalism within the confines of the feudal system in France that ultimately boiled over into a political crisis, after first manifesting as an economic and fiscal crisis, that turned very rapidly into a revolutionary situation and the abolition of feudalism through the state.
But his book is not just a study of the French economy. Answering to the challenge of the revisionists, Heller takes time to explore the emergence an extension of a bourgeois mode of thought through the course of the revolution, whether organically in rising class-political consciousness, or through the establishment of institutions to reinforce this process. He points the Ecole Polytechnique as one example, a school for the science of the revolution where ‘they embraced an essentially industrial vision of the power of science to transform society and nature,’ where young and talented members of the emergent bourgeois class would theorise the mathematics of machines, engineering and science. He suggests that such ‘new state institutions perfectly illustrate the way the revolutionary state helped constitute the bourgeois as a class (p. 136). In this connection, and against the revisionists, Heller stresses that:
In a quite balanced way, Marxists have generally stressed that the strength of political consciousness – revolutionary or otherwise – must be related to the existing social and economic context. Ideology, and culture, alone could never have induced a revolution. Accordingly, the social and economic context on the eve of the French Revolution is far from irrelevant, Marxists quite rightly insist (p. 18).
He stresses this against the postmodern and revisionist interpretations of the revolution that argue that ideology and culture alone created the conditions for such a violent change in French society. These liberal-revisionist interpretations of course make no effort to study the economy and then deny that it has anything to do with the emergence of the revolution. Their interpretation is weak and unfounded, and of course the easiest way to deny that something has no causal weight is to not even discuss it in the first place. Which often the revisionist interpretations do, since to study the economy on the eve of the revolution would be to suggest it has some role to play in the emergence of grand political and social events.
One of the more interesting arguments that Heller counters revisionists with pertain to the composition of the Estates General. The revisionists suggest that since so few of the delegates of the third estate were bourgeois capitalists, it means that the revolution cannot have been bourgeois. Heller counters this by arguing that ‘As a new class develops within the world of economic production, it tends to create from out of itself a stratum of intellectuals that help to give it a sense of homogeneity and a sense of its economic as well as its social and political functions. With respect to the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, such organic intellectuals [were] above all lawyers’ (p. 72). Heller also counters by point out the effort that merchants and manufacturers took to gain representation at the Estates General. He highlights that some 56 chambers of merchants from major towns requested direct representation in the Estates, only to be rebuffed by the Assembly of Notables in December 1788. Heller goes on to say:
The representations made by these chambers reflect the point of view of the leading merchants, financiers, and manufacturers of each of the principal cities of the Kingdom. They embody a call for recognition of the status and expertise of this group and its right to deliberate over the affairs of the Kingdom. Although these requests are couched in respectful terms, they demonstrate an undeniable emergence of class awareness. At the same time, the denial of the request of the urban economic bourgeoisie for direct representation in the Estates General must be kept in mind when analyizing the social composition of that body (p. 73).
Based on these robust arguments and elucidation of the social and political composition and action outside the grand bodies of political institutions, Heller concludes that ‘to demand why business people and not lawyers were to be found sitting in the Estates General for the third estate in 1789 is to invoke an argument based on a crude reductionism’ (p. 72). Heller also wryly notes that of course the bourgeois class would sponsor lawyers who understand the feudal legal system to represent them, rather than they themselves being present, because that would be the most efficient and astute political way of seeing their interests represented. By focussing the historical light on the political and group actions outside formal institutions of power, namely the Estates General, Heller provides a more robust and full picture of the political and social conditions in the lead up to the revolution. In doing so he also exposes the weakness of political history and liberal historiography, namely the shallow and limited capacity of this kind of analysis to understand the course of history, while simultaneously highlighting the strength of social and economically oriented materialist conceptions of history.
Heller also makes an important observation about the role of the state in establishing capitalist social relations that is often missed in general interpretations of liberalism, market capitalism and their historical emergence. He writes:
In capitalist states the conditions of production are not all furnished by market forces. The provision of a more or less trained and disciplined labour force, a reliable currency, law and order, and an infrastructure of roads and bridges are not provided directly through the market but require state intervention. Markets, insofar as they are not already in place, have to be fostered by the state. Through tariffs, treaties or military interventions, the state expands the national market and increases foreign exports. Indeed, the weaker the market, the more necessary is state intervention (p. 126).
He elaborates this in the context of the Napoleonic period of the revolution, although in previous sections of the book provides a convincing exposition of the role of the successive revolutionary governments and states in the abolition of feudalism, and the consolidation and advancement of capitalism and its institutions; the advancement of market structures and the bourgeois as a class. More broadly, this penetrating insight provides a robust understanding of the state as a necessary condition for the emergence, consolidation and continuation of the capitalist mode of production.
Heller throughout the book stresses ‘the importance of capitalism to the upheaval’ of the French Revolution (p. 79). Through a relatively strong study of the French economy prior to and during the revolution, he produces a convincing narrative that the revolution was indeed a bourgeois and capitalist revolution that swept away feudalism. His core fault is that he does not study as carefully the interactions of feudalism and capitalism as he does the emergence of the bourgeois. But this is a relatively small fault in a book that is otherwise convincing, well-argued and can answer revisionist critiques of the classical Marxist school with robust arguments, strong evidence and viable materialist explanation of the role of emergent capitalism and the bourgeoisie in causing and leading the French Revolution.
July 18, 2024
How could the French Revolution be a bourgeois revolution that instituted capitalism if pre-revolutionary France was feudal? The only way to square this circle is if there were capitalist elements and a rising bourgeoisie in the last decades of pre-revolutionary France. This Henry Heller demonstrates decisively. A lively read, The Bourgeois Revolution briskly describes the elements of capitalism within feudalism that burst out when the Revolution came.
The role of the bourgeoisie is often not central in accounts of the French Revolution, and this book is designed to center that class and explain how multiple stages of the Revolution came to be dominated by bourgeois interests. This is not at all a complete history, as the author explains in the introduction, but rather a focus on this sometimes misunderstood aspect to round out a fuller picture.
The bourgeoisie need not be the moving force behind a bourgeois revolution; Neil Davidson's concept of a bourgeois revolution being defined by a revolution ending with bourgeoisie supremacy and a capitalist mode of production regardless of what classes drove the revolution remains a solid foundation. The bourgeoisie was obviously not the only class driving the French Revolution forward but it played a more active role than is often portrayed in standard accounts, the author successively argues. The book is also useful for introducing English-speakers to new sources as the overwhelming majority of sources are French works deployed to bring knowledgable scholarship to new audiences.
The role of the bourgeoisie is often not central in accounts of the French Revolution, and this book is designed to center that class and explain how multiple stages of the Revolution came to be dominated by bourgeois interests. This is not at all a complete history, as the author explains in the introduction, but rather a focus on this sometimes misunderstood aspect to round out a fuller picture.
The bourgeoisie need not be the moving force behind a bourgeois revolution; Neil Davidson's concept of a bourgeois revolution being defined by a revolution ending with bourgeoisie supremacy and a capitalist mode of production regardless of what classes drove the revolution remains a solid foundation. The bourgeoisie was obviously not the only class driving the French Revolution forward but it played a more active role than is often portrayed in standard accounts, the author successively argues. The book is also useful for introducing English-speakers to new sources as the overwhelming majority of sources are French works deployed to bring knowledgable scholarship to new audiences.
February 25, 2022
As Thomas already wrote, this book is a great defence of the revisionist perspective of the french revolution. Heller convinces the reader with setting great economic studies and case studies in a theoritical context.
February 22, 2013
A lame-ass attempt to resuscitate a Marxist approach to studying the French Revolution. HELLer leaves out pretty much everybody in his formulation of events (no Short Pants?!?) which tries to revise the revisionists who coldly turned Marx out of their bed in favor of the tender caresses of that sultry hussy, Reasoned and Verifiable Argument. Worth reading for his hysterics only.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews