A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799

The Rise of Modern Europe #11

by Crane Brinton

"This is the very best short history of the [French] Revolution I have come across in many decades of reading."
- Albert Guerard

"This volume represents a successful attempt to reinterpret the Revolution in the light of modern research. The author admittedly writes 'sociological history,' but let me hasten to assure any who may have developed a complex against this blend that, whether because of it or in spite of it, the quality of his history is good. His treatment is judicious. His characterization are apt. His writing is clear and vigorous with often an incisive observation that puts the issue in a new light or settles some disputed point more effectively than a page of argument."
- The American Historical Review

Contents
I. The Setting
II. The Monarchical Experiment
III. Europe and the Revolution: Peace
IV. The Republican Experiment
V. The Revolutionary Government
VI. The Republic of Virtue
VII. Europe and the Revolution: War
VIII. The Thermidoreans
IX. The Directory
X. The Arts and Sciences in Revolutionary Europe
XI. Conclusion

Genres: History, European History

331 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Clarence Crane Brinton (February 25, 1898 – September 7, 1968) was an American historian of France, as well as a historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the introduction:

... The great paradox of the French Revolution lies here: That until the fall of Robespierre in 1794 the most tender- minded were consistently the most hard-headed; the most doctrinaire, the most pliable. Historians, as a class rightly distrustful of paradox, have concluded, in spite of the evidence, that the com- bination is impossible. Royalist historians in general conclude that the revolutionists were impractical theorists, and fail to explain their success, except as the accidental triumph of villainy; republican historians conclude that the revolutionists were practical, far seeing men, and fail to explain either their ideology or their failure in 1794, except that the latter is always attributable to the villainy of their enemies. A true explanation must accept the facts, even though the facts are shocking to preconceived notions.

There is certainly little trace of political acumen in the extreme Right of the Assembly, and in the court party which it represented. Its ablest orator was the Abbé Maury, son of a cobbler, conservative with the interests of a self-made man, a good fighter, but utterly tactless and without any program. The Vicomte de Mira- beau, from his corpulence called Barrel Mirabeau, was an able obstructionist, especially when interrupting his brilliant brother. Outside the Assembly the queen, the king's brothers, most of the Versailles nobility formed a group with a definite aim: no con- cessions. It was a group scornful of propaganda, for the that it denied public opinion, in the modern sense, any place in very reason government. It was, of course, destined to failure from the simple fact that public opinion was already in 1789 a factor in government. Many of its members lived up to the middle-class notion of an aristocrat; that is, they were proud, haughty, dissolute, contemptuous of those immediately beneath them in the social scale. But as a class they were hardly the vicious and irresponsible tyrants revolutionary propaganda made them out. They were certainly among the most intellectual of aristocracies...

This 'sociological history' explores the motivations, actors, and strategies of personage and plebes in the French Revolution. Published apparently in the early '30s, there is a willingness to seriously consider even Marxist thought that makes it hard to imagine this today getting a marquee publisher.

For the scholar, I think the extensive Bibliographic essay here in the backmatter is especially promising as a reference list.