Inventing the French Revolution

Ideas in Context

by Keith Michael Baker

Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Ideas in Context, Series Number 16)

In this volume, Keith Baker, arguably the leading expert writing in English on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, collects together a range of his essays on this subject published in journals in recent years. The essays include historiographical studies of the treatment of the topic by French and other historians as well as important case studies on the political vocabularies characteristic of the ancient régime and the revolutionary periods. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies on one of the central themes in modern European history.

Genres: History, French Revolution, France, Politics, European History, 18th Century

382 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Keith Baker is professor of early modern European history and, by courtesy, of French and Italian, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, and Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center. His research focuses on intellectual history and the history of political culture, and on the cultural and political origins of the Englightenment and the French Revolution. He is the author of Condorcet. From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics and Inventing the French Revolution. Prof. Baker has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, he won the American Historical Association's lifetime achievement award.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

For most readers, pretty much everything important is in the first two chapters. The approach is the important thing here.

[Shane Avery · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a nutshell:

"there can be little doubt that the competing representations of the French past considered in the present essay were highly charged political actions, mobilizing the resources of a more or less common set of documentary materials for the explicit purposes of ideological struggle. Taken together, they suggest -- and indeed they respond to -- a process of political contestation much more intense and complex than many historians interested in the ideological origins of the French Revolution have been willing to acknowledge. Each ... addressed the fundamental political question: that of the nature and conditions of existence of the body politic." (57)

Herein, Baker does an impressive job looking at competing discourses and the attempts by his subjects to control working-definitions of meaning in pre- Revolutionary France. Also herein, he does a horrific job trying to sketch a jargon-laced theory that reduces the experience of human beings to "symbolic fields of discourse," an idea so patently absurd it need not be engaged. In attempting to overthrow vulgar Marxist historiography, Baker creates something equally, if not more, vulgar. It's ironic that he owes his understanding of ideology to the Marxist lexicon.