Interpreting the French Revolution

by Elborg Forster (Translator), François Furet

The French Revolution is an historical event unlike any other. It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage. But after two centuries, this central event in French history has usually been thought of in much the same terms as it was by its contemporaries. There have been many accounts of the French Revolution, and though their opinions differ, they have often been commemorative or anniversary interpretations of the original event. The dividing line of revolutionary historiography, in intellectual terms, is therefore not between the right and the left, but between commemorative and conceptual history, as exemplified respectively in the works of Michelet and Tocquevifle. In this book, François Furet analyses how an event like the French Revolution can be conceptualised, and identifies the radically new changes the Revolution produced as well as the continuity it provided, albeit under the appearance of change. This question has become a riddle for the European left, answered neither by Marx nor by the theorists of our own century. In his analysis of the tragic relevance of the Revolution, Furet both refers to contemporary experience and discusses various elements in the work of Alexis de Tocclueville and that of Augustin Cochin, which has never been systematically applied by historians of the Revolution. Furet's book is based on the complementary ideas of these two writers in an attempt to cut through the apparent and misleading clarity of various contradictory views of the Revolution, and to help decipher some of the enigmatic problems of revolutionary ideology. It will be of value to historians of modern Europe and their students; to political, social and economic historians; to sociologists; and to students of political thought.

Genres: History, French Revolution, France, Nonfiction, Politics, European History, World History

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Colm Gillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have given this 6 stars if I could. One of the best books I've read. Furet has a brilliant style and he presents a conservative version of the French Revolution, without at the same deprecating the supporters of the event. If you want to write an analysis of competing ideas concerning a certain question, then look no further.

[William Bahr · Rating 4 out of 5]

So what is “historiography”? It’s the principles, theories, or methodology of scholarly historical research and presentation. And what is “interpreting”? It translating, proving meaning, making things easier to understand.

Furet divides his book into two parts (Part I: The Revolution is Over; Part II: Three approaches to the history of the French Revolution: 1. The Revolutionary Catechism, 2. De Tocqueville and the problem of the French Revolution, 3. Augustin Cochin: the theory of Jacobinism). Part I, according to the author deals with how the Revolution came to be; what it was, and what it resulted in: socialist, fascist, communist movements. Part II (written before Part I) deals with how he came to the answer: studying Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin.

Here are some of my brief notes from the book:

Historians of the French Revolution were often first asked their political stance.

The 1789 Revolution was a societal and government breakdown. Afterwards, church, monarchy, and nobility returned, resulting in continuity. The Revolution deals with “democratization of society” before 1789 and far beyond 1794 and 1799. What actually happened? Before 1789, absolution and nobility prevailed. After 1789, liberty and bourgeoisie came into their own. The Revolution was not simple cause-effect. It was not an event but a complex process/phenomenon: agricultural, industrial, meteorological, and social. Different meanings were had by historians as compared to revolutionaries when they were living it.

De Tocqueville – “Democracy in America” and “Old Regime and the Revolution.” America is not Europe’s childhood, it is Europe’s child, its future. The takeover of the society by the administrative estate. He takes apart the Revolution and reconceptualizes it.

Cochin – (in a conceptual rewriting of Michelet) complemented de Tocqueville. Focused not Tocqueville’s continuity but the break (exceptional violence, especially 9 Thermidore (Robespierre’s execution) in the political fabric.

Here’s insight about Furet’s book from elsewhere: Historian Jeremy Popkin says “Critics of the Revolution, from Edmund Burke to modern historians such as Francois Furet, have seen the Terror as an outgrowth of the movement’s utopian and unrealistic aspirations.”

Here are some notable quotes from the book:

P 31 “Rousseau may well have been the most far-sighted genius ever to appear in intellectual history for he invented, or sensed, so many of the problems that were to to obsess the nineteenth century. … Rousseau is hardly ‘responsible’ for the French Revolution, yet he unwittingly assembled the cultural materials that went into revolutionary consciousness and practice.” OTOH, IMHO, Rousseau, the author of “Social Contract (Robespierre’s “bible”) is a conflicted, impractical libertarian/totalitarian (“licentiousnarian”?) who could not link his utopia with the real world and so provided Robespierre the blueprint to the Terror.

P 45 “He [Tocqueville] comes close to the definition I am trying to develop when he characterizes the evolution of ideas in late 1788 as follows: ‘At first people spoke only of working for a better adjustment in the relations between classes; soon they advanced, ran, rushed toward the idea of pure democracy. In the beginning they quoted and commented Montesquieu; in the end they talked of no one but Rousseau. He became and was to remain the only tutor of the Revolution in its youth.’”

Here are what I view as the main problems with the book:

1. Lack of chapter names. Part 1 (half the book) is entitled “The Revolution is Over” Chapters are numbered (no titles), and information is not always faithful to topic paragraphs. Part II does have named chapters, but the subchapters are numbered, and again, are no easy reads.

2. Frequent use of Revolutionary Calendar dates (vis a vis traditional calendar dates).

3. Very dense, ultra conceptual book. The author obviously knows his subject. However, the vast majority of readers will need to unpack poetic (or muddled?) meanings. Though I’ve read perhaps 50 books on the French Revolution, I have not spent the time to unpack and decide whether or not his frequent assertions, with $10, ten-syllable words, are poetic or muddled.

4. Yes, again, assertions, sometimes dubious, aplenty without explanations. Eg, p 79, end of Part I: The French Revolution was “the first experiment with democracy.” How about Greece? How about the American Revolution?

Judging this book for me is like judging abstract modern art one encounters in a museum. Is it genius, or something else? Even after having read some 50 books on the French Revolution, I’m left wondering: Is this a work of genius, a random collection of $10, ten-syllable words, or something else? Interpretation is supposed to make things easier to understand. However, for me, much seems to be lost in this translation. Therefore, not quite sure of anything and with some hesitancy, as a fellow author, I’ll give this book four stars.

[Miloš · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tokvil je vrlo škrt kad treba da kaže šta je čitao, ali je vrlo iscrpan kad treba da navede pisane izvore: možda je to dvostruki snobizam: aristokratski i intelektualni. (145)

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his introduction, Furet says that the French Revolution is finished. For him, the republican model could not be questionned. The monarchical risk of restoration is worthless. France thus would be pacified and linked.
Is it truth? The Hate against rich person is never also violent. They are not killed but the murder is symbolic : 75 % taxes it's a way of denying the person. And there is this quite French arrogance to want to teach lessons to the world.(I'm french)

By the way, it's nécessary to read Furet because his analysis give a new vision. Before him, we are complain to accept marxist conception (Sadoul...)His analysis défined new concept.

[John Minster · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting analysis of various modes of understanding the French Revolution. Furet discusses competing frameworks for analyzing the event, largely those with a conceptual and detached understanding vs those with a vested interest in the revolutionary ideology. I would have gotten more out of it if I simply had a better understanding of each respective author, as while he gives you explanations, the book still relies on prior knowledge. That said there are still some good insights regarding Jacobinism vs Marxism, Robespierre's place in history, the development of the administrative state, and whether the Revolution really marked a complete watershed change.

[Harry Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The work overall is thematically divided into four parts: Furet’s own claims and interpretative work on the revolution (“the revolution is over”), an attack on the mainline neo-Jacobin/Marxist interpretation (“the revolutionary catechism”), followed by two analysis of separate authors—the well known Alexis de Tocqueville and the lesser known Augustin Cochin.

The central argument of the book is that the French Revolution embodies both a break (a change in the nature of power as it relates to the people as a mass, undifferentiated, versus as a society of orders) and a continuity (the Tocquevillian argument that the democratization of French society occurred in virtue of, not in spite of, the increase in absolutism which rendered people politically equal, although politically impotent).

Furet also interestingly goes through some of the common arguments for the French Revolution (ex. the paupérisation of the rural poor as a result of feudal burdens) and in this sense attempts to replace an economic basis for the French Revolution with a purely social one. He is wont to point out that rural interests and urban interests on the part of the bourgeoise weren’t aligned—one wanted a reduction in state power (reflected in the Fronde and the anti-Huguenot dragonnades in the 17th century alongside the anti-Republican Vendée rebellions).

I can’t do this book justice in the review, but simply put it seems an excellent portal into the debate over how ought the French Revolution to be understood as a historical and social phenomenon.

[David Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This important study of the historiography of the French Revolution, first published in 1978, is in two connected parts, the first consisting of a general critique of predominantly French understandings of the Revolution, and the second of studies of three different approaches thereto, those of classical Marxism, de Tocqueville, and Cochin. The tone, particularly with regard to the established Marxist construction of the 'bourgeois revolution', is often polemical and contrarian, but the text is framed within a recognisably French structuralist approach of discourse and the dialectic, and, within its historiographical analysis, posits the author's thesis of a continuity in historical development between the Ancien Régime and the Revolution. The Revolution is conceived in primarily political and ideological terms as the manifestation of a revolutionary consciousness which adapts the mechanisms of administrative monarchy to the pursuit of democratic centralisation, and in which Jacobinism and the Terror of 1793-4 are understood as inherent in, and the dialectical result of, the principles of 1789.
Firstly, Furet sets out to contextualise the French Revolution within its historical time, as both a continuity with the past and a break, not in socio-economic or class terms as provided by Marxist analysis, but in predominantly political and ideological terms, leading to what he defines as a revolutionary consciousness that developed out of the intellectual climate of the later eighteenth century, which was able to take political form and action in the crisis of the Ancien Régime in 1787-9 brought about by state financial, political, and moral bankruptcy, and which resulted in the virtual surrender of monarchical government in the summer of 1789. It was this revolutionary consciousness, a consequence of philosophical ideas of equality and democracy, which was to define the Revolution, encapsulated by Furet as the specific historical period between summer 1789 and the end of the Great Terror with 9 Thermidor in 1794. The Revolution is therefore to be primarily understood as a manifestation of political and ideological discourse, and not in socio-economic structural terms.
Furet dismantles the Marxist theory of the 'bourgeois revolution' by showing how the Revolution was neither a change in the mode of production nor a product of class conflict, by explaining how eighteenth century France was undergoing a process of rural capitalism and embourgoisisation that preceded the Revolution and was not its result. In so doing, he distinguishes the progression of civil society, which pursued an increasingly democratic path that challenged an administrative monarchy which was unable to reform in response due to the political, not socio-economic, opposition of vested interests, primarily the nobility, but also the middle class rentiers, financiers, and tax farmers. Then he also reveals how the nobility was not an obstructionist feudal class, but instead an increasingly open aristocracy of proto-capitalist landowners whose income came much more from money transactions than the old feudal services and which was being diffused by bourgeois wealth, as those who had made money from finance or urban enterprise sought through the purchase of land and public office sold by the insolvent monarchy the social distinctions of nobility. What role the nobility played was primarily passive as the embodiment of the 'aristocratic plot' that provided the antithesis in the revolutionary diabetic.
The section on Tocqueville focuses on two elements: his thesis of the continuity of centralised administration between the Ancien Régime and the Revolution; and his exploration of the nobility as a political and socio-economic group. Tocqueville reveals how the nobility was not so much a class as a caste, not an aristocracy that shared in government, as in contemporary England, but a politically weak group excluded by the administrative monarchy from the exercise of power and the mediating role proper to aristocratic government. Furet does show that Tocqueville exaggerated the centralisation of the administrative monarchy and underestimated the part played by some nobles in royal government, particularly the intendants in the provinces, but, accepts that the nobility had not evolved into a mediating and representative force as provided by theories of aristocracy, and so, was excluded from the political process when the crisis of the Ancien Régime came to its head in 1789. The nobility had no practical part to play, positive or negative, so Instead the choice, and the political dialectic, came to be between the restitution of administrative monarchy or the establishment of democracy, the Revolution confirming the weakness of the political power of the nobility under centralised government. The Revolution marks the completion of the centralisation pursued by the Ancien Régime, although brought about much more speedily and by violent means, and in this sense is a change in government not in administration, with the theory of monarchial authority replaced by that of of democracy with legitimacy derived from the people.
Cochin's often overlooked contribution to revolutionary historiography is centred upon two related studies: one, the elections to the Estates-General and the associated cahiers de dolèances of 1789 as drawn up by the local elective assemblies, and, two, the Jacobinism of 1793-4. The point that Furet draws out from Cochin is how the politics and ideology of pure democracy that underlie 1789 were directly connected to and manifest in the radical government of the Terror, and that the electoral assemblies were products of contemporary democratic sociability that had been inculcated by the philosophical societies, and which was to develop through the historical process and the dialectic of popular revolution and aristocratic plot into the 'pure democracy' of Jacobin government and the Parisian sections. In this view, rather than the Terror being an aberration, the ideology that underpinned it was inherent in the ideas of political reform elucidated by the cahiers and articulated by those who dominated the electoral assemblies and were chosen as representatives to the Estates-General, themselves members of and influenced by the revolutionary societies. It is this conjunction of ideology and political action which Furet identifies as revolutionary consciousness, and which formed a political and ideological continuity between 1789 and 1794.
Furet's considered thesis, which while totally rejecting the traditional Marxist interpretation, builds upon the administrative centralism of Tocqueville and the political-ideoligical analysis of Cochin to posit an understanding of the French Revolution as a discrete historical event between the summoning of the Estates-General and the Fall of Thermidor, with its proximate origins in the crisis of the state from 1787 onwards, that is both a continuity, administratively and ideologically, and a discontinuity, as in how it was perceived contemporaneously and understood historically through the concept of revolutionary consciousness. What makes the historical discourse between 1789 and 1794-5 into the French Revolution is not structural change, socio-economic or political, but the revolutionary consciousness that conceives of this discourse as revolutionary per se.
The Revolution can therefore be interpreted as both event and discourse with revolutionary consciousness as its political determinant. This book, even after forty years, remains an important work of both history and historiography, conceiving the Revolution in primarily political-ideological, non-Marxist terms, and as the product of revolutionary consciousness, but even more it is an interpretative historical analysis that reminds the reader to always be willing to reconsider how s/he approaches the Revolution through the multiplicity of readings to which the Revolution can be subject, as both historical event and historical discourse. Furet therefore helps to answer the question, What is the French Revolution? if not, Why did the Revolution happen? What is for certain, at least in terms of historical debate and contrary to the title of the first part of Furet's book, is that the French Revolution is far from over.

[Igor Gomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riqueza é um meio, o poder é um serviço. A autoridade política é uma instituição útil à sociedade e cumpre a função histórica de trazer progresso a vida de um povo. O progresso social une a tradição e o progresso: conserva renovando e renova conservando. A paz de uma sociedade emana da unidade indivisível entre ambos os termos.

A modificação, quase sempre violenta, de um governo ou das condições políticas e sociais com o fim de estabelecer uma ordem nova constitui a revolução. A revolução sempre visa maximizar a liberdade humana compreendida como autonomia ou autodeterminação a fim de instaurar um «novo início» – retorno às origens –, o que pressupõe um horizonte de futuro. A pretensão de eliminar uma ordem social assentada sobre privilégios injustos é conatural ao processo político que forjou a modernidade. A revolução é visionada na idade moderna como um direito atrelado à noção de soberania popular ao qual o povo não pode renunciar.

A revolução é um desvio violento do processo evolutivo natural de uma sociedade. O ideário da revolução, isto é, o desígnio de modificar uma ordem constituída a partir de métodos radicais tem como oposto simétrico o conservadorismo, ou seja, a disposição tendente a preservar uma ordem esclerosada e injusta mediante a força. O conservadorismo instrumentaliza a seu serviço os interesses particulares amparados na ordem social injusta que a revolução busca eliminar. O conservador discrimina o porvir – presságio do caos – em função do presente ao qual se aferra em preservar. A revolução discrimina o passado – fautor de uma estrutura social injusta – em função do presente, que contém as virtualidades da sociedade futura.

A defesa do passado sem uma perspectiva do futuro acaba por elimina-lo, porque a atualização do antigo em novo se perdeu no tempo; a esperança de fazer algo novo prescindindo do passado erige o processo revolucionário em juiz de si mesmo, o que comporta a justificação de todos os abusos e todas as injustiças.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes a critical look at the historiography of the French Revolution. The thesis of the book is that the “standard” historiography of the French Revolution is tainted by the uncritical acceptance of the “narrative” put forth by the participants in the Revolution. Furet is impatient with historians who cannot or will not move on past the “Revolutionary catechism.” He brings the reader’s attention to two writers who each, in his own way, provides a corrective to the standard account. The first is August Cochin, a relatively obscure historian of the early 20th century, who developed an insightful theory of ideology to explain Jacobinism, the central phenomenon of the Revolution. The second writer is Alexis de Tocqueville, whose late work The Old Regime and the Revolution examined political trends leading up to the Revolution and concluded that the Revolution was the natural outcome of the decline of the institutions of the old regime.

Furet’s book will be of greater interest to the specialist than to the general reader. The latter will not find it easy going. The author refers to various French historians with whom many (like myself) will not be familiar; unfortunately, such familiarity is often necessary in order to follow the author’s train of thought without some difficulty. This difficulty is compounded by the author’s style of expression, which one can only describe as “French” to the highest degree.

For those willing to put in the work, this book contains many thought-provoking passages. To take just one example, Furet explains how opinion became the source of power that motivated the Revolution. The leaders of the Revolution didn’t have power per se; there was in fact a power vacuum. The leaders did, however, have language that could shape opinion. Opinion became the core of the entire political struggle. As Furet writes (p. 48), “Legitimacy, therefore, belonged to those who symbolically embodied the people’s will, and were able to monopolize the appeal to it.” And later (p. 49): “The history of the Revolution between 1789 and 1794, in its period of development, can be seen as the rapid drift from a compromise with the principle of representation toward the unconditional triumph of rule by opinion. It was a logical evolution, considering that the Revolution had from the outside made power out of opinion.” To put Furet’s argument into the crude terminology of current popular thought, the French Revolution was about the struggle to “control the narrative”; the narrative was everything.

[Bülent Bilgili · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zekânın en temel göstergelerinden biri doğru sorular sorabilmek olsa gerek. Böyle bir konuyu lezzetli hale getirebilmek ancak zeki birinin işi olabilirdi.

Her kütüphanede/kitaplıkta bulunmalı bence.

[laurentiu]

0

[Baptiste le Pirate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un ouvrage complexe pour comprendre la Révolution et son impact. Puis en seconde partie l'évolution de sa compréhension grâce aux divers travaux.

[lukas · Rating 1 out of 5]

ja neviem či som hlupačik, ale táto kniha bola len kopa buzzwords, akože mala points at some levels ale také že aj skolkar by ich vedel, neviem toto má byť ten veľký Furet?

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 4 out of 5]

A semiotically oriented critique of the mainstream interpretation of the French Revolution. Furet's prose can be torturous at times. The books is divided into three parts, but most of Furet's revisionist ideas are concentrated in the introductory part, where he takes multiple stabs at Marxist historiographers for pigeonholing the Revolution into what he calls a vulgarized Marxist schema. They failed to take a critical distance from the tradition practiced by the revolutionaries themselves and performed self serving celebrations of the Revolution 'from within'. Instead, Furet says, we should conceptualize the revolution by means of explicit concepts.
In this vein, Furet deduces the Terror from the revolutionary discourse apropos the tension between the people's will (a bastardization of Roussean General Will) and its obscene double that sustains it--the plot. The Terror is the 'dialectic between the people's will and the aristocratic will elevated to its purest form'. The people's will is none other than the absolute undivided power of the Bourbon Monarch reinvested and reimagined in and by the 'people'. As early as 1789, he says, the revolutionaries almost took it as an article of faith that the people's will is always transparent and in perfect synchronicity with each individual will of the citizens. However, this is not what they observe in real life. Things often spiral out of control. Grain shortages happen. Hence, the theoretical and the expedient allure of the notion of an all-pervading conspiracy to thwart the Revolution's progress.
Since the collapse of the Ancien Regime, power has been perceived by everyone to have suddenly become available. Revolutionaries could only claim legitimacy to this power by engaging in a ritualistic denouncement of the aristocratic plot. Language was an instrument particularly suited to this task because it was public and transparent by its nature. 'The constant raising of the ideological stakes (by this Furet means the increasingly radicalized attitude assumed towards the plotters, hoarders, aristocrats, etc) was the rule of the game'. From the onset the revolutionaries passionately believed that the Revolution had no 'objective limits', i.e. all of societal ills were amenable to political solution. Everything that went wrong is blamed on the organized subjective resistance emanating from the shadows. Obliterate the subjective resistance and the efforts of the Revolution will begin to bear fruit. Thus, the Terror.

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book about the history of the French revolution is full of ideas. In particular, the idea that intellectuals are the worst people to govern as they believe in ideals, hence Robespierre killing people in the name of the people.

[JEAN-PHILIPPE PEROL · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un apport riche et bien étayé aux grandes analyses sur le sens de la Grande Revolution

[Paolo Merolla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Furet shows - as it was never done before - that with Revolution the "sun of the future" is not the new world, and the new man is not seen.

[Mialena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Препоръчвам на всеки, който се вълнува от различните концепти за Френската револлюция. Книгата е изключително интересно четиво, макар и на моменти сякаш не толкова последователна.

[Kin · Rating 4 out of 5]

ชอบไอเดียของฟูเร่ต์มากๆ นะ สนุกดี

[Leonardo]

En 1978 [...] el historiador François Furet publicó su rompedor Penser la Révolution Française, en el que desmantelaba sistemáticamente el «catecismo revolucionario» que durante décadas se había impartido a los franceses para que entendieran su país y su pasado.

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