Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective Read Online Free PDF Page A

political
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    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    evolution, which in this closing phase of the Revolution expressed itself
    primarily as a polarization and “militarization” of politics leading directly
    to the Bonapartist coup of November 1799.
    A Conclusion, after briefly restating the central thesis of the study and
    summarizing the conclusions to be derived from it, will situate the entire
    revolutionary experience in a broader historical context, with reference to
    the longue durée of early modern, modern, and “contemporary” French
    (and world) history.
    The argument, as outlined above, will “play” the French Revolution as
    tragedy – but tragedy with a certain ironic twist. At one level, it is easy
    to view the whole revolutionary experience as demonstrating the relent-
    less durability of expedience – the expedience of “bourgeois” class inter-
    ests, to be sure, but, equally, of French anxieties about and aspirations in
    Europe – and the ultimate fragility of more altruistic concerns. Whatever
    some historians may have written, the Revolution was not suddenly and
    fortuitously blown off course as the French turned to massive warfare dur-
    ing the 1790s.28 In one fashion or another, war inhered in the Revolution
    from the start, and even before the start: in its causation as well as in its
    course and its aftermath. The sanguinary Terror of 1793–94 was, in hind-
    sight, implicit not so much in the rhetoric and ideology of the times as in
    the paramount need of this proud nation to prevail, by whatever desperate
    means, in the sullied, scarred European world of the late eighteenth cen-
    tury. No faction of politicians could escape from this compelling reality,
    a reality that from one year to the next came to acquire precedence over
    all other realities. Whatever the revolutionaries might strive to do for their
    constituents (and, as we have already noted, our analytical approach obliges
    us to take account of those ameliorative efforts), they were forced in the
    end to tailor their dreams and their reforms to statist exigencies even more,
    perhaps, than to their sense of immediate “class” interest.
    At a deeper level of perception, however, the sense of tragedy yields to
    irony – the irony in the fact that, to one extent or another, all persons in the new polity struggling to establish itself had a stake in the restoration
    of France’s stature in the world, whether or not they were aware of this. It
    may be true that those on the fringes, or beyond the pale, of “civilized” and
    domiciled society were in fact as indifferent to the Revolution in general as
    their chronicler Richard Cobb has suggested in many studies.29 Moreover,
    28 An argument put forth by, among others, Franc¸ois Furet and Denis Richet in The French Revolution , trans. Stephen Hardman (New York: Macmillan, 1970), esp. chap. 5.
    29 See, for example: Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Reactions to the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Paris and Its Provinces, 1792–1802
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
    Introduction
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    the Revolution insofar as it was a Parisian phenomenon undeniably
    violated at times the sensibilities (and the material interests) of those in the
    provinces.30 Yet again, it is all too obvious that it categorically withheld its
    most meaningful opportunities, and many of its benefits, from women.31
    Still, even these unfortunates were shielded by the Revolution’s military
    successes from the worst depredations of Europe’s other armies (though,
    on occasion, they were harassed and oppressed by their own troops), and in
    some instances they genuinely profited from social and economic reforms
    enacted in this era. As for those adult males definitely sporting the new
    citizenship, they certainly stood to gain in more concrete ways from
    innovations that afforded them new