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

civic options while associating them
    with an eventually triumphant patriotic “cause.” The feuding revolution-
    ary leaders, then, if compelled all too often to rob the Peter of socially
    beneficent expenditure to pay the Paul of military defense and aggran-
    dizement, nevertheless were directly or indirectly serving the interests of
    Frenchmen (and, yes, politically unenfranchised Frenchwomen too) in
    all walks of life.
    We might sound one final cautionary note in this connection. No matter
    how necessary it may be for our analytical purposes to separate the revolu-
    tionary leaders’ governmental priorities from all the political and ideolog-
    ical and social issues they had constantly to engage, in the daily affairs of
    the Revolution these innumerable and conflicting matters could not be so
    easily sorted out. Still, we can assert in general terms that France’s guiding
    spirits were striving to fashion and control critical foreign and domestic
    policies even as they themselves were borne upon the tide of clamorous
    events. And in this, as in much else, the years of upheaval testified both to
    the dogged continuities of French history and to the exhilarating novelties
    of revolutionary hopes and actions.
    30 This has been pointed out in numerous excellent monographs on the Revolution in the provinces. For one of the most recent of these works, see Alan Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
    Our study will have to deal recurrently with the tensions between the capital and the provinces during the revolutionary era.
    31 There is a steadily growing corpus of works on the roles of women in the revolutionary era. See, as examples in point: Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Shirley E. Roessler, Out of the Shadows: Women and Politics in the French Revolution, 1789–1795 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); and Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and the French Revolution , trans.
    Katherine Streip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Many other titles could be added to the list.

    1
    The ancien régime: challenges not met,
    a dilemma not overcome
    On 7 September 1782, French foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de
    Vergennes, acknowledged in a letter to his eventual successor, Armand-
    Marc, comte de Montmorin, that England had “in its constitution and in
    the establishments which it has permitted her to form, resources which
    are lacking to us.” Eight weeks later, the foreign minister again referred to
    English “advantages which our monarchical forms do not accord us.”1 It is
    striking that Vergennes, however loyal to his country’s absolutist traditions,
    should nevertheless have ruminated so uneasily upon differences between
    the constitutional systems of the two rival powers. His reflections point
    to a basic discrepancy in the old France – that between the far-reaching
    objectives of its foreign policy and the national means actually marshaled
    to attain those objectives.
    In retrospect, it is clear that those ruling France in the years before 1789
    confronted a challenge that in time became an unmanageable dilemma. The
    challenge was to preserve French influence in an increasingly competitive
    system of West Eurasian states while at the same time maintaining fiscal,
    constitutional, and social stability at home. The dilemma was that the pur-
    suit of what became an ever more ambitious foreign policy could not, in the
    end, be judged strategically realistic – or be squared with the sociopolitical
    tenets undergirding the ancien régime in France.
    The statesmen/politicians of revolutionary France would find them-
    selves similarly bedeviled by the interrelated complexities of foreign and
    domestic policy.