PAUL R.

HANSON

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Political History of the French
Revolution since 1989
Abstract
The French Revolution was a supremely political event. Indeed, it might be seen
as marking the invention of modern politics. Broadly speaking, virtually any
work of scholarship dealing with the French Revolution might be said to address
revolutionary politics. This essay focuses more narrowly, however, on recent
works that have explicitly addressed aspects of the political history of the
Revolution, paying particular attention to three broad areas. The first is a grow-
ing body of work focusing on the French Revolution in the provinces, including
important provincial cities, as well as village studies and regional studies. Some of
this scholarship explores the dialectical relationship between political currents in
Paris and developments in the provinces. Paris has hardly been ignored, however,
and a number of important books in recent years have been devoted to important
political events centered in the capital. These include works on the Night of
August 4, the king’s flight to Varennes, and the massacre on the Champ de
Mars. A spate of recent works on the origins and nature of the Terror promise to
generate continuing debate on that topic. Finally, an array of historians has pro-
duced significant scholarship over the past twenty years on the period of the
Directory, making it clear that the revolutionary dynamic did not end with the
fall of Robespierre. Thus, the historiography of the Revolution since the bicenten-
nial has broadened our understanding of revolutionary politics both geographically
and chronologically.

Among other trends in the historiography of the French Revolution since its
bicentennial, we have seen a revived interest in the political history of the pe-
riod, with important work on both sides of the Atlantic broadening our under-
standing both geographically and chronologically. With the demise of the
Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution usher-
ing in the capitalist era, 1789 has come to be seen as the birth of modern de-
mocracy, a view put forward in contrasting ways by both Lynn Hunt and Keith
Baker.1 Baker’s work explored a variety of ways in which political discourse
emerged in the final decades of the Old Regime to both shape and presage the
crisis that would erupt in 1789, while Hunt’s work applied both a cultural and a

Journal of Social History vol. 52 no. 3 (2019), pp. 584–592

doi:10.1093/jsh/shy075
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Political History of the French Revolution 585

social approach to examining the political experience of the revolutionary de-

cade itself. As Hunt observed, the revolutionary experience of participatory poli-
tics had an enduring legacy: “Thousands of men and even many women gained
firsthand experience in the political arena: they talked, read, and listened in
new ways; the voted; they joined new organizations; and they marched for their
political goals. Revolution became a tradition, and republicanism an enduring
option.”2

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In the pages to follow, I will explore some of the historical literature de-
voted to the political history of the Revolution in three broad areas. The first of
these is the Revolution in the provinces. For obvious reasons, Paris has loomed
large in most histories of the French Revolution, and it has sometimes seemed
that little of importance occurred beyond the boundaries of the capital city. But
as the Girondin deputies insisted in 1793, Paris was only one of eighty-three
departments in France, and over the past three decades, a number of studies
have deepened our understanding not only of provincial politics but also of the
ways in which the provinces affected developments in Paris. A second area that
has drawn considerable attention since 1989 is the political history of the years
that we might consider to be the heart of the Revolution, 1789–94. Some of
this work has focused on pivotal moments during those years, such as the Night
of August 4, the king’s flight to Varennes, and the massacre on the Champ de
Mars. In addition, several important works in the past decade have dealt with
the origins and nature of the Terror. Third, the period of the Directory, long
downplayed as a kind of desultory interregnum between the Jacobin republic
and the appearance of Napoleon Bonaparte, has drawn the attention of a num-
ber of historians. We now see clearly that the Revolution did not end with the
fall of Robespierre and that the Directory regime made its own important contri-
butions to the political legacy of the French Revolution.
The bicentennial itself produced a plethora of local studies in France, and
in the decade that followed, a number of important books appeared. My own
work has focused on the federalist revolt, which saw four major provincial cities
rebel against the National Convention in the summer of 1793, following the
May 31–June 2 journees in Paris that led to the proscription of twenty-nine lead-
ing Girondin deputies.3 I have argued that the federalist revolt was more than a
simple reaction to events in Paris. In Lyon and Marseille in particular, resistance
to Paris grew out of political conflict that, in both cases, led to armed uprisings
that expelled local Jacobins from control of municipal politics, replacing them
with moderates, all of which occurred before the insurrection in Paris that con-
solidated Montagnard control of the National Convention. Although the feder-
alist rebels looked in the end to royalists for support, the movement was not
royalist in inspiration but rather grew out of a vision of a republic that rested
more on law than on popular sovereignty as championed by Robespierre and the
Jacobins. Ultimately the federalist rebels, departmental administrators for the
most part, failed because they could not generate popular support for a march on
Paris to restore, as they put it, the integrity of the National Convention, vio-
lated on June 2, 1793. A differing view of the federalist revolt has been pre-
sented by Antonino de Francesco, who characterized the movement as an
exercise in popular sovereignty.4
Others have explored provincial politics through a broader chronological
lens. Alan Forrest, certainly among the most prolific historians of the French
586 Journal of Social History Spring 2019

Revolution in the past forty years, followed up a first book on Bordeaux with a
volume devoted to the history of the Revolution throughout the Aquitaine.
Forrest emphasized that local politics in the region was more than a pale reflec-
tion of, or reaction to, Parisian politics and argued that the region’s reputation
for political moderation did at times turn toward outright royalism. He followed
that volume with a book that very explicitly attempted to link provincial and
Parisian politics over the course of the Revolution.5

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Also worthy of note is Bill Edmonds’ work on the early years of the
Revolution in Lyon. In exploring the genesis of the federalist revolt in that city,
Edmonds presents a fascinating analysis of the shifting currents in local politics,
stressing, among other things, the importance of neighborhood mobilization to
the emergence of a radical political movement, and how crucial it was for local
authorities to maintain control of weapons depots and the militia.6 Jacques
Guilhaumou has studied another of the federalist cities, Marseille. Drawing on
an analysis of discourse and texts, Guilhaumou argues that the effort by
Marseille radicals to enlist support in the towns and villages of Provence, by
sending out “patriot missionaries” in what he labels a form of “Jacobin feder-
alism,” ended up alienating as many people as it attracted.7 Aubagne, one of the
towns in the hinterland of Marseille, is the subject of a recent book by Donald
Sutherland. Sutherland insists that Aubagne politics cannot be understood apart
from Marseille Jacobinism, but rather than emphasizing the role of ideology, as
does Guilhaumou, he sees violence pure and simple as the driver of radical poli-
tics between 1792 and 1794.8
Jacobinism has long been a focus of Revolutionary historiography, but we
should make note here of two books published since the bicentennial that have
added to our knowledge of Jacobin politics. The first is the third volume of
Michael Kennedy’s magisterial study of the Jacobin clubs, spanning the years
from 1789 until their prohibition in 1795 and examining provincial clubs as
well as the mother society in Paris.9 The second, by Patrice Higonnet, associates
Jacobinism with the excesses of the Terror and, in contrast with Donald
Sutherland’s book on Aubagne, places great stress on the role of Jacobin
ideology.10
The French Revolution was preeminently an urban phenomenon, but revo-
lutionary politics touched the countryside as well. Peter Jones, who has long
been among the leading historians of the peasantry in the Revolution, has given
us a comparative study of six villages in different regions of France, focusing in
one chapter on “sovereignty in the village” and examining in another the man-
ner in which the revolutionary decade produced “a new civic landscape” in the
provinces.11 Peter McPhee has also focused on the Revolution in the provinces,
exploring in an early book the decidedly negative impact that the end of the sei-
gneurial system had on the rural environment of the Corbières, a region in
southwest France. More recently, McPhee described at a very personal level the
impact that the Revolution had on ordinary people in villages, towns, and cities
all across France, bringing alive for readers the legacy of participatory politics
that Lynn Hunt identified as so important.12
Symbolically important dates often assist both teachers and students in nav-
igating the complicated political history of the French Revolution, and none
looms larger than July 14, 1789. Two important works have appeared since the
bicentennial to reshape our thinking about the fall of the Bastille. The first,
Political History of the French Revolution 587

coauthored by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, employed a semiotic

approach to examine the symbolic potency of the Bastille leading up to the
Revolution and at the time of its fall, both within France and across Europe.13
More recently, in an essay that appears in his book Logics of History, William
Sewell takes the assault on the Bastille as an example to support his argument
that historians should borrow from the work of Marshall Sahlins to develop a
“theory of the event” that might make more systematic and powerful our analy-

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sis of historical contingency.14
Two more important works draw our attention to another symbolic date
from the early Revolution, August 4, 1791. In The Night the Old Regime Ended,
Michael Fitzsimmons stresses the altruistic motivations of the aristocrats who
stepped forward in a late night session of the National Assembly to renounce
their seigneurial dues and an array of other vestigial feudal emoluments, effec-
tively undermining the edifice of privilege that underpinned the structure of the
Old Regime monarchy. John Markoff, in The Abolition of Feudalism, agrees with
Fitzsimmons about the importance of that night but argues that it was personal
interest rather than altruism that motivated the deputies, given the wave of rural
violence and ch^ateau burnings that had spread across much of France that sum-
mer in the Great Fear.15 Rafe Blaufarb has recently added another dimension to
this debate, arguing that the Night of August 4 amounted to a fundamental re-
definition of property, launching a contentious and complicated process that
would extend well into the nineteenth century.16
No one has contributed more over the past twenty-five years to our under-
standing of the political history of the French Revolution than Timothy
Tackett. Three separate books published during this period moved chronologi-
cally toward the Terror. The first offered a collective biography of the members
of the Constituent Assembly, challenging the revisionist argument that there
was little social basis to the Revolution by presenting evidence of social distinc-
tion, and tension, between deputies of the second and third estates. A second
book argued that the Flight to Varennes, June 20–21, 1791, marked a crucial
turning point in the Revolution, altering the political landscape by tarnishing
the reputation of the king, heightening the fear of conspiracy, and laying the
groundwork for measures that would be more fully implemented during the year
of the Terror. In a third book, examining the origins of the Terror, Tackett
presents a complex analysis that centers on rumor and denunciation and the cul-
ture of fear whose roots he identified in the aftermath of the king’s flight in
1791.17
One of the consequences of the king’s flight was the massacre on the
Champ de Mars in July 1791, the focus of an important book by David Andress
that attempts to sort out the conflicting accounts of the massacre itself, as well
as to assess the impact of the killings on revolutionary politics later that summer
and fall. Andress has also contributed an overarching treatment of the Terror, a
stirring narrative but also an attempt to walk a fine line in the longstanding de-
bate between those who emphasize circumstance and contingency versus those
who favor an ideological interpretation of the Terror.18
The Terror itself has been a topic of renewed interest since 1989. Marisa
Linton, like Tackett, has examined the path to Terror by focusing on personal
friendships, betrayal of those friendships, and what she calls revolutionary
“authenticity,” culminating in the “politicians’ terror,” that moment in late
588 Journal of Social History Spring 2019

1793 extending through the summer of 1794, when the deputies of the National
Convention turned on each other.19 Works on the Terror, not surprisingly, are
often polemical. Patrice Gueniffey, following in the path of his mentor, François
Furet, sees the Terror as the logical culmination of the revolutionary project, a
product essentially of Jacobin ideology.20 In stark contrast, Sophie Wahnich
argues that the Terror was a defense of the sovereignty that the people had
claimed and won between 1789 and 1792—necessary, then, but not inevita-

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ble.21 Quite recently, Mette Harder has demonstrated that the Terror stretched
beyond 9 Thermidor and, extending an element of Linton’s argument, that it
was substantially more risky to be a deputy than to be an ordinary citizen in
those years.22
There was more to the Terror than political repression, and two important
works have illuminated what we might call the more positive aspects of this pe-
riod. The first, by Jean-Pierre Gross, follows the footsteps of five representatives
on mission who attempted to put Jacobin egalitarian ideals into practice in the
provinces through food distribution, land redistribution, tax reform, work pro-
grams, and educational reform, laying the foundations for what would become
the welfare state in the twentieth century.23 Michel Biard has given us a more
comprehensive study of the representatives on mission, the crucial intermediar-
ies between Paris and the provinces. Some 426 deputies served in this capacity
between March 1793 and October 1795, numbers and dates which suggest both
the diversity of their political backgrounds and the complexity of their
missions.24
Two other important works have addressed the issue of revolutionary vio-
lence more broadly. In his 2006 book, Jean-Clement Martin argued that we still
lack a clear definition of what the Terror was and insisted that the National
Convention did not declare terror to be “the order of the day” on 5 September
1793, even though Bertrand Barère did use that phrase in debate that day.
Martin stressed the need to place revolutionary violence in context, proposing
that we should see the Terror not as an extension of popular violence but rather
as an effort on the part of the state to control it.25 Micah Alpaugh has recently
published the first extensive study of the Paris crowd in the Revolution since
the classic works of George Rude and Albert Soboul. In an impressive examina-
tion of more than 750 events between 1789 and 1795, he shows that the vast
majority were peaceful. This is an important study that will force us to rethink
our interpretation of violence in the French Revolution.26 As a whole, this
body of work calls for a reconceptualization of the Terror and its place in the
Revolution.
The Directory regime, long relatively neglected in the historiography of the
French Revolution, has become a fertile field of scholarly research over the past
several decades. In Ending the Terror, Bronislaw Baczko argued that those who
overthrew Robespierre on 9 Thermidor hoped to move beyond the Terror with-
out repudiating the goals of the Revolution, but he also emphasized that our un-
derstanding of the Terror has ever since been indelibly colored by what the
Thermidorians had to say about it.27 Taking up the first of Baczko’s points,
James Livesey has asserted that the Directory witnessed the emergence of a “new
democratic republicanism,” rooted in liberalism rather than Jacobin egalitarian-
ism. Livesey focused, on the one hand, on the political thought of men such as
Benjamin Constant and Nicolas-Louis François de Neufch^ateau and, on the
Political History of the French Revolution 589

other, on economic reforms and the division of common lands in the country-
side that led to what he characterizes as “commercial republicanism.”28 Jon
Cowans, more critical of the Directory regime than Livesey, has explored the
manner in which public opinion shaped, and was shaped by, representative poli-
tics. He argues, in part, that by turning away from the ideal of popular sover-
eignty, the Directors ultimately undermined their own legitimacy.29
Howard Brown has proposed a different explanation for the failure of the

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Directory regime: its inability to maintain civic order and its willingness to resort
to extrajudicial measures to repress banditry and rural violence. “Liberal democ-
racy failed and the French Revolution came to an end,” Brown argues, “only af-
ter prolonged violence had generated a public sentiment willing to accept
exceptional justice and brutal repression as the price of restoring order.” This in-
terpretation suggests an alternative periodization of the revolutionary decade to
that which we have long followed: according to Brown, the Directory was as ar-
bitrary and repressive as the Jacobin regime and instituted a “security state” that
we generally associate with Napoleon’s government.30 Bernard Gainot takes a
very different view of the Directory than Brown, seeing in this period evidence
of a renewed Jacobinism and, like Livesey perhaps, at least the potential founda-
tions for a constitutional democracy.31
Let me close with a brief discussion of two final books that enrich our un-
derstanding of the years of the Directory and Consulate. Andrew Jainchill sees
the years between 1794 and 1804 as a “watershed in the transition from classical
to modern republicanism.” It was classical republicanism, he argues, that ushered
in the policies of the Terror, against which the revolutionaries who led France
under the Directory were reacting. Jainchill is interested in discourse, and there-
fore in political thinkers, but is also attentive to those who were active in the
political arena at the time and in the interactions between those two groups.
One of the theorists discussed by Jainchill is Benjamin Constant, the subject of
a recent book by K. Steven Vincent. He examines Constant alongside his good
friend and collaborator Germaine de Sta€el, the first figures in France to call their
thought “liberal.”32 Vincent sees the final years of the revolutionary decade as
crucial to the development of Constant’s “pluralistic liberalism,” which he
hoped would mark out a path to achieving a stable political order while preserv-
ing the ideals of 1789, a hope that in the short term, of course, proved illusory.
What lies ahead in the political history of the French Revolution? Two po-
tential areas of interest come to mind. Until twenty-five years ago, historians
working on or teaching about the Revolution paid little attention to the
Haitian revolution. There is now a considerable body of work on Haiti/Saint-
Domingue (which is beyond the scope of this essay to address), and the revolu-
tion in Haiti is now more integral to our histories of the French Revolution
than it once was. But I do not think that we have yet made much headway in
considering the impact of the upheaval in Saint-Domingue on the politics of
port cities in France and on national politics more broadly, especially between
1792 and 1794.
A recent book by Maxime Kaci suggests a second fruitful possibility. Several
years ago, Pierre Serna suggested that “every revolution is a war of
independence,” arguing that the struggle for independence among French colo-
nies might be a useful conceptual model for considering the relationship be-
tween the provinces and Paris during the Revolution.33 Kaci’s work does not
590 Journal of Social History Spring 2019

explicitly take up that task, but it is a fascinating study of three departements

along the northern French border. Due to the war with Prussia and Austria, this
region was directly impacted by the currents of national politics from 1792 on-
ward, but each department reacted to those currents in different ways, largely
due to internal factors. As Kaci describes quite clearly, local authorities some-
times responded to the threats of war by adopting emergency measures (creating
surveillance committees, for example) well before such measures were adopted

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by the national government, thus belying the commonly held notion that the
provinces always reacted to events emanating from Paris.34 As we look in the
years ahead to situate the French Revolution more firmly in a global context,
we might also look to illuminate national political trends through the lens of
provincial politics.

Endnotes
Address correspondence to Paul Hanson, Department of History and Anthropology, Butler
University, 4600 Sunset Ave., Indianapolis, IN 46208. Email: phanson@butler.edu.
1. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 1984);
Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); this was also a theme of
one of three international conferences in the years leading up to the Bicentennial, the
papers from which were published in C. Lucas, ed., The Political Culture of the French
Revolution (Oxford, 1988).
2. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class: 221.
3. Paul R. Hanson, Provincial Politics in the French Revolution: Caen and Limoges,
1789–1793 (Baton Rouge, 1989); and Hanson, The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The
Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park, PA, 2003).
4. Antonino de Francesco, Il Governo Senza Testa (Naples, 1992). For our exchange of
views, see A. de Francesco, “Popular Sovereignty and Executive Power in the Federalist
Revolt of 1793,” French History 5, no. 1 (1991): 74–101, and P. R. Hanson, “The
Federalist Revolt: An Affirmation or Denial of Popular Sovereignty?” French History 6,
no. 3 (1992): 335–55.
5. Alan Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (Oxford,
1996), and Paris, the Provinces and the French Revolution (London, 2004). See also his first
book, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (Oxford, 1975).
6. W. D. Edmonds, Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon, 1789–1793 (Oxford, 1990).
7. Jacques Guilhaumou, Marseille republicaine, 1791–1793 (Paris, 1992).
8. D. M. G. Sutherland, Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French
Revolution (Cambridge, 2009).
9. M. L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, 1793–1795 (New York,
2000). The first two volumes were published by Princeton University Press in 1982 and
1988.
10. Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution
(Cambridge, MA, 1998).
11. Peter Jones, Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France: Six Villages Compared,
1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2003).
Political History of the French Revolution 591

12. Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lord, and
Murder in the Corbières, 1780–1830 (Oxford, 1999); and Living the French Revolution,
1789–1799 (New York, 2006).
13. Hans Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of
Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC, 1997).
14. William H. Sewell, Jr., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing

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Revolution at the Bastille,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
(Chicago, 2005): 225–70. An early version of this article appeared in Theory and Society
25, no. 6 (1996): 841–81.
15. M. P. Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789 and the French
Revolution (University Park, PA, 2003), and J. Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism:
Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA, 1996).
16. Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of
Modern Property (Oxford, 2016).
17. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National
Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790 (Princeton, 1996);
When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, MA, 2003); The Coming of the Terror in the French
Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015).
18. David Andress, Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in
the French Revolution (Woodbridge, UK, 2000); The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom
in Revolutionary France (New York, 2005).
19. Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French
Revolution (Oxford, 2013). As the title suggests, Linton sees the Terror as contingent, not
inevitable.
20. P. Gueniffey, La politique de la terreur: essai sur la violence revolutionnaire, 1789–1794
(Paris, 2000).
21. S. Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution
(London, 2012), first published as La liberte ou la mort: Essai sur la terreur et le terrorisme
(Paris, 2003).
22. Mette Harder, “A Second Terror: The Purges of French Revolutionary Legislators af-
ter Thermidor,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2015): 33–60.
23. J. -P. Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (Cambridge, 1997).
24. M. Biard, Missionnaires de la republique (Paris, 2002).
25. J. -C. Martin, Violence et revolution: Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris,
2006).
26. M. Alpaugh, Non-violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris,
1787–1789 (Cambridge, 2015).
27. B. Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre (Cambridge,
1994), first published as Comment sortir de la terreur (Paris, 1989).
28. J. Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
29. J. Cowans, To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy in the
French Revolution (New York, 2001).
30. H. G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the
Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville, VA, 2006), 349 for the quotation.
592 Journal of Social History Spring 2019

31. B. Gainot, 1799, un noveau jacobinisme? La democratie representative, une alternative a

Brumaire (Paris, 2001).
32. K. S. Vincent, Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism (New York, 2011).
33. Pierre Serna, “Every Revolution is a War of Independence,” in The French Revolution
in Global Perspective, eds. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca,
NY, 2013): 165–82.

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34. Maxime Kaci, Dans le tourbillon de la revolution: Mots d’ordre et engagements collectifs
aux frontières septentrionales (1791–1793) (Rennes, 2016).