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Revolutionary France: 1770-1880

Autor: Robert Forster
Fecha: Summer 1994
From: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History(Vol. 25, Issue 1)
Publisher: MIT Press Journals
Tipo de documento: Book review
Length: 728 words

Texto completo:
The bicentennial of the French Revolution has brought forth many fine histories of that pivotal event in as many languages. But none
has attained the scope of Furet's volume in the projected five-volume history of France from 987 A.D. to 1987. Superbly translated
from the French by Antonia Nevill, Furet's handsome volume charts a critical century in that 1,000 years.

After Penser la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1978) and his revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution, Furet's history of France
from Turgot to Gambetta contains some surprises. Here intellectual history is imbedded in a rich political culture, and both formal
ideologies and more elusive public attitudes are closely related to changing circumstances and contingencies. Most compelling is
Furet's emphasis on the weight of the collective memories of the Revolutionary generation (including the Napoleonic episode) on the
political attitudes and behavior of the French political and literary elites throughout the nineteenth century.

In contrast to most of the recent revisionist histories of the French Revolution, the Terror (1793-94) is not the centerpiece of Furet's
book. In fact, the decade of the Revolution represents less than one-third of the volume. Furet's main concern is the legacy of a
revolution that announced homo democraticus but was unable to reconcile popular sovereignty or direct "transparent" democracy
with parliamentary representation until the consolidation of the Third Republic in 1876. Furet, therefore, marshalls his thick factual
narrative behind the theme of "the dilemma of democratic representation" which unfolds in two major cycles, the first from 1787 to
1814 and the second from 1814 to 1880, all deftly deployed in ten fifty-page chapters (III). This is parliamentary history in the grand
manner, replete with insightful vignettes of political leaders, literati, and social thinkers. Like Tocqueville or Guizot, Furet punctuates
his analysis with reflective pauses that are often tinged with paradox.(1)

The ghost of Tocqueville haunts much of this history, as if the Norman nobleman had lived long enough to complete his projected
history of the Revolution and beyond. Tocqueville is present in Furet's paradox of centralization and perpetual political crises, in the
tension between messianic crusading and national glory, and in the struggle between constitutional liberalism and populist equality
from 1789 and 1793. Captivated by Furet's parade of paired vignettes--Turgot and Calonne, Sieyes and Mirabeau, Chateaubriand
and Madame de Stael, Thiers and Guizot, Michelet and Blanc, Remusat and Buchez, Renan and Ferry, and Broglie and Gambetta--
one senses that the history of France is a litany of extraordinarily versatile minds which sometime override the theme of
representative government. After all, nineteenth-century France is much richer even than politics. Most unexpected, Maximillian
Robespierre emerges as a believable, if frightening, person--part ideologue, part shrewd politician, living in special circumstances and
not simply as the embodiment of an abstraction from Rousseau. Here we might be reading Robert R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
(Princeton, 1941) or Crane Brinton, Decade of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1934) along with Tocqueville, Recollections.

This major work is not derivative, even though Furet's debt to "Anglo-Saxon" as well as to classic French historians from Quinet to
Lefebvre is patent and avowed. On the contrary, Revolutionary France marks a return to political and literary history in the best sense
of the genre, written in a lively and felicitous style. This achievement and his unmistakable endorsement of France's long march
toward liberal parliamentary democracy place Furet in the great tradition of Macaulay.(2) This is no slight praise. In addition to elegant
exposition and vivid portrait, Furet and Macaulay share the heroic theme of the long voyage toward constitutional representative
government. For Furet, the haven of a "French 1688" is finally reached, not in 1830, but in 1876.

1 Alexis de Tocqueville (trans. Henry Reeve), Democracy in America (New York, 1951), 2 v.; idem (trans. George Lawrence),
Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 (New Brunswick, 1986); idem (trans. Stuart Gilbert), The Old Regime and the French
Revolution (Garden City, 1955); Francois Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe et en France (Paris, 1838), 6 v.

2 Edgar Quinet, Critique de la Revolution (Paris, 1867); Georges Lefebvre (trans. R. R. Palmer), The Coming of the French
Revolution (Princeton, 1947); idem, La Revolution Francaise (Paris, 1957), 2 v.; idem, Etudes sur la Revolution Francaise (Paris,
1954); Thomas Babington Macaulay (ed. C. H. Firth), The History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1913-15), 6 v.

Robert Forster Johns Hopkins University

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
Cita de fuente (MLA 8)
Forster, Robert. "Revolutionary France: 1770-1880." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 25, no. 1, 1994, p. 128+. Gale
Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A16125598/AONE?u=colmex&sid=AONE&xid=7ea94976. Accessed 24 Nov.
2020.
Número de documento de Gale: GALE|A16125598