Debating the French Revolution

The French Revolution used to be one of the most fiercely contested historical subjects. It was often said that its historians didn’t just want to interpret the event, but to refight it. More than a century ago, the French republican historian of the Revolution Alphonse Aulard devoted an entire book to refuting the arguments and exposing the errors of the conservative writer Hippoylte Taine. From the 1960’s through the bicentennial of 1989, the quarrels provoked by the historian François Furet, who discerned pathological tendencies in the Revolution that he claimed led ineluctably to the Terror, often turned white hot. Steven Kaplan wrote a very long and interesting book about the bicentennial that centered on Furet and his influential reinterpretation of the subject.

Mais où sont les querelles d’antan? Furet’s student Patrice Gueniffey, whose work often looks for inspiration to the old counter-revolutionary right, can still write about the Revolution with real sting, notably in this ferocious 2018 review of Annie Jourdan’s survey of the event (“This pointless history has as much charm as the plastic flowers one sees from time to time on a gravestone. In this case, on the one under which lies the corpse of the French Revolution”). But for decades now, Gueniffey has transferred his principal attention from the Revolution to Napoleon Bonaparte. My own 2007 book The First Total War provoked some very strong criticism from historians of the Revolution (including Annie Jourdan!), but the controversy did not turn around the meaning of the French Revolution itself.

But one can still hear echoes of the older debates, notably in a fascinating new exchange on H-France between Florida State’s Rafe Blaufarb, and the French historians Marc Belissa (Université de Nanterre) and Yannick Bosc (Université de Rouen). Belissa and Bosc’s book Le consulat de Bonaparte might seem, like Gueniffey’s work, to be tangential to the history of the French Revolution, since it focuses on the Napoleonic era. But as Blaufarb says in his review (to which the authors have responded here): “Ultimately, their argument seems to aim more at making a distinction between what they see as the two great stages of the Revolution--1789-1795 vs. 1795-1799--than about the nature of the Consulate itself.”

Belissa and Bosc both belong to a group of French historians inspired by the work of Florence Gauthier on “droit naturel”—and, more distantly, by the Marxist tradition. They see the initial stages of the Revolution, through the fall of Robespierre, as a period in which resistance to oppression was considered a natural right, and property “a social right subordinate to the right to existence enjoyed by all citizens.” The founders of the Directory in 1795, however, removed natural right from the Republic’s theoretical foundations and turned property into an “unlimited” right. Belissa and Bosc outlined this argument in an earlier work on the Directory, and the new book builds on it by insisting on continuities between the Directory and Napoleon’s Consulate. More broadly, their work presents the radical Jacobin republic of 1793-94, and the figure of Maximilien Robespierre (who is more usually depicted as the principal architect of the Terror), in a very favorable light. Indeed, Robespierre has not had quite so favorable a reception since the work of Albert Mathiez a century ago. I had my say on another of Bosc’s books about Robespierre in a recent review of my own.

Rafe Blaufarb, the author of a truly important book on property in the Revolution, does not accept Bosc and Belissa’s claim that the founding of the Directory marks a fundamental rupture in the French Revolution. He argues that the various revolutionary regimes all agreed on the “primacy of property ownership.” None of them subordinated it in a serious way to social rights. What distinguishes the Directory is not that it tried to instantiate an “unlimited” right to property, but that it stopped trying to expand the ranks of property-owners, as the earlier regimes had done. In their response, Belissa and Bosc insist that Blaufarb is using too narrow a definition of “property.” Robespierre and his allies also included “common property” in the concept, they argue, and tried to ban any type of property dealing that threatened the welfare of others.

Personally, I think that Blaufarb gets the better of the exchange. But the great advantage of electronic forums like H-France is that readers can see both sides, go back to the books themselves, and make up their own minds. Bonne lecture!