XIV - CONCLUSION

Summary

Throughout this book I have been discussing the problems involved in writing the social history of the revolution. In doing so I have not intended to suggest that it was other than primarily a political revolution, a struggle for the possession of power and over the conditions in which power was to be exercised. Essentially the revolution was the overthrow of the old political system of the monarchy and the creation of a new one in the shape of the Napoleonic state. However, behind the political régime there is always the social structure, which is in a sense more fundamental and is certainly much more difficult to change. Once we begin to investigate this social background to the revolution, it is borne in on us how little notice ordinary political history has taken of it, and indeed how little we really know of the actual pattern of eighteenth-century French society and the impact on it of the revolution. The supposed social categories of our histories—bourgeois, aristocrats, sans-culottes—are all in fact political ones. Three-quarters of a century of revolutionary historical research, including much comment on the movement of social groupings, has been conducted under the influence of ideas derived from politics, transferring its categories to the context of social history. This research has itself in the end exploded the ideas which inspired it, and demonstrated the inadequacy of the social terminology employed and the politico-sociological theories it reflects. We know now that there was a much more complicated social pattern in eighteenth-century France than has commonly been recognised and that it demands a more sophisticated historical analysis.