1 - Historical Background

Summary

In his justly admired work Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), François Furet claimed that the Revolution had at last passed into history: it had finally settled into the French past as an event, still endlessly discussable, but no longer a galvanizing political issue. His judgment was amply borne out by the innocuous pageantry of the recent bicentennial celebration and the fact that the French government did not think it at all odd to invite Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, nor did the two leading conservatives of the Western world think it inappropriate to attend. Yet some of those in attendance would have remembered a time when the Revolution still had the power to organize European politics in radically divisive ways. Mussolini had spoken openly of the Fascist revolution as an attempt to undo the damage of the French one, an analysis that was absorbed by Franco and Hitler, for whom the immediate threat of Marxism was merely the logical extension of what had been unleashed in 1789. In France, the Vichy government portrayed itself not as collaborationist, but as representative of traditional French values overturned by the Revolution. The homely virtues inscribed on Petain's banner “Travail, famille, patrie” were clearly intended as a rebuttal to the promiscuously flamboyant “Liberté, egalité, fraternité” of the revolutionaries. In turn, the épuration that followed Vichy's collapse found historical precedent in the bloody purge of royalists more than 150 years before.