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Unnecessary revolution: the case of France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

W. G. Runciman
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Extract

For all the controversy that continues to surround the course of events in France between the summoning of the Estates-General and the fall of Brienne in the summer of 1788 and the summoning of the Convention and the fall of the monarchy in the summer of 1792, it is nowhere in dispute that they constituted a revolution— that is, in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. III.7), ‘a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it’. Indeed, they constituted such an overthrow in a manner and to a degree without precedent. Neither the English Civil War (and still less the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) nor the War of American Independence are properly comparable with them. In calling the French Revolution ‘unnecessary’, therefore, I am not seeking to minimize either its importance (of which more later) or its novelty. Nor do I maintain that the problems by which the ancien régime was confronted could have been resolved by any scheme of reform which would have preserved intact the existing forms and distribution of power. I mean only that the Revolution was unnecessary in two different senses: first, it only took place as it did because of a wholly unfore-seeable series of coincidences; second, its eventual outcome in terms of the broad difference in social structure between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France would have happened in any case. These assertions, moreover, are not—or so I hope to show—as controversial as they may seem: properly stated, both should be equally acceptable to ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ historians alike.

Type
Unnecessary Revolution
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , November 1983 , pp. 291 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1983

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References

(1) For a summary of the recent historiography of the Revolution, see Doyle, William, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford 1980)Google Scholar, Part I (‘A Consensus and its Collapse: writings on Revolutionary origraphy gins since 1939’). I am also indebted to Professor Doyle for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.

(2) See my Origins of States: the case of Archaic Greece, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIV (1982), 351–378Google Scholar. Capitalism without Classes: the case of Classical Rome, British Journal of Sociology, XXIV (1983), 157–181Google Scholar; and Accelerating Social Mobility: the case of Anglo-Saxon England, Past and Present (forthcoming).

(3) Mousnier, Roland, Les institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue 1598–1789, I: Société et État(Paris 1974), p. 128Google Scholar. It parican perhaps be objected that the ‘uniquement’ is too strong: the right to a seat, and docuwith it a vote, in the Cour des Pairs was a political, not merely a social, one. But there can be no dispute that the preeminence of the dues et pairs was predominantly social.

(4) Labatut, Jean-Pierre, Les dues et pairs de France au XVIIe siècle: étude sociale(Paris 1972), p. 431Google Scholar.

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(6) Ibid. p. 428: ‘Dans certains documents, les sans-culottes sont identifiés à ceux qui ne possèdent rien, aux prolétaires au sens traditionnel du terme’.

(7) See the glossary entry given by Rudé, George, The Crowd in the French Revolution(Oxford 1959), p. 256Google Scholar.

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(19) Op. cit. Chapter VIII.

(20) Even the fiercely moustachioed révolutionnaire of the Terror turns out under the legitiscrutiny of Cobb, Richard, Les armées révolutionnaires: instrument de terreur dans les départements, avril 1793-florial An II, I (Paris 1961), p. 186Google Scholar, to be ‘qu'un Parisien déjà déâge mûr, père de famille à la vie pai-sible de petit commerçant de quartier’.

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(23) As e.g. inPalmade, Guy P., Capitalimse et capitalizes français au XIXe siècle(Paris 1961)Google Scholar.

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(28) Lefebvrb, , Le mythe de la Révolution française,Annales historiques de la Révolution française, XXVII (1955), p. 342Google Scholar.

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(31) Le mythe de la Révolution française, p. 343.

(32) Zeldin, Theodore, France 1848–1945, I(Oxford 1973), p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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(36) These examples are cited by Cobban, , The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, p. 29Google Scholar from Carré, H., La noblesse de France et l'opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle(1930), pp. 130–1Google Scholar.

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(38) Furet, François & Richet, Denis, La Révolution française, I(Paris 1965), p. 59Google Scholar.

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(44) Op. cit. p. 306.

(45) Cf. Forster, Robert, The provincial noble: a reappraisal, American Historical Review, LXVIII (1962–1963), p. 683Google Scholar.

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(47) Ibid. p. 129.

(48) Taylor, George V., Noncapitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revoles, lution, American Historical Review, LXXII (1967). PP. 487. 489Google Scholar.

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(52) La noblesse au XVIIIe siècle, pp. 52–55.

(53) Cf. Faÿ, Bernard, L'esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle(Paris 1925), p. 164Google Scholar on the image of America as ‘un peuple souverain, aussi vertueux et pieux que libre’.

(54) Doyle, , Origins of the French Revolution, p. 64Google Scholar, citing (n. 30) Pillorget, R., Les problèmes du maintien de l'ordre public en France entre 1774 et 1789, L'information historique, XXXIX (1977)Google Scholar.

(55) La noblesse au XVIIIe siècle, p. 27.

(56) Taylor, Noncapitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution, p. 493, and Revolutionary and nonrevolutionary Content in the Cahiers of 1789: an interim report, French Historical Studies, VII (1972), p. 487Google Scholar. More recently, it has been argued conby Higonnet, Patrice, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles in the French Revolution(Oxford 1981)Google Scholar that the Revolutionaries Revoattacked the nobility not because of what actual nobles had said or done, but as an ideological category against whom they could the better define themselves: see in particular his Chapter Five (‘Ideological anti-nobilism’), and cf. Paine's letter to Burke of 17 January 1790 cited by Cobban, , The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, p. 82Google Scholar(and from Cobban by Higon-net, op. cit. p. 152).

(57) Soboul, , Prédcis d'histoire de la Réolution française, pp. 8, 9Google Scholar.

(58) On the orthodox view, to acknowledge (as Lefebvre did) that a minority of nobles cut themselves off from their order 'is not to say that the nobility, or any part of it, is to be included in the reference of the concept of the “bourgeoisie”. It is to say the opposite; that having entered the bourgeoisie, the minority is no longer conby sidered in law or public opinion as “noble”. (Shapiro, Gilbert in Greenlaw, Ralph W. (ed.), The Social Origins of the French Revoattacked lution: the debate on the role of the middle classes(Lexington, Mass., 1975), p. 235)Google Scholar. But this does not contradict the revisionist view that the conflict within the propertied ilite cut across the division between the orders, any more than the revisionist view contradicts the view that the bourgeoisie were, in the end, the winners and the nobillution, ity the losers.

(59) The phrase is that of Colin Lucas, Nobles, bourgeois and the origins of the French Revolution, in Johnson, Douglas (ed.), French Society and the Revolution(Cambridge 1976), p. 107Google Scholar, by which he means various areas within this complex social structure where friction developed during the century of which ‘possibly the remmost significant in terms of the genesis of the Revolution was the one which seems to have developed in the established channels of social promotion’.

(60) It seems now agreed that the con- tents of the cahiers of the Third Estate comcannot plausibly be construed as anticipating the future programme of the Constituent Assembly, and even, perhaps, that it was the cahiers of the nobility which more fully disclosed ‘la volonté non de conserver mais de changer, d'abolir, de détruire, de remmost placer’ (Chaussinand-Nogaret, , La noblesse au XVIIIe siècle, p. 183)Google Scholar. But orthodox and revisionist historians can surely both agree with Lucas (op. cit. p. 129) that what caused the revolutionary leaders actually to ‘jettison privilege in mid-'80. was ‘the comcannot bination of the counter-offensive of the Ancien Regime and anti-privilege pressure from below’.

(61) The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, p. 52.

(62) Le mythe de la Révolution française, p. 340.

(63) Bloch, Marc, Les caractères origi-naux de l'histoire rurale française(Oslo 1931), p. 147Google Scholar.

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(65) La Révolution française et les pay-sans, p. 263.

(66) Cf. e.g. Trebilcock, Clive, The Industrialisation of the Continental Powers 1780–1914(London 1981), Ch. IIIGoogle Scholar.

(67) See Chaunu, Pierre, La Civilisation de l'Europe classique (Paris 1966), p. 344Google Scholar, who even suggests that the Revolution ‘par un choc en retour inévitable, a même provoqué un durcissement de ce qui pouvait subsister des anciennes structures par ordres’.

(68) Bergier, J.-F., The industrial bourgeoisie and the rise of the working class 1700–1914, in Cipolla, Carlo M. (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: the industrial revolution(London 1973), p. 421, who goes on to say that ‘Their role in the formation of the working class can be regarded as non existent, if indeed it was not negative’Google Scholar.

(69) Zeldin, , op. cit. pp. 108–9Google Scholar.

(70) Noncapitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution, p. 497.

(71) Morazé, Charles, La France bourgeoise: XVIIe-XXe siècles3 (Paris 1962), p. 87Google Scholar.

(72) Zeldin, op. cit. Chapter XIV: The place of politics in life, gives some good examples.

(73) The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, p. 171.

(74) Higonnet, , op. cit. p. 363Google Scholar.

(75) Cf. Plamenatz, John, The Revolutionary Movement in France 1815–71(London 1952), p. 4Google Scholar.

(76) The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, p. II.