An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Francois Furet's Penser la Revolution francaise in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s

François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française was one of the most important works in the late 1970s’ critique of totalitarianism. Leading French intellectuals to see communism and revolution as totalitarian, this critique transformed Furet’s political consciousness and provided him with a new understanding of revolutionary politics that he used to reinterpret the French Revolution. Penser la Révolution française, in turn, played an important role in antitotalitarian politics and in Furet’s recasting of his memory of his past communist engagement. In projecting totalitarianism onto the French Revolution, Furet implicitly explained the communist engagement of his generation as a by-product of the supposed illiberalism of French political culture and confirmed antitotalitarian intellectuals in their belief that a threat of totalitarianism existed within the French Left.