Living the French Revolution, 1789-99 (review)

It is not uncommon to hear historians of the French Revolution lament the absence of a reigning paradigm for the 1989 bicentennial marked the last moment of true interpretive synthesis. Afterward, the historiography fragmented as sweeping analyses of the Revolution's causes and consequences gave way to monographs and narrative. That this has been a positive development is attested by Living the French Revolution, which highlights how multifaceted is our knowledge of common people's lives at the end of the eighteenth century. Mining the riches of two generations' scholarship to wed with his own prodigious research, Peter McPhee has produced an account of the French Revolution in the countryside that is both far-reaching and sharply detailed.

The French Revolution was not, McPhee insists, "irrelevant" to ordinary men and women, as historian Richard Cobb famously argues and as others have since repeated. Nor was the Revolution the work of urban militants overcoming the atavism of their rural peers. Rather, the roughly 90% of the population who lived on isolated farms or in the small towns and villages that dotted the French countryside played an active part on both sides of the revolutionary divide. "The local experience of the Revolution is best understood as a process of negotiation and confrontation with distant governments" McPhee argues; and, one might add, within rural communities themselves. Provincials were subjects in their own right, not mere rabble "being acted upon, and only occasionally lashing out in violent retribution." (5)

Dismissing the traditional priority given to legislation and revolutionary milestones, McPhee focuses on what mattered in the countryside. Thus, he makes short work of the abolition of the monarchy (the republican revolution of 1792 merits but a single paragraph) because rural people themselves had so little to say about it: "it was as if the aura of monarchy had evaporated with the King's attempt to flee fourteen months earlier." (110) Instead McPhee highlights local conflicts over resources, status, and responsibilities to the revolutionary state, tracing the changing rhythms of rural life and using vivid quotation to evoke provincials' hopes and disappointments: a nameless peasant springs to life when complaining bitterly, on the eve of revolution, that "the Seigneur treats us like slaves." (16)

As McPhee makes clear, it was competition over reform as much as resistance to it that gave the revolutionary dynamic such energy. The attack on privilege, for instance, was initiated and broadened at the local level well beyond what Parisian deputies intended. The August 4 legislation of 1789, abolishing seigneurial dues in exchange for compensation, initially appeared to be a successful answer to the rural insurrections known as the "Great Fear." But peasants, emboldened by "the revolutionary shift in relations of power," (76) renewed resistance—through violence, legal challenges, and the time-honored practice of foot-dragging—when the National Assembly attempted to set the value of compensation. Legislators finally acquiesced with decrees that "changed forever the economic structures and social and political relationships of the countryside" 135) by striking down almost all forms of seigneurialism without compensation. Not all competition was, however, equally clear-cut or equally successful. If the battle against seigneurialism was won largely by and for peasants who had borne its weight for generations, the struggle over common lands left no one satisfied as successive governments sought vainly to balance the interests of the poor, protection of the environment, and the guarantee of property rights.

Moving fluidly between social and cultural history, McPhee reminds us that the Revolution's impact is not to be found strictly in adherence or resistance to norms established in Paris at the time or retrospectively by historians. Rates of electoral participation, for instance, do not tell us all we need know about the Revolution's reach into the countryside. New systems of administration, new ideas of sovereignty, and new kinds of association integrated some citizens into revolutionary political culture, just as requisitioning or atheism drove others from it. McPhee describes, with an exhaustiveness remarkable in...