On Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Finding Our Way through Revolutionary Politics, History, and Art

The best academic writers tread a fine line. On the one hand, they must be meticulous and careful, buttressing claims with close readings and archival findings. On the other hand, they should aspire to engage readers and spark interest by providing innovative syntheses and contributing to ongoing debates. This feat is made more difficult by the vogue for case studies. Like a scholarly politique de bascule, there seems to be a reaction underway against the previous generation's enthrallment with grand theories; call it the "new positivism." Although admirable, the sheer volume of information produced by positivists can feel distracting to readers, raw and indigeste. The books reviewed here reflect the excitement of archival discovery, but they prove more challenged by the scholar's duty of marshalling accumulated evidence to prove a point. Their stores of knowledge are a wonder to behold, yet the minutiae sometimes overwhelm. A bit of pruning might have shaped this work to better effect, and saved a few trees as well.

In an arresting opener, Michael Sonenscher states: "This book is about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution" yet a footnote to this first sentence warns: "It is also an attempt to correct some of the gaps or mistakes" in three earlier publications by Sonenscher. "It is also a book about Rousseau," Sonenscher continues, "and, no less centrally, a book about salons," whose aim is to "open up a way towards the real political history of the French Revolution": in other words, how ancient republican politics conjoined with modern debt-based economics so that the latter came to be seen as the means to revive the former (1, 3, my emphasis). This breathless overture, which confidently takes on a number of seemingly unrelated and extremely complex topics, is emblematic of Sonenscher's style. Sonenscher's insights into the moral and economic history of prerevolutionary France are wide ranging and extremely well documented; few can rival his breadth. Some of his findings, for example, on Robespierre's protosocialist ideas of using public finance to reimburse citizens for contributions to political life, cast revolutionary politics in surprising new lights (53). But there exists so much detail that the narrative movement sometimes runs aground.

Inspired by a little-known salon joke that originated in Mme de Tencin's custom of offering velvet breeches to her habitués on New Year's Day, Sonenscher's alternative history of the sans-culottes is arguably the best part of this book. Marshalling evidence from the correspondence of salonnières Tencin and Geoffrin, and literary sources such as Mercier's Nouveau Paris, Sonenscher counters classic themes of both political history (Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l'an II, 1958) and costume history (Daniel Roche, La Culture des apparences, 1989; Nicole Pellegrin, Les Vêtements de la liberté, 1989) to argue that the label sansculotte originally designated writers whose inelegant dress signaled their lack of a patroness. The transformation of a salon joke into an emblem of republican politics in chapter 2 typifies Sonenscher's method: it begins as a history of marginalized intellectuals, morphs into an account of the tension between free-market economics and royal privilege, throws in a foray into vitalism, and liberal digressions on writers such as Rousseau, Mercier, and especially the unsuccessful poet Nicolas Gilbert (widely considered the "first" sans-culotte), and concludes: "The joke was a joke about distinction. In its first, salon-based guise, it made fun of men of letters and their female patrons. In its second, more morally charged, guise, it made fun of patronage itself...