A Concise History of the French Revolution (review)

This book provides a good overview of the French Revolution. In the opening chapters on the old regime, Sylvia Neely highlights the orientation of the state, its ministries and its budget toward warfare. She also highlights the state's inherent conservativeness. Kings incorporated the provinces into the realm over the centuries by promising to preserve their privileges. These included the political authority and fiscal immunity of local magnates. Other privileges belonged to fiscal office holders, who withheld part of the tax revenue as profit for their services, and to judges, who collected fees in addition to their government salaries. Each king pledged, upon assuming the throne, to preserve privileges, not to reform the state.

Neely bucks the recent trend toward the rehabilitation of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The country was still agricultural, and the overwhelming majority of the population resided in rural areas. The values of the nobles set the standard, and men who made their fortunes invested in land, purchased fine houses, retired from business, and sought to live as the nobles did. The path to career advancement was to buy land and an office, and to start to live nobly while the generations accrued and titles became hereditary. The bourgeoisie, Neely writes, did not evince class solidarity.

Neely mentions background causes of the Revolution such as the century's intellectual movements, which weakened traditions and dissipated allegiance to the old regime. Partly for this reason, many of the beneficiaries of privilege did not defend the old regime with as much vigor as they once did. Neely also draws out the implications of developments within the royal court. Louis XVI differed from his predecessor in his fidelity to his wife, Marie-Antoinette. She differed from previous queens by surrounding herself with a few chosen friends rather than with the illustrious noble families. These could not forge alliances with preferred mistresses to advance their interests and obtain pensions. Neely argues that this novel situation of irremediable exclusion from influence at court helps to explain why some of the grandees led the reform and oppositional movements of 1788 and 1789.

Neely places particular emphasis on contingency and accident. She states in the introduction that up until the very end, no one knew that the Revolution would occur. No revolutionary groups plotted to make it happen. The government made no plans to prevent it. It was unexpected, and its further development was even more unexpected. Contemporaries made, what would seem to us, short-sighted decisions, because they could never have imagined the radical consequences.

This focus on the narrative is a refreshing corrective, for ever since François Furet's polemics against Albert Soboul—Furet's mockery of retelling the stories of revolutionary heroes and of unwarranted leaps from social analysis to the sequence of events—historians have been reticent to provide a meaningful narrative. But as Neely points out, the events shaped the political perspectives of the revolutionaries and gave meaning to their lives. She thus draws heavily on the methodology of William Doyle to show that events created new contexts requiring new analyses and decisions from the people involved. Narrative itself helps to explain the Revolution.

Thus, from approximately page 50 onward, Neely provides the story of the decision of the Parlement of Paris that the Estates General should meet in the forms of 1614 favorable to the privileged orders. She describes the revolutionary meetings in the Palais Royal in Paris in June 1789 financed by the duc d'Orléans, as the deputies of the Third Estate met in Versailles amid throngs of enthusiastic supports and in the face of an especially aristocratic representation of the Second Estate. She tells of the decision of the Constituent Assembly to disenfranchise women and citizens of modest means. Neely describes the polarization of opinions over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the institution of the monarchy in the wake of the king's ill-fated attempt to flee the country in 1791.

Neely offers a balanced interpretation...