A Trend that Has No Trend

Historically Speaking November/December 2006 A Trend that Has No Trend EdwardJ. Woell Why did the French Revolution occur? What accounts for its constandy changing quality? Why was it so hard for the French to stabilize the revolutionary government and bring the construction of a new regime to a definitive end? Even though such questions are well over 200 years old, they have continued to confound scholars studying one of the most bewildering and perplexing events in human history. Few if any episodes have been more written about than the French Revolution , yet historians today seem no more capable of providing satisfactory answers to these basic questions. Indeed, finding a comprehensive explanation of the French Revolution —one that is able to answer all the great questions the event has raised—has fast become the academic equivalent of the search for the Holy Grail. But it was not always this way. There was a time when understanding the French Revolution was relatively easy. Almost seventy years ago Georges Lefebvre published a synthetic masterpiece, later published in English as The Coming of the French Revolution. The book dominated scholarly interpretation of the Revolution for decades, in part because Lefebvre framed the event in such a coherent and convenient manner. The French Revolution , according to Lefebvre, marked a turning point in history whereby the feudal order collapsed and was replaced by the new economic tour de force, capitalism. In accord with this transition, and in keeping with Karl Marx's notion that all history is guided by class struggle, Lefebvre represented the Revolution as a conflict between the two most powerful segments of French society, the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Given its insistence on the inviolable right of private property and its condemnation of the seigneurial and corporative structures of the Old Regime, the French Revolution marked a transference of political power from the exploitative, feudalistic nobility to an even more oppressive middle class, thus ushering in the bourgeois era of history— so necessary before the ultimate and inevitable revolution begun by the proletariat could commence. Lefebvre's application of Marxist theory to the Revolution, later labeled the "classical" interpretation , was thoroughly convincing not only because it made such simple sense, but also because it was allencompassing . It perfecdy integrated the social and economic conflicts of late 1 8th-century France with the political upheaval marking the revolutionary decade. By the 1960s, however, there was only one problem: much that underlay the classical interpretaFrench citizens with heads of "traitors" carried on pikes, July 1789. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZC2-3565]. tion was found to be inaccurate, if not just plain wrong. Or so said Alfred Cobban, who saw the social and economic structures of late Old-Regime France quite differendy. He, along with other Anglo-American scholars like George Taylor and Colin Lucas, disputed the notion that the pre-revolutionary elite in France could be clearly defined as either "nobility" or "bourgeoisie." To them it seemed as if the line between the two groups was extremely blurred, thus calling into question the supposed class war between them. These scholars noted for example, that members of the nobility had as much capitalistic savvy as many bourgeois investors, that many wealthy bourgeois were becoming ennobled—just as many nobles were marrying into the middle class—and that the Marxist concept of the bourgeoisie controlling the means of production proved ill-fitting for a mosdy preindustrial economy in 18th-century France. These findings turned the classical interpretation into a veritable sieve, earning these scholars the somewhat dubious moniker of "revisionists." Although the revisionists all but dismanded the classical interpretation, they acknowledged an inability to provide as convenient or comprehensive an interpretation as that of Lefebvre and his disciples. In essence, they created what one revisionist called "a somewhat painful void." Even so, in rejecting the primacy of social and economic conflict emphasized by Marxist historians, revisionists underscored the role of politics, both in the coming of the Revolution and in its unfolding. They placed the fiscal crisis that led to the meeting of the Estates General at the center of the Revolution's origins, and portrayed the event as a...