Mirrors of Revolution: Conflict and Political Identity in Early Modern Europe (review)

Is there anything more dead than a controversy that has been abandoned for more stimulating approaches? Forensic investigation can, however, contribute to our understanding of what went wrong and why or how the snares of contemporary ideas and politics can and should be avoided. In some cases, those looking in from the outside, like Professor Benigno, see more of the game than the participants.

This is high-level historiography, clarifying, but not for the most part judging, how the canonical explanations of events designated ‘Revolutions’ came into being and why in a different age a different viewpoint has led to a rewriting of the established narrative. Whether the ‘reality’ of such complex events can be recovered or whether the image reflected in the historian’s mirror will always shape the story remains problematic. Benigno is optimistic that from the ashes of revisionism, the Phoenix of understanding can rise. While the human race has always been captivated by theoretical models, Benigno thinks that, imperfect as they turn out to be, they provide the springboard for further research and new insights.

This is an updating and translation of his 1999 book, Specchi della rivoluzione: Conflitto e identita politica nell’Europa moderna. The book contains four studies – an account, familiar to those who lived in it and through it, of the debate over the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution, as good a summary as one could expect of debates that consumed the lives of many distinguished historians. More illuminating to historians who do not read widely in languages other than English, are his re-examinations of the French civil war known as the Fronde, where he shows how events can be written out of history when they do not suit those creating a political identity, and the Neapolitan uprising of 1647–48 that has been marginalized simply because the focus of European history in the period has made it so. In both these studies, Benigno provides the historiography alongside his own reconsideration of the multiple centrifugal events that formed part of what happened. He makes clear why these events are ‘hard to fit into the traditional political categories with which the sociopolitical conflict was evaluated’ (p. 322).

His final conclusion that both English and French revisionism resolved into a ‘traditional, reassuring empiricism, and a no less traditional set of implicit theoretical assumptions’ (p. 325) suggests that the ‘battle of the pens’ has not yet resulted in a new paradigm. Nevertheless, he argues that the struggle was not in vain as it has uncovered a complex, hitherto concealed stratification of events, as well as insights into how history is written.