Plus Ça Change, Plus Ça Change: Some Recent Work on the French Revolution (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Plus Ça Change, Plus Ça Change: Some Recent Work on the French Revolution Richard Bienvenu University of Missouri The Revolution in Questions is the possibly punning title of one of the flood of books recently published in France to mark the Great Revolution's bicentennial and to help sate the voracious appetite ofthe well informed reading public that seems to exist in France. Jacques Sole's summation ofthe current state of revolutionary historiography employs the centuries old catechetical form. Solé starts with a series of substantial questions on "profound causes" ("Was the Revolution a Triumph of the Enlightenment?") and ends with equally weighty problems: "Decisive Changes?" Sole's book is thorough, well organized, and even-handed. It is also eventempered , and that is what is perhaps one ofthe more significant things about this work of high popularization: its equable tone suggests that since the very survival ofthe Revolution—or rather, the survival of its ultimate embodiment, the (Fifth) French Republic—is at last no longer in question, it can now be subjected to a cooler kind of scrutiny, even by historians who are French. That this should be deemed significant might come as a surprise to American readers who are not familiar with the recent history of the Revolution's own history, a historiography which in the last thirty years has been in turmoil. From an olympian point of view, this turmoil is simply a sign of health, proof that professional history is indeed what Pieter Geyl said it is: debate without end. For those ofus whose training as historians took place some thirty years or so ago, the turmoil and its apparent resolution in what appears to be a durable new consensus is rather more than an edifying spectacle: we have, mutatis mutandi, witnessed and sometimes contributed to a kind of Copernican Revolution, the dissolution of an entire historiographical cosmos. For still others, the apparent triumph—an academic, commercial, and, some would argue, political triumph—of a new view of the causes, course, and meaning ofthe revolution is at best a historiographical Thermidorean reaction1 and at worst a politically motivated and reactionary counter-revolution. Solé announces the end of the once dominant interpretation at the very beginning of his book: For historians today the French Revolution is not at all what it used to be. For a long time historians had at their disposal a 75 76Rocky Mountain Review seductive explanation of the revolution. A major episode in the ascension of the Western bourgeoisie, the revolution of 1789 originated, in the first place, in the slow decline of the feudal aristocracy under the weight ofcapitalist development. In the realm ofideas the advance ofEnlightenment ideas reflected these economic and social transformations, while the crisis of the monarchy of the old regime stemmed from its inability to adapt itself to the new developments. (11) This must strike us as a rather bland death notice, if we recall that the old interpretation had behind it the powerful authority ofthe Marxist paradigm and rested on the herculean researches of a succession of master-historians (who were also Marxists) such as Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul, and others; that it had an institutional base in the universities in France which trained, certified, and provided young historians with jobs2; and that it controlled a powerful outlet for the dissemination ofthese researches in the premierjournal for revolutionary studies, the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (AhRf). If few historians are still willing to fall into the arms of this "seductive explanation" ofthe French Revolution, iffew continue to believe in and recite the "revolutionary catechism,"3 this is so, Solé argues, above all because of the work done over the "last twenty or so years" by what he and his compatriots call "anglo-saxon researchers," that is, historians who happen to write in English and who, he believes, benefit from the "dynamism of the university departments ofthe United States or of Great Britain." It comes as something of a pleasant shock to a non-French historian ofFrance to read Sole's warning to his compatriots: "It would be stupid to regret or to take offense at this because of a narrow nationalism" (12-13). It...