Liberty or Death: The French Revolution by Peter Mcphee (review)

Integrating large-scale political history with the lived experience of common French people, Peter McPhee’s Liberty or Death: The French Revolution offers a valuable panorama of France’s Revolutionary decade. Looking beyond the Marxist/Revisionist debates that have long characterized the historiography, McPhee insists on placing changes in political culture in a broader social setting, describing the Revolution as a “process of negotiation and confrontation” (p. xii) leading to terror and dispossession, but also radical hope, fitful democratization, and empowering changes.

Having previously written books concerning French rural life during the Revolution, the era’s environmental history, France’s nineteenth-century revolutions, a biography of Robespierre, and a shorter French Revolution survey text, McPhee expertly weaves these themes together into a broader tableau. Few historians possess a comparable breadth of experience from which to see the Revolution as a multisided phenomenon.

In explaining the coming of the Revolution, McPhee manages to emphasize social causes “originating deep in French society” (p. 80) without falling into determinism. Examining how political culture developed in tandem with lived experience, he expertly outlines how a panoply of causes contributed to the unanticipated political rupture that would become the French Revolution. Only through a “coincidence of unprecedented political tension and economic crisis” (p. 59) did the Revolution take the unprecedentedly drastic form it did. A combination of “anticipation, menace and fear” (p. 74) pushed the revolutionary dynamic forward, with combinations of idealism and real interests driving groups and individuals into increasingly stringent revolutionary and counterrevolutionary camps.

With scholarly attention in recent years focusing principally on the origins and politics of the Terror, McPhee contests the recent focus on Enlightenment philosophy as an explanatory mechanism and instead emphasizes the severity of the internal divisions and potentially mortal external threats facing France. Amidst both foreign and civil wars, “a thorough purge of their enemies” (p. 163) seemed to both sides the only reliable method to solve the political crisis in which the only choices seemed to be, as the author emphasizes, Liberty or Death. Beyond a merely cultural interpretation, McPhee emphasizes how the choices common French people made to support, oppose, or evade the Revolutionary state were complex and varied—but closely followed their economic and social interests. Far from being a paranoid psychosis, the Revolution and its dangers could not have been more real for those who lived through the era.

The Revolution’s legacies, as McPhee details in his final chapters, would become as endlessly complex as the Revolution itself. By 1799, after five post-Thermidorian years of failed compromise and growing disillusionment, the Revolutionary decade for many French became seen as “a decade of fear: of privation, violence and insecurity” (p. 341). Yet the trauma of terror would for many be exceeded by the mass conscription and war casualties that continued unabated until 1815, leaving few families untouched. McPhee notes, however, that by the end of the Napoleonic era, peasant life expectancy (aided by Revolutionary land redistributions) had increased by more than a decade, and the social landscape of France changed irrevocably toward a broader spreading of wealth and greater social equality.

In a longer view, McPhee argues, “The Revolution left a legacy of multiple and conflicting memories to both inspire and terrify” (p. 361). Future generations of activists promoting popular democracy, the modern welfare state, and dictatorial egalitarianism, both in France and across much of the world, would take inspiration from the Revolution’s innovations, and even conservatives in time would find it necessary to selectively appropriate elements of the Revolutionary legacy. McPhee describes the Revolution as “world-historical,” in the sense that “the fundamental questions posed and probed by the French Revolution remain at the heart of all democratic political life everywhere” (p. 370). The expansiveness of the Revolution’s ambitions proved too great to fully succeed, but provided at least a partial template for all reform movements and revolutionary upheavals to follow.

No book, of course, can treat all aspects of...