Le Livre Noir de la Révolution française (review)

This is a curious and uneven collection that relentlessly presents the debit side of the French Revolution. The essays in their different ways (some subtle, some downright polemical) insistently remind readers that the progressive presentation of the Revolution has held consensual sway in republican France for too long and that it is time to put the other side and restore a balance. And so they do. In successive contributions, the dark and destructive dimensions of the Revolution are identified (with the unspoken question, was it worth it?), and historians are implicitly (and sometimes with some justice) chastised for taking too lightly the human costs of 1789-1815. The victims of the Revolution, it seems, outweighed its beneficiaries. While anxious to stress (and, in some instances, to overplay) the contemporary countercultural dimension of this reading of the Revolution, Renaud Escande's essayists provide fine offerings on Rivarol, Maistre, and Bonald, and Jacques de Guillebon gives us Balzac as "un critique organique" of the Revolution. Renaud Silly, O.P., writes about Taine as a precursor of François Furet, and there is a superbly succinct examination of Auguste Cochin in context by Philippe Lauvaux. However, this discussion of distinguished nineteenth-century authors and historians who were in varying degrees critics of the Revolution is in itself evidence that Escande's team is hardly the first to notice the multiple costs of the 1790s and beyond, and thus slightly undermines its claims to critical originality in challenging the foundational mythologies of French republicanism. This enterprise has been going on as long as there has been a republic to impugn. Nevertheless, Le Livre noir is far more than a roll call of the Right. It repays surveying not least because its fifty-six chapters include contributors of the calibre of Pierre Chaunu, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean Tulard, and Jean de Viguerie, and it is heartening to find some distinguished clerical authors herein. There are chapters on key episodes such as the taking of the Bastille; the event of August 10, 1792; and the death of King Louis XVI. Those on leading participants vary in quality, and one wonders how helpful it is for François Rouvillois to ask "Saint-Just fasciste?" on the expanded basis of noting that he and Benito Mussolini both agreed that Augustus was the greatest man in antiquity. One also finds the irrepressible Reynald Sécher returning to the Vendée and Christophe Boutin writing thoughtfully about "Le découpage révolutionnaire du territoire." Two other highlights based on solid learning are Tancrède Josseran on the destruction of French naval power at the hands of the republic and Xavier Martin on revolutionary law.