The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution (review)

This is the first study in English, not so much of the famous events of 4 August, which ended the old order in France, but rather their aftermath. For despite the decisiveness of the night, its full implications were only worked out over the two years that followed. Fitzsimmons, for whom this is a companion piece to his Remaking of France: The National Assembly and the Constitution of 1791 (1994), argues that historians have tended to underestimate the significance of the nocturnal session he considers to have brought about an extraordinary social revolution. The unmaking of corporate society certainly affected everyone, since 'privilege' was by no means restricted to the upper classes; it thus represented a defining moment in the great upheaval. In order to make his case, Fitzsimmons does not recount the proceedings themselves and those seeking a compact narrative of 4 August should look elsewhere. This is very much an analysis of how the occasion impacted on clergy, nobility, peasants and townspeople, in the four chapters that constitute the core of the book, which is based, like his preceding volume, on an impressive array of sources, national and local, printed and archival. Some familiar ground is covered, but Fitzsimmons also raises a series of interesting questions for specialists of the period. For example, he suggests that the nobility's loss of honorific status, with the abolition of titles in 1790, was far more contentious than the curtailment of their material privileges a year earlier, and while the universal institution of elected municipal authorities ran smoothly, replacing a plethora of urban oligarchies, he draws attention to the belated dissolution of artisan guilds, which were curiously allowed to linger until the spring of 1791. Ever mindful of the importance of contingency, Fitzsimmons is anxious not to read the Terror into this initial script and his concluding sentence emphasizes the bloodless nature of this revolutionary transformation. Such an assertion constitutes another welcome antidote to the determinism of revisionist discourse, though his argument still glosses over difficulties and divisions a little too easily. He does acknowledge the fatal schism that ensued between church and state, but the calm of 1790 was more frequently disturbed by continuing unrest among the peasants, whose insurrection had obliged the deputies to act on 4 August and who were far from pacified by their less than absolute assault on feudalism. Readers will none the less learn a great deal regarding what was the beginning as well as the end of the Ancien Régime, a concept that came into currency to reflect the magnitude of the changes the Revolution had set in motion. Fitzsimmons splendidly conveys the impromptu nature of this breathtaking leap forward, far beyond what was contained in the cahiers de doléances and wildly in excess of what anyone, even a month earlier, might have imagined.