Making Democracy in the French Revolution (review)

Making Democracy attempts to restore the French Revolution as a progressive watershed in political history by arguing that it created the "European model of democracy" (2). Livesey thus challenges François Furet and Keith Baker's claim that the "Revolution was not a paradigm of modern politics, but a parable of its possible pathologies" (6). Eschewing earlier Marxist or liberal interpretations, he invokes recent theories of political culture and civil society to argue that a new democratic republicanism emerged during the Directory (1795-1799) that enabled the French to negotiate the processes of modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Defining "democracy" as "the capacity of groups and individuals to represent themselves in public life, be it at the state or substate level, in favor of a grand narrative of the transfer of sovereignty from an absolute monarch to an absolute nation" (10), Livesey severs the traditional connection to constitutions and elections. Instead, he argues, activists can institutionalize democratic "norms" in "extrapolitical associational life" and "informal structures of cooperation" (15). Drawing upon Sidney Verba's work on civic culture and Robert Putnam's studies of "social capital," Livesey argues that low election turn-out or abrogated constitutions might not signal failed democratization because democratic activists can transmit, practice, and institutionalize their norms through other sites (associations, art, festivals, and education, for example). This approach restores "agency" and "contingency" to politics by locating democratization in actors (not impersonal formations such as the state or classes) operating in particular historical contexts. Thus, democracy and republicanism were not simply ideas but performed individually, cooperatively, and historically.

Moreover, Livesey differentiates a particularly French democratic republicanism from the Anglo-American traditions of liberal democracy. This "commercial republicanism" derived from a unique conjuncture, during the Revolution, of "Genevan political practice, French political theory, and the Anglo-American experience" (30) expressed in the work of revolutionaries and theorists Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Etienne Clavière, Benjamin Constant, and the marquis de Condorcet. They argued that "a free state could be created out of the interaction of a commercial economy, an emulatory civil society, and democratic political institutions" (45). Commercial republicans declared that the

modern republic was democratic of necessity, committed to the defense of equality and the idea that the labor of every person qualified him or her for participation in political life. It embraced the forms of modern economic life as instrumentalities to foster moral independence among the citizens, which needed material independence to exist.

(86)

"Moral self-creation" through industrie and sentiment provided the foundation for citizenship.

Commercial republicanism diverged from its liberal relations in several ways. It refused liberalism's elevation of a separate economic sphere to a dominant place, and instead awarded it an important—but not primary—role in the pursuit of "freedom and welfare of the population" (110). It drew inspiration, not from merchant and industrial England, but from France's own agricultural foundation and its image of the individual, independent peasant proprietor. Agriculture became "a proxy for . . . a set of mœurs that could unite work and citizenship" (104) for "public good and private interest" (89).

These democratic norms crystallized during the Directory. Only after several years of a formal Republic (from 1792) did there emerge a "network of committed activists" who could ground "commercial republicanism" in French society as both a norm and social capital. Its chief exponent, François de Neufchâteau, Minister of the Interior in 1797, helped "elaborate the idea of the commercial agricultural republic" and found himself "charged with creating it" (111). He aimed to improve the transportation system, manipulate (but not regulate) the grain trade, and encourage agriculture.

The last three chapters offer case studies of commercial republicanism during the Directory: the division of village commons (the partage movement); education; and public culture (spectacles, religion, the novel, and arts). Livesey argues that these helped politicize French people (especially the peasantry) and involved them in a national discourse on the economic and political transformation of France.

The subaltern elements of society, which had...