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  • The Debate on the French Revolution
  • Simon Burrows
The Debate on the French Revolution. By Peter Davies. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006. xiii + 210 pp. Hb £45.00. Pb £14.99.

An introductory survey of two centuries of revolutionary historiography would be a bold project for any historian, but particularly one whose published research does not focus on the revolution per se. It could also be a useful one: there is no comparable long durée survey in English. Unfortunately, undergraduate students — the book’s target market — will struggle to strike gold in Peter Davies’ The Debate on the French Revolution. Davies’ nine chapters cover initial responses to the revolution; ‘the liberal perspective’ of the nineteenth century; ‘idealist and romantic views’; ‘Tocqueville’, ‘Third Republic historians’, ‘the Marxist orthodoxy’, ‘Soft revisionism’, ‘Hard revisionism’ and ‘Bicentenary re-evaluations’. A six-page postscript covers developments since 1989, but is cursory. For example, the widely remarked emergence of the new British school of political historians goes unreported and most of its prominent members go unremarked. Davies frequently struggles to control his material. In places the book resembles a catalogue of historians, although some big names are almost relegated from view. A historian of the stature of Robert Darnton is mentioned only in a list of contributors to Colin Lucas’ Rewriting the French Revolution. This, in turn, is taken from a review cited to illustrate ‘the Bicentenary-induced hype that enveloped new [End Page 345] publications in and around 1989’ (p. 173). Elsewhere, Davies appears to renege on his assertion that he has no intention of producing a textual ‘reader’, particularly in his treatment of Edmund Burke, which comprises 11 long, partially digested extracts from the Reflections interspersed with a few lines of commentary. There are also issues of selection and explanation. Predictably, a handful of writers dominate the narrative: Burke, de Staël, Thiers, Guizot, Michelet, Tocqueville, Taine, Aulard, Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Soboul, Cobban, Furet and Hunt are all treated, with varying degrees of engagement. Feminist history, especially (and deservedly) the work of Joan Landes, receives appropriate attention and is rightly contextualized alongside hard revisionism, though the explication of Landes’s central arguments could be clearer. Beyond his chosen canonical authors, Davies clutters his story with a galaxy of other figures, often to little effect. Eight lines on the influential counter-revolutionary journalist Mallet Du Pan (four of them quoting Acton’s opinion of him) inform readers that he was sagacious and objective in his judgements without revealing his actual response to the revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft receives a slightly longer treatment, but what it means to have been a ‘pre-eminent early feminist’ (pp. 17–18) and how that impacted on her interpretation of the revolution is not explained. Davies’ text and footnotes draw heavily on summaries from secondary works, review articles and websites of uncertain standing, while his recommended further reading list is general and brief. The student wishing for specialised studies of Burke, Tocqueville or almost every other writer discussed in the text will find no guidance. Even Davies’ specialist field, the French right since 1789, is poorly served. With the exception of Paul Beik’s The French Revolution Seen from the Right (1956), the standard mongraphs on French counter-revolutionary ideology in the 1790s and Napoleonic era are absent.

Simon Burrows
Leeds University
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