Making Democracy in the French Revolution (review)

For much of the past two centuries, social interpretations dominated the historiography of the French Revolution, and from these emerged what R. R. Palmer called its "myths." Liberals hoped to fulfill an "incomplete" 1789, finish the work of the National Assembly, and establish individual liberté and a middle-class juste milieu. Socialists hoped to fulfill an "incomplete" 1793, finish the work of the National Convention, and achieve egalité and fraternité. Across the last several decades, however, François Furet's recovery of Tocqueville's tragic view of French history has become the basis for a new historiographical consensus. For Furet, 1789 "slipped" ineluctably into 1793, democracy into despotism, and ultimately the Terror into a template for subsequent totalitarianisms. In short, the revolution as possibility became the revolution as pathology.

But the French Revolution, Livesey reminds us, did not end in 1794. The years 1794-99 constitute a distinct motivating center in its history. During those years, a variety of writers, among whom were Jean-Baptiste Say and Pierre-Louis Roederer, Sophie de Grouchy and Jean-Baptiste Salaville, crossed Scottish political economy and moral theory with the revolution's experience of democratic participation. The result was a modern commercial republicanism that took shape in the institutions and practices of the Directory. Complex debates over the division of common lands inscribed—in the collective memory of villages across France—an argument for a mutually reinforcing relationship between the citizen-farmer and agricultural improvement. Proposals for the reform of education produced a secondary-school curriculum designed to inculcate habits of responsible democratic citizenship. And the theophilanthropy of the Director La Révellière-Lépeaux reframed the Jacobins' austere civic religion in terms of grand theatrical spectacles that celebrated sentimental and commercial moeurs. To be sure, these institutions and practices were overwhelmed by the Brumaire coup and Napoleonic authoritarianism. But they had secured a foothold in the French imagination. Again and again in the nineteenth century, these institutions and practices would reemerge, eventually becoming pillars of the Third Republic. And they remain, Livesey contends, the basis for a European alternative to the Anglo-American model of liberal democracy.