The Origins of the French Revolution (review)

It is now over half a century since Alfred Cobban and George V. Taylor ignited a great historical controversy over the nature of the French Revolution. Most of their criticism of the then-prevailing orthodoxies stemmed from their perceptions of how the Revolution originated, and although, since then, some scholarly attention has swung back towards a nineteenth-century preoccupation with Terror, most of the work of revisionists building on Cobban's and Taylor's demolitions, and post-revisionists more preoccupied with cultural and linguistic contexts, has continued to concentrate on the problem of origins. The full range of still-open dossiers is displayed in the essays which Peter Campbell has brought together and introduced in this welcome and timely collection. Appropriately, his cast of contributors is international, combining names well-established in the field with newer voices more detached from earlier learned clashes. Thankfully, no new consensus emerges. Nostalgia for lost certainties (almost any certainties, it has sometimes seemed) has stalked this field for too long. If anything unites the ten essays, it is the editor's determination to keep his authors empirical. In addition to his personal viewpoint, offered in a wide-ranging introduction and in a detailed fresh perspective on the Parlement of Paris in the 1780s, he offers sharp summaries at the beginning of each piece to guide readers through the implications. This is decidedly helpful in cases like William Scott's rather opaque meditation on why cultural analysis has supplanted social, or John Hardman's characteristically minute case-studies of how Louis XVI's government made fateful key decisions. Others speak out more clearly for themselves. Joël Félix opens with a masterly anatomy of the old monarchy's financial dilemma, while Michael Fitzsimmons concludes with a lucid guide to the steps by which the traditional Estates-General became a revolutionary National Assembly. Three contributors offer convenient distillations of earlier big books: Dale Van Kley on religious origins, Kenneth Margerison on pamphlet debates about the form of the Estates and John Markoff on peasants and their grievances. It is particularly useful to have such a sparkling résumé of the latter's vast and deeply important monograph on the cahiers. More originally, the currently hegemonic cultural approach commands the attention of Mark Ledbury and Marisa Linton. Ledbury positively celebrates it, providing as elegant and pointed a justification for this approach as could be found anywhere. Linton, though an intellectual historian, maintains her distance, highlighting the shortcomings of some of the most eminent pioneers of linguistic and cultural turns. All the essays have copious endnotes, and a twenty-page guide to further reading indicates how much important new work continues to appear on this inexhaustible subject.