The Debate on the French Revolution

R. C. Richardson's The Debate on the English Revolution, which was first published in 1977, is an important work that provides an essential framework for understanding the complex historiographical debates surrounding that event. Peter Davies's book is designed to fulfil the same function for the French Revolution. Its appearance, and the promise of similar studies on the American and Russian Revolutions, offers the prospect of interesting comparisons. Unfortunately, however, Davies's book suffers from several flaws.

The series as a whole is aimed at undergraduates. With this audience in mind, Davies sets out "to unpack the ideas of the key historians, to discover what they said about the Revolution and how they said it" (p. 8). The work is divided chronologically, with Part I focused on the nineteenth century and Part II on the twentieth. Across this chronological divide Davies notes the distinction between the "Great Tradition" —which presented the Revolution in a positive light —and an alternative, more critical tradition encompassing the works of Tocqueville, Taine, Cobban, and Furet.

The first chapter deals with the reflections of contemporaries, and here is the first of several editorial slips. The introduction suggests that Burke, de Maistre, and de Staël will all be considered in this chapter, whereas in fact de Staël is discussed alongside the early liberal writers in chapter 2. There are more serious problems with Davies's account of Burke. No mention is made of the latter's support for the American Revolution, which is clearly of relevance for anyone seeking to explain his attitude towards the French Revolution. There is also no mention of Price's A Discourse on the Love of our Country to which Burke's Reflections was a response. Finally, though the works of Wollstonecraft and Paine are mentioned, there is no indication that they formed part of an enormous pamphlet war inspired by Burke's book.

Chapter 2 focuses on what Davies sees as the first proper "school" of revolutionary historiography, involving de Staë l, Thiers, and Mignet, which exemplified a liberal, bourgeois approach. The remaining three chapters of Part I deal respectively with "Idealist and Romantic" interpretations (Carlyle, Michelet, Guizot, and Quinet), the works of Tocqueville, and the historians of the Third Republic (Taine and Aulard).

For historians today, the emergence of the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, and its adoption as the orthodoxy, is so much a part of the historiographical territory that it is hard to recapture how revolutionary this was at the time. Davies rightly reminds us of this. Having touched on Marx's own views on the Revolution, he then focuses on some of the key advocates of the Marxist interpretation, including Jaurès, Mathiez, Lefebvre, and Soboul.

Chapters 7 and 8 deal with "soft" and "hard" revisionism respectively. The former label is used to denote those who first challenged the Marxist orthodoxy, but maintained the social and economic approach. First among them was Cobban, but Davies also explores the work of Taylor, Hampson, and Thompson. The term "hard" revisionism is reserved for those who went further, in shifting the focus away from social and economic factors in favour of political and intellectual ones. The central figure here is, of course, Furet. However, Davies's account is not always accurate, particularly when setting out Furet's relationship with the Annales School. There are also inaccuracies in his account of the work of Furet's American associate, Baker. For example, on page 162 Davies says: "Baker wrote The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (1987) and Interpreting the French Revolution (1990). The fact that the first book focused on 'culture' and the second had an identical title to Furet's main work on the Revolution is significant." In fact, Baker was editor, not author, of the first book, which was one of four edited collections bearing that title. Furthermore, the second book was actually called Inventing the French Revolution. (Davies does give the correct title elsewhere in his book.) Part of the problem may be the sources on which Davies relies. Rather than offering his own assessment of Baker's oeuvre, he cites a "media article" and then includes a quote from a survey article, which does not quite capture Baker's central argument.

Davies's final substantive chapter is entitled "Bicentenary Re-evaluations." It is followed by a short "Postscript" bringing the story up to the present. While the consensus is that the historiography has fractured since the collapse of the Marxist orthodoxy, Davies could have done more to cut a path through the confusion. Instead, he lists books without offering much account of their content and, in some cases, without providing proper references. There are also gaps in his coverage. When dealing with culture, he mentions Kennedy's import-ant book and Ozouf's work on festivals, but Darnton's pioneering work is not discussed at all and Chartier only gets a brief mention. His apparent tendency to rely on book reviews (often from websites —some of which are already defunct), historiographical surveys, and, in one case, the blurb from Amazon.com, rather than summarizing works for himself, renders this part of the book of limited use.

There are positive features that give this book the potential to be a useful work: for example, its coverage of the whole sweep of French revolutionary historiography from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, and its concern with debates not just about the origins but about the Revolution as a whole. Davies is also good at considering the methodology of historians and the context in which they were writing, as well as the content of their interpretations. However, the flaws in his own methodology, and the resulting errors contained in the work, mean that it does not live up to Richardson's admirable model. Perhaps some of these problems will be dealt with in future editions. Considering the book's present state, however, it would be difficult to justify recommending it to undergraduates.