Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective Read Online Free

that the origins, development, and results of this up-
    heaval were essentially cut from the same cloth, and are therefore to
    be comprehended today in one set of explanatory terms? If this be
    true, the historian need not worry about playing up the discontinuities
    in the revolutionary experience, for they turn out to be less deserving
    of note than underlying historical continuities. Second, there is Skocpol’s
    premise that a “structuralist” account of the maelstrom of 1789–99
    hinging upon the interacting realities of statist competition abroad and
    statist “semiautonomy” at home has to prove more satisfactory than a
    “voluntarist” perspective keying upon the revolutionary roles of individual
    actors and/or social groups and/or ideologies. If this is accurate, the histo-
    rian must concede that it was the French state, pursuing as a bureaucratic
    entity geostrategic and impersonal objectives, that instigated, carried out,
    and benefited from the Revolution, and not previously unempowered
    individuals or groups of individuals inspired by revolutionary ideology.
    This latter assumption – that, for analytical purposes, the state can be
    reified as a historical “actor” imposing its “will” more or less independently
    upon society – has been especially challenged in the light of recent work
    in the field. Scholars usually departing from Furetian analyses of political
    culture have been blazing new paths in hitherto unexplored hinterlands
    of gender, linguistic analysis, and all that is currently subsumed under the
    rubric of the “new cultural history.” In doing so, they have usefully sug-
    gested novel ways of conceptualizing the (French) state. It may yield rich
    dividends, Suzanne Desan has written, to view the state “more flexibly
    as a site of structured negotiation over power, resources, and relation-
    ships, rather than simply as a coercive entity separate from society.” Such
    an approach, Desan and other sociocultural historians have maintained,
    would facilitate inquiries into the exceedingly complex relationships be-
    tween revolutionary institutions and individuals, relationships mediated
    by the political culture of the period. The considerable ability of the state
    to structure social behavior and expectations would continue to be recog-
    nized even as governmental norms and procedures are portrayed as being
    themselves conditioned in part by developments within the revolutionary
    society at large.25
    25 See Suzanne Desan, “What’s after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary
    Historiography,” French Historical Studies 23 (Winter 2000): 163–96.
    Introduction
    9
    Such theorizing may indeed provide a needed corrective to the
    Skocpolian tendency to reify the state – in this case, the French Revolu-
    tionary state. In a larger, historiographical sense, of course, observations
    like these also remind us that no explanatory paradigm currently dominates
    the field of revolutionary studies. What we seem to have, in the wake of the
    demise of the old socioeconomic argument, is a somewhat decentralized
    but no less fruitful dialogue between advocates of one or another brand of
    “social revisionism,” on the one hand, and ever-multiplying proponents
    of “political-cultural” and “new-cultural” analysis, on the other.
    Yet, at the risk of exposing myself to the slings and arrows of informed
    criticism in this contentious field, I would maintain that there is a way
    to enlist insights from both the “social revisionists” and the “political-
    cultural” analysts in the service of an explanation of the French Revolution
    hinging upon the roles of a carefully redefined French state. For it is cer-
    tainly arguable that, if subtly conceived, that state can in fact still be seen
    as crucial to the onset, process, and various outcomes of the Revolution.
    On the one hand, no reasonable specialist in this period can deny that
    the single most pressing reality that those