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

governing or aspiring to govern
    France had to confront throughout this period was their country’s cen-
    trality in the evolving European and extra-European struggle for survival,
    power, and prestige. This was as inescapable a reality for politicians in the
    radiant dawn of revolution as it had been for their most cynical predeces-
    sors in the ancien régime. We need not revert to Albert Sorel’s excessively
    one-sided preoccupation with the international aspects of the Revolution
    to make this point. We can, however, note with some interest that the
    recent inquiries of T. C. W. Blanning into the historical forces and diplo-
    matic calculations behind the French Revolutionary wars point in much
    the same direction.26 In addition, we can join Blanning in avowing that the
    international concerns of France’s leaders were a thread tying the entire
    revolutionary era to the years preceding it and the years following it.
    To a certain limited extent, then, the origins, process, and aftermath of
    the Revolution were cut from the same cloth.
    On the other hand, just as no fair-minded observer can deny that the
    revolutionary leaders from start to finish were burdened with the legacies
    of past wars, the current needs of national defense, and anticipations of
    possible conflicts to come, so must that same hypothetical observer view
    the revolutionaries as caught up also in their own interests and expectations
    of domestic reform and as responding to every imaginable kind of pressure
    in French politics and society. Hence, it might be particularly advisable,
    26 T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986), and, more recently, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
    10
    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    in reassessing the important foreign and domestic policies of the period
    and retracing the twists and turns of domestic politics, to underscore the
    complexways in which those policies and politics, mediated continually
    by the political culture of the day, mirrored both European and uniquely
    French realities. This is, of course, another way of saying that the French
    state can only be an effective locus of analysis and vehicle of explanation
    if it is conceived simultaneously as an initiator of policy and events and as
    a focal point for political, ideological, and social struggle.
    Essentially, what I am proposing to do in this study is to extend to the
    French Revolution a modified version of the perspective I employed in an
    earlier book to explain the anterior development, decline, and demise of
    the old regime.27 The interpretation, as before, will be synthetic in nature,
    drawing from the best work in many fields of historiography. Yet it will
    also be “modified” along the lines indicated above: acknowledging the
    complexity of revolutionary politics and of state–citizen relationships in
    this period, it will continually revisit issues of political culture without
    abandoning a central concern with the roles of governance in France’s
    public affairs. A brief exposition of the argument would seem at this point
    to be in order.
    Chapter 1 will summarize developments in the old regime. It will first
    review the increasingly global outreach of French foreign policy after 1715
    and suggest how, given changes in the European state system, that out-
    reach was probably destined to fail. Next, it will examine the many ways in
    which the absolute Bourbon monarchy, insufficiently responsive to strate-
    gic realities abroad, also proved in the end to be insufficiently responsive
    to ever-evolving sociopolitical and ideological realities at home. Finally,
    it will maintain that the convergence of these statist failures lay behind
    the unprecedented politicization of the citizenry in the “prerevolution” of
    1787–88 and ultimately brought about the government’s financial collapse
    in the summer of 1788.
    Chapter 2 will reexamine