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

the process of France’s descent into
    full-fledged revolution, from the government’s definitive admission of
    bankruptcy in August 1788 to the removal of both king and self-proclaimed
    National Assembly from Versailles to Paris in the wake of the October
    Days of 1789. The argument will require an initial concentration upon
    the dangers faced by a paralyzed France in a Europe seemingly primed
    (as usual) for interstate warfare. The chapter will then turn to the domestic
    crisis of a government shaken by its revelation of bankruptcy and besieged
    by polarized social “notables” and popular insurgents. It will reappraise
    27 Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
    Introduction
    11
    the differing prescriptions for reform offered by Finance Minister Jacques
    Necker and Louis XVI and then explain how the political initiative during
    these transitional months gradually shifted from the crown to the most
    progressive deputies in the National (Constituent) Assembly.
    Chapter 3 will reassess the first attempt to stabilize the Revolution – at
    this juncture, upon the basis of a constitutional Bourbon monarchy – which
    lasted from October 1789 through the summer of 1791. Our general thesis
    will again call for an initial concentration upon the challenges confronting
    the French government in Europe and overseas. The focus then will shift to
    the domestic front. Chapter 3 at this point will discuss a number of the most
    significant institutional and social measures enacted by the Constituent
    Assembly. It will also query to what extent these reforms reflected the state’s
    multifarious needs and to what extent they resulted from a “domestic” cal-
    culus of both “middle-class” interests and more broadly conceived human-
    itarian concerns. The concluding section of the chapter will deal with the
    continuing shift of political initiative from the crown and its conservative
    adherents to the most progressive constituent assemblymen.
    Chapter 4 will reassess the “revolutionizing of the Revolution,” an es-
    pecially dramatic phase in the upheaval that commenced more or less with
    the first Legislative Assembly sessions in October 1791 and ended abruptly
    with the fall of the emergency Robespierrist dictatorship in Thermidor,
    Year II ( July 1794). It will be even more imperative now to start with a
    reappraisal of the international situation, for the evolution of French policy
    and politics during this entire period took place against the constant back-
    drop of mounting European challenge to the revolutionary experiment.
    The next section of Chapter 4, like the analogous section in Chapter 3,
    will not only review the key domestic measures implemented by the rev-
    olutionaries but also reevaluate the roles played in the enactment of those
    policies by statist calculations on the one hand and by class-oriented and/or
    genuinely altruistic considerations on the other. The closing section of the
    chapter will revisit the theme of political radicalization, which during this
    stage of the Revolution played itself out in the factional struggles of the
    Legislative Assembly and National Convention, and in the horrific political
    and ideological climaxof the Terror.
    Chapter 5 will reexamine the second attempt by the French to achieve
    some degree of revolutionary stability, this time under the republican aus-
    pices of the Thermidorian Convention (1794–95) and Directory (1795–99).
    Analysis will have to bear first of all upon the gradual but momentous shift
    in French foreign policy from national defense to national aggrandize-
    ment, and upon the European reaction to this development. Chapter 5 will
    then reinterpret the institutional and social policies of the 1794–99 period
    in terms of the revolutionaries’ commingled diplomatic and domestic con-
    cerns. It will conclude by returning one last time to the question of