The French Revolution is one of the most important, perhaps still the historical event of all time. Many books have been written about it, but I loved your comment, in your presidential address to the American Historical Association, that “every great interpreter of the French Revolution, and there have been many, have found the event ultimately puzzling.” /p>
I think that, in this sense, it can be a useful example of historical events in general. The amazing thing about the French Revolution is that events unfold over a long enough period of time that people can get a sense of how unpredictably events unfold. people study it, in part, because it’s kind of a laboratory model of the really shocking event and it takes place over the years, rather than being condensed in time like, perhaps, the most recent revolutions are. /p>
Many people have tried to explain why the French Revolution is the way it is. what they discover is that the more they find out about it, the more questions they have. it is very difficult to penetrate; things turn in a direction you don’t expect. and as much as one tries to tie that into rational explanations – social causes, demographic causes, economic causes, political causes, ideological causes – there is a way in which the experience that occurs in an event is very difficult to fully explain. It’s actually true for all events, it’s just that we usually don’t spend as much time thinking about every event in our life. but if we did, I suspect we’d have the same “wow. how did it happen that way?”
Most of the great interpreters didn’t finish their writings on the revolution and said, “oh yeah! I really figured it out.” they told themselves, and in print, that there is something about it that is extremely difficult to achieve, no matter how hard you try. Edmund Burke, in 1790, is already expressing this kind of amazement: It’s so unbelievable what’s going on, I’m thinking about it, I’m trying to figure it out, and there’s still some way I just can’t believe it.
You are reading: Best books french revolution
Looking back from our era of non-monarchical rule, it’s hard to appreciate the enormity of an event where you end up beheading the king.
A king had been beheaded before, as we know, in England. but there was a way in which, in the French case, they celebrate having done it. there is immediate writing on why this is making a point. in the English case, it was more, “we had to do it, due to the circumstances”. it is not connected to any reinvention of the entire political order.
Let’s go over the books you’ve chosen. your first choice is from one of the greatest interpreters of the revolution, alexis de tocqueville. he was actually born in 1805, after the revolution, but he did a lot of archival research. Tell me about his book, the old regime and the revolution.
the good thing about tocqueville is that it looks at files and studies events, but it applies an amazing synthetic and analytical intelligence to them. it is the same intelligence that he applied to American society, which he visited in the 1830s.
What is surprising is that he is able to develop broad analytical categories that relate the French Revolution to the direction of modern society as a whole, which he sees as the destruction of the aristocracy and the advent of democracy. but he adds a twist that will remain influential to this day, and that is that he points out the weakness of democracy as a form of government. he has an inherent internal tendency to lead to despotism unless certain conditions exist that prevent that from happening.
“democracy has an internal and inherent tendency to lead to despotism unless there are certain conditions that prevent that from happening.”
This is an incredibly brilliant insight. he does it, in part, because he’s involved in the 1848 revolution, and he’s incredibly disappointed in the rise of louis napoleon [napoleon’s nephew, who became emperor napoleon iii in 1852]. he was born in the Napoleonic period, and he says, “how can this be? we have these revolutions in the name of freedom and we end up with a despotic and authoritarian ruler.” it’s a problem we still grapple with today. Why do revolutions in the name of democracy -we see them happening at this very moment- end up having problems institutionalizing themselves as true democracies?
Do we have an answer?
The Tocquevillean answer remains incredibly important, and that is that you are more likely to end up a democracy if you have institutions that support a democratic political life. it is a tragedy and a paradox. you make a revolution because you don’t have the institutions that sustain a democratic political life. you do it to have a democratic political life, but you don’t have the infrastructure to make it possible. So the question is how do you go from the desire to the reality of democratic political life?
what tocqueville loves about the united states is that they already have this infrastructure, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke up with britain. but it is leaving us with a problem that we still have to face. Shouldn’t we want people to have democracy if they don’t have the institutions yet? if they’re not democratic yet, can we really say that to the people in the world: “I’m sorry you don’t have democratic institutions, therefore you really can’t have democracy.” of course we can’t. so we need to figure out how you do this transition.
my own personal criticism of tocqueville is that he is too negative about what happens during the revolution. what happens during the revolution is, from my point of view, an incredible emergence of new types of democratic institutions. it’s just that they don’t have time to fully take root.
So, like many historians, Tocqueville’s book is a commentary on his own time?
yes, but it is able to go back. What’s amazing is that he’s actually a minister in the 1848 government. It’s not like he’s just around. he is actively involved, and yet he is able to offer this analytical tour de force. after the events unravel the way they unravel, he’s able to step back and say, “what’s going on? what explains how this could happen? Why does this keep happening in French society?”
What’s amazing about Tocqueville (and I don’t particularly sympathize with his political point of view, necessarily) is his intelligence to capture these fundamental categories and explain them in the most astonishingly penetrating, limpid and fascinating prose. he gives you these turns of phrase: you actually can’t believe it when you’re reading it. you just think, “wow. that’s a great way to put it.”
In terms of its specific arguments, it talks a lot about the continuities between the old regime and the post-1789 world, especially in terms of centralization of government. is that an important part of the book?
is absolutely crucial and probably the most important thing you are discussing. Actually, I’m not convinced you’re right about that, but it’s a very powerful analysis. basically it says that countries develop a style of governing and that it is extremely difficult to get out of that style of governing. for example, in interpretations of the Russian revolution there is a complete divide between those who feel that communism took on the basic features of tsarist government, which was incredibly centralized and authoritarian, and dependent on the secret service, and those who believe that Marxism changed completely. everything.
This type of division of opinion exists for all great revolutions, partly due to the influence of this Tocquevillean analysis, which is that you have a style of governing and it is very difficult to change it.
the other thing that caught my attention while reading it is that tocqueville seems to like louis xvi a lot. he refers to him as “this kind and unlucky prince.”
yes, he doesn’t really like louis xiv, but he does like louis xvi. historical opinion is now, in fact, much kinder to louis xvi. louis xvi tried to reform, he tried to be a good king, he didn’t have mistresses, he didn’t spend a lot of money buying trinkets for members of his court. he was trying to be the king of the new style, but in a situation where it was impossible for him to push it as a project.
So, do historians agree with Tocqueville’s analysis that “nothing is more dangerous for a regime than when it attempts to reform itself”?
both tocqueville has had an enormous influence on social scientific thought about social and political movements. So yes, among them is what is called the “rising expectations” revolution. he points to the fact that it is not a france that is in misery, it is a france that is getting better and better. This is the problem. people have higher expectations and then feel more disappointed.
Tocqueville just had all these incredibly brilliant ideas about how this worked, and in part it was because, frankly, he didn’t write in the historical mode. he wrote in a sociological mode. so that he could say, “I don’t need to tell you what happened in 1789, I’ll just tell you what it meant.”
let’s move on to françois furet, and his book on the interpretation of the french revolution, published in 1978. so he was a great french historian, elected member of the academie française in 1997. this book is quite difficult to read if you don’t you do. I don’t know much about the French revolution, do I?
See Also: IdentifyingWizard of Oz Book First Editions
yes. Tocqueville’s book had an incredibly wide influence in a variety of fields, with a variety of readers. Furet’s book, by contrast, was very much a book for people who already knew something about the subject. he had an amazing impact on the way historians viewed the French revolution, because he was an extremely effective polemicist. The opening essay to this book, “The Revolutionary Catechism,” is simply devastating, and no other approach would likely have had the decisive impact that it did.
is written in a drippingly ironic and satirical mode of rhetoric. it’s just blow after blow, and it incredibly undermined the entire Marxist social interpretation of revolution because it made a mockery of it. he not only said it’s wrong, he ridiculed it. this was incredibly effective. needless to say, it led many people on the other side to develop a visceral hatred of furet. it’s hard for people to understand that today: how an interpretation of the French revolution could lead to this level of personal vituperation. It was partly because he wrote it in a way that would be much more common in internal debates within the Communist Party, rather than in an academic paper.
Didn’t the book reflect his own disillusionment with communism, having originally been a member of the communist party?
yes, and he had been a member of the same cell as the main communist interpreter of the French revolution. he knew very well the people he was talking about, and it added to the whole atmosphere that this was more than a difference in interpretation.
You say it completely changed the way historians viewed the French Revolution. Did it also have a broader impact?
It did so in the sense that it took the gravitational pull away from Marxism at the very moment when Marxism was under much greater fire due to political events. this was in the 1970s, before the collapse of communism, and it seemed part of a general move away from a Marxist position towards, and the question then was, what was the direction going to be? Was it going to be towards a type of neoliberalism that many people associated furet with in the 1970s and 1980s? got caught up in the mitterrand-thatcher debate, a general political shift to the center and right in the 1970s and 1980s and to some extent in the 1990s. it was not just an academic question, but a general political question in the West.
so what does furet really say about the french revolution?
what he argued in the book is this: it is not that there is a crisis in feudalism leading to the rise of capitalism and that this is a bourgeois revolution in Marxist terms. he is suggesting that it is a broader problem, that it is really about internal contradictions in the political system.
“It is difficult for people today to understand how an interpretation of the French Revolution could lead to this level of personal vituperation.”
These internal political contradictions drive the revolution in an increasingly radical direction until it collapses under its own weight, because the radicals do not have a sufficient base of support. thus it emphasizes politics above all else, rather than the socio-economic environment in which politics takes place. to some extent that was the devil’s advocate position. he didn’t really think social factors were completely insignificant, but he wanted to shift the emphasis to ideology. he wanted to argue that the problem with communism was that it was a false and contradictory ideology, and that you cannot change the world through ideology. we must change the world through concrete political programs.
He’s extremely critical of the revolution, isn’t he?
absolutely. for him it is still a great and incredibly important event, but it has extremely problematic implications. he reveals that if you try to promote democracy without having an adequate institutional basis for it, you will end up with terror, violence and the repression of dissent. in short, you will end totalitarianism. So he takes Tocqueville’s argument even further: Democracy can lead not only to despotism, but also to totalitarianism.
for him, the bad thing about the revolution is that everything is ideology and fights over who is going to represent the general will of rousseau and who is supposed to represent the people in democratic terms. because it’s all ideology, it doesn’t really establish democratic forms of government, but veers towards terror and totalitarianism. so it’s pretty negative, but like I said, there’s a way that a lot of his arguments came from a devil’s advocate position: he wanted to combat the marxist position in the first place, and he was less clear on what exactly his own position was . .
then you have chosen the citizens of simon schama. did you choose this because it’s more of a popular story?
yes. I have a lot of reservations about Simon Schama’s book, but it had a huge readership in 1989 when it came out. that’s because he’s done something that few other historians have been able to do, and only a few, and that is tell a story that’s compelling enough that people want to read it. it is completely different from the other books. everything is narrative. there is very little analysis. maybe he drifts towards the furet position, but he has nothing of the analytical style of tocqueville or furet, because he is telling a story and he wants to tell an interesting story. so it is full of curiosities, anecdotes and characterizations of incredibly interesting people. it’s generally negative about revolution, because it’s basically about how revolution is very, very violent.
Do you have a favorite snack there?
My problem with most stories is that they tend to be pretty negative. it’s about how people end up doing things that seem crazy to us in hindsight. writes about the activist woman theroigne de mericourt, who goes crazy. that’s a great story. but as a representation of what revolution is, it’s a problematic choice.
eric hobsbawm was also very critical of the citizens, wasn’t he? He said it was continuing an English tradition (including popular books like Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities) of focusing on the negative side of the French Revolution.
as a vision of revolution, schama’s book is anathema to eric hobsbawm. that’s because schama doesn’t really care about an extremely important part, which is that there are thousands of people who get involved in the revolution. they hold office, they attend meetings, they are sincerely motivated by the idea of establishing a democratic and republican form of government, because that will lead to more equality, more political freedom and more social justice. they are completely serious, sincere and authentic about wanting to do that. those people are not in schama.
For me, the revolution is filled with hundreds of thousands of stories of people finding their lives transformed for the better. they want to do something with it and they run into many obstacles.
schama is not a specialist in the French revolution, is he? he seems to write about many different things.
not. he was originally a specialist in Dutch history. Since then, he has been interested in the history of art, he has done a lot about the history of Britain, which was not his specialty originally either. simon is a very fast learner and a fantastic writer and speaker. he is an amazing enthusiast.
let’s talk about his fourth book, twelve that ruled, from r. r. palm tree These are the twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety who directed the terror, of whom the most famous is probably Maximilien Robespierre. this is an older book, from 1941, but very enjoyable.
the twelve that ruled by palmer is my favorite book about the french revolution. he does precisely what he was talking about. he does not do it for the tens of thousands -I am more interested in the tens and hundreds of thousands- but for the twelve who governed. it’s incredibly good at giving you a sense of what these people are facing, the incredible difficulty of their situation, and the incredible stress of the circumstances they find themselves in.
“the twelve that ruled by palmer is my favorite book about the french revolution”.
See Also: Top 13 Best Brandon Sanderson Books Of All Time Review 2022
is just fantastic at recreating that atmosphere and forcing you to sympathize with these men as a result. his position is much closer to mine. he sees this as trying to do something really important, running into huge obstacles in the process of trying to do it, failing, but fully understanding why it would happen in this particular way.
yes, because looking back from the present, the guillotine and the bloodshed are not understandable, but he is trying to make us see that it was understandable given the circumstances.
It also gives you the feeling that these were actually real people. they weren’t completely out of control. for the most part, the people on this committee are living incredibly austere lives. they are working 20 hours a day, they are giving themselves completely to the cause of trying to save the republic. and, in fact, they succeed.
They are capable of reorganizing the armed forces in the worst possible circumstances. they actually win the war, in a situation where winning the war seemed totally impossible. What Palmer does so successfully is get you to identify with the things they’re trying to do. he doesn’t try to make it seem like it’s all a bed of roses, that they’re just idealists who are achieving what they want to achieve; he is also interested in the conflicts between them. but it’s just great for getting you into the rooms where these decisions are made.
One fact you mention that surprised me, given the number of people he put to death, is that Robespierre started out opposing capital punishment.
yes, and as an adversary of war. he was afraid of what the war would do to the revolution. palmer’s book is the reason i got into french history and why i wanted to study the french revolution. I first read it when I was 19 and found it fascinating.
And that’s because you associated these twelve men with terror and bloodshed and he was able to show you the other side?
exactly. he was able to say, “well, what did you expect them to do?” you are facing a civil war in the west, with all the monarchical powers of europe aligned against you, what are you supposed to say? “oh good! that’s not a good idea. we shouldn’t have a republic because everyone says we shouldn’t.” he really makes you see the political stakes that are involved.
His latest book is The New Regime of Isser Woloch, Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia.
isser woloch was a student of r. r. Palmer and was greatly influenced by his point of view. this book is a somewhat dry presentation. it is, however, an absolutely crucial book to make you understand that after tocqueville, after furet, after schama – books that focus on all the problems of the revolution – here is one that concretizes the staggering amount of change taking place in this period, in all domains of political and social life.
This is an amazing corrective, because what it shows you is that everything changes. maybe I’m obsessed with this, but the whole question, “does the revolution fail?” or “why does the revolution fail?” is a wrong. what it shows you is that all these different things change in ways that will never go back. they are institutional changes, so the things that tocqueville says do not happen, the things that furet says do not happen and lead the revolution to deviate towards totalitarianism, he is demonstrating that the revolution changes them, and they continue to be an important part of french life until the present. I always tell students, you have to read this book, because you have to see that it’s not just louis xiv redux, it’s really a massive review of French life.
Would you like to give an example of some of these changes? Is it things like universal primary education?
they don’t really succeed at that. they propose to do it and it was a blueprint for the future. one of the things that happens in revolution is that things come up on the agenda that will stay on the agenda for generations to come. Divorce is instituted in 1792. They do not return to the same divorce law until the 1970s. Universal education is proposed as a program, they begin to try to do it, but it is not really achieved until the end of the 19th century. but certain things are achieved.
“the whole question, “does the revolution fail?” or “why does the revolution fail?” is a wrong one.”
The penal code rewrite, beginning in 1791, is essentially the penal code that will remain in effect forever. permanently eliminate torture in the judicial process. they institute equality before the law forever. they institute forms of legal inheritance for children, including girls, who will remain in law forever. these are incredibly fundamental changes taking place. among them, and one that people tend to forget, is that when the monarchy returns in 1814, there is a constitution. there is a written document that says, there will be a lower house and an upper house. yes, they limit voting, but there’s no way you’re not going to have a constitutional form of government from then on. These are crucial developments in French political and social life that shape what happens during the 19th and 20th centuries.
and did it have an impact beyond france too?
What the revolution showed is that, in the future, it would be impossible to ignore the great mass of the people. there will be many solutions to that problem. some of those solutions will not be so good. it could be argued that fascism and communism are different answers to “what to do to incorporate the mass of the people into politics?” but representative forms of government will also be a very important example. the French don’t invent that. The United States is also developing it. but the revolution shows that governments will ignore this at their peril.
In that sense, it has a huge impact. because everyone from then on is thinking, what are we going to do with this? What changes do we have to make in order not to lose our position?
What aspect of the French Revolution is most relevant today, in your opinion?
there is something about the suddenness of the french revolution that makes people realize that the way the government is organized is really just a convention. it is not given by nature, it is not given by tradition. It sparks a huge debate about how far you can go to change things just because you think it’s reasonable and right to change them, and how much change has to happen more gradually.
“what the revolution showed is that, in the future, it would be impossible to ignore the great mass of the people.”
revolution raises the whole issue of how change is brought about, and how much people should organize to insist that change is brought about. it tears the veil of tradition and says that the only justification for government is that it makes sense, that it is fair, that it is egalitarian, that it is just. These are debates that we have to this day: how to negotiate the tension between what we currently have and what should be. it gives a force to this that no other event has done before in quite the same way, which is why everyone who writes about it, from burke on, is completely obsessed with what happened.
so when you see that wall street is busy, do you think of the french revolution?
yes, in the sense that occupying wall street is not just sitting around saying, “oh! there is a widening gap between rich and poor”, but figure out what we are going to do about it. it’s a way of saying that just because things are the way they are doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. it is not acceptable, just because it is there. What revolution does is create an amazing rupture in people’s ideas in that sense, because a centuries-old monarchy just falls apart and is replaced by something France never had, a republic.
See Also: What Are Some Books That DG Recommends? | Desiring God