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Politics, culture, and class in the French revolution
Book Reviews
381
communities concerned. Thus, while the use of the chapter title, ‘The Struggle for Palestine’ might seem to suggest a pro-Arab stance this is at once offset by the description of Arab unity as a ‘myth’. Even in the case of Iran, which is of spectal concern to both authors, their real feelings about the recent Revolution are difficult to discern, with talk of a ‘reign of terror’ against the Shah’s supporters balanced by the recognition that the Khomeini regime has created a large enough popular base to prevent it from any danger of imminent collapse. A last way of judging such books is in terms of the competition. In my own opinion this book is better written, more balanced and more comprehensive than all of its major rivals-with the possible exception of S.N. Fisher’s larger (750 pp.) The .Viddle Eosr: A Hisrory (2nd edn., New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1969). Roger Owen St. Antony’s
Politics,
California
College,
Culture,
Oxford
and Class in the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University Press, 1984) xvi + 251 pp., $19.95 cloth, S8.95 paper.
of
Lynn Hunt’s synthetic study represents an intelligent and courageous attempt at rescuing the history of the French Revolution from the historiographical deadlock in which it is currently trapped. The ‘classic’ Marxist interpretation of the event, featuring triumphant bourgeoisie and declining aristocracy, has long been declared pad by a majority of scholars working in the field; but the ‘revisionist’ school, having done away with its Marxist foes, seems in danger of sinking into complacent negativism. Revisionists. by definition, are usually more interested in tearing down than in building up: inevitably-but with some notable exceptions’-we have read more in recent years about what the Revolution was not than about what it was. Revisionist scholars reacted against Marxist determinism by stressing the random or ‘accidental’ nature of the revolurronary process. The French nation, in their view, could and should have enjoyed a peaceful transition to liberal constitutional government on the English model; a regrettable concatenation of events and personalities produced the fatal dynamic that culminated in the Reign of Terror. Lynn Hunt eschews this sort of implicitly negative judgment; her purpose is in part to rehabilitate the positive legacy of a decade that bequeathed to Modern Europe its major political traditions, in particular that of French revolutionary and democratic republicanism. The objective of her study is revolutionary politics, which she approaches not chronologically but structurally, in an attempt to excavate the layers of meaning implicit in such diverse manifestations of political practice as the wearing of cockades and the oratory of political leaders. The first part of the book, entitled ‘The Poetics of Power’, is made up of three interrelated essays on rhetoric, iconography and symbolic codes. At the heart of Hunt’s often brilliant analysis lies what she perceives as the central defining paradox of this revolutionary political culture. The French infused politics into every aspect of life. from costume and speech to the calendar; they did so with didactic self-consciousness, all the while insisting that, as Robespierre once put it, the laws should be inscribed ‘not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men’.’ Their ideal was one of Rousseauian ‘transparency’, of a spontaneous and unmediated accord between the ruler and the ruled. As a result, the need for political representation was belittled or denied, and politics in the modern sense of forming alliances or competing for power universally denounced as ‘conspiracy’. Revolutionary political culture was thus shaped by a ‘tension between transparency and didacticism’ (p. 73). a tension created by the collapse of the former ‘sacred center’ of political legitimacy embodied in the monarch and his court.
382
Book Reviews
Having thus established the dominant features of the new political culture, Hunt turns to the ‘new men’ who shaped it. The three chapters m part two. based on an impressive array of quantitative and prosopographical data. yield the following general conclusions: that left-wing politics mostly caught on and endured in the poorer, less urbanised and mostly illiterate regions situated around the periphery of the country; that the revolution opened up national and local leadership to individuals and groups previously excluded from the political sphere, creating an entirely new political class; and that on the local level, political power often fell to religious or social outsiders (Jevvs. Protestants, actors), or to cultural intermediaries such as schoolmasters. innkeepers or merchants. The biggest methodological challenge raised by the book resides not in the specifics of either section-although those open up plenty of new areas for investigation and debate-but in the link between both parts. The authorconfronts the theoretical problem head-on in her opening pages: the relationship between society and politics should not be thought of in terms of ‘strata’ or ‘levels’, she writes: a better image would be the knot or Mobius strip, ‘with no permanent “above” or “below” ’ (p. 13). This elegant formulation works better in theory than in practice. however. IVhat Hunt proceeds to show is not a dialectical back-and-forth between culture and politics, but what might be termed a structural homology between a new political class drawn from the social and geographical boundaries of the nation, and the feverishly improvised, ‘liminal’, culture of an era of political innovation. The connection she presents is extremely convincing, and the very organisation of the book does a good job of subverting the conventional class-to-culture progression adopted unthinkingly by most historians. But what we are offered in the end is a rather static, structural relationship, not the roller-coaster ride announced in those opening pages. The author might be taken to task for sidestepping some delicate issues ofcausality, and in particular for completely ignoring the vexed question of the relationship between Enlightenment and Revolution, which bears directly upon her topic. Historians of the old regime may find her insistence on the absolute novelty of revolutionary culture somewhat exaggerated, since some of them now argue that the political legitimacy of divine-right monarchy had begun to ‘unravel’several decades before 1789.’ These and other issues will be debated at conferences and in seminars for years to come. That this book represents a major and welcome breakthrough in the historiography of the French Revolution, seems however, well beyond dispute. Sarah Maza Northwestern
University
NOTES I. Most notably The& Skocpol, Slates and Social Revolurions: A Compararive AnalJ,sis ofFrance. Russia, andChina(Cambridge, !979); Francois Furet, PenserlaRevo/urionFranCoisz(Paris. 1978). 2. Speech of 17 Pluvibse, Year II, as quoted in Richard Bienvenu, The :l’inrh o/Thermidor: The Fall of Robesprerrr (NW York, 1968). p. 33. 3. For instance Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the L’nrarrliing of the Ancren RL;gime (Princeton, 1983).
Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). xiv + 417, pp. S24.95. To the late Raymond Aron, Marx theorists of modern society, theorists answers to the fundamental questions
Boesche
and Tocqueville appeared as the two seminal who provided opposing but equally coherent of contemporary social philosophy. The one
381
communities concerned. Thus, while the use of the chapter title, ‘The Struggle for Palestine’ might seem to suggest a pro-Arab stance this is at once offset by the description of Arab unity as a ‘myth’. Even in the case of Iran, which is of spectal concern to both authors, their real feelings about the recent Revolution are difficult to discern, with talk of a ‘reign of terror’ against the Shah’s supporters balanced by the recognition that the Khomeini regime has created a large enough popular base to prevent it from any danger of imminent collapse. A last way of judging such books is in terms of the competition. In my own opinion this book is better written, more balanced and more comprehensive than all of its major rivals-with the possible exception of S.N. Fisher’s larger (750 pp.) The .Viddle Eosr: A Hisrory (2nd edn., New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1969). Roger Owen St. Antony’s
Politics,
California
College,
Culture,
Oxford
and Class in the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University Press, 1984) xvi + 251 pp., $19.95 cloth, S8.95 paper.
of
Lynn Hunt’s synthetic study represents an intelligent and courageous attempt at rescuing the history of the French Revolution from the historiographical deadlock in which it is currently trapped. The ‘classic’ Marxist interpretation of the event, featuring triumphant bourgeoisie and declining aristocracy, has long been declared pad by a majority of scholars working in the field; but the ‘revisionist’ school, having done away with its Marxist foes, seems in danger of sinking into complacent negativism. Revisionists. by definition, are usually more interested in tearing down than in building up: inevitably-but with some notable exceptions’-we have read more in recent years about what the Revolution was not than about what it was. Revisionist scholars reacted against Marxist determinism by stressing the random or ‘accidental’ nature of the revolurronary process. The French nation, in their view, could and should have enjoyed a peaceful transition to liberal constitutional government on the English model; a regrettable concatenation of events and personalities produced the fatal dynamic that culminated in the Reign of Terror. Lynn Hunt eschews this sort of implicitly negative judgment; her purpose is in part to rehabilitate the positive legacy of a decade that bequeathed to Modern Europe its major political traditions, in particular that of French revolutionary and democratic republicanism. The objective of her study is revolutionary politics, which she approaches not chronologically but structurally, in an attempt to excavate the layers of meaning implicit in such diverse manifestations of political practice as the wearing of cockades and the oratory of political leaders. The first part of the book, entitled ‘The Poetics of Power’, is made up of three interrelated essays on rhetoric, iconography and symbolic codes. At the heart of Hunt’s often brilliant analysis lies what she perceives as the central defining paradox of this revolutionary political culture. The French infused politics into every aspect of life. from costume and speech to the calendar; they did so with didactic self-consciousness, all the while insisting that, as Robespierre once put it, the laws should be inscribed ‘not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men’.’ Their ideal was one of Rousseauian ‘transparency’, of a spontaneous and unmediated accord between the ruler and the ruled. As a result, the need for political representation was belittled or denied, and politics in the modern sense of forming alliances or competing for power universally denounced as ‘conspiracy’. Revolutionary political culture was thus shaped by a ‘tension between transparency and didacticism’ (p. 73). a tension created by the collapse of the former ‘sacred center’ of political legitimacy embodied in the monarch and his court.
382
Book Reviews
Having thus established the dominant features of the new political culture, Hunt turns to the ‘new men’ who shaped it. The three chapters m part two. based on an impressive array of quantitative and prosopographical data. yield the following general conclusions: that left-wing politics mostly caught on and endured in the poorer, less urbanised and mostly illiterate regions situated around the periphery of the country; that the revolution opened up national and local leadership to individuals and groups previously excluded from the political sphere, creating an entirely new political class; and that on the local level, political power often fell to religious or social outsiders (Jevvs. Protestants, actors), or to cultural intermediaries such as schoolmasters. innkeepers or merchants. The biggest methodological challenge raised by the book resides not in the specifics of either section-although those open up plenty of new areas for investigation and debate-but in the link between both parts. The authorconfronts the theoretical problem head-on in her opening pages: the relationship between society and politics should not be thought of in terms of ‘strata’ or ‘levels’, she writes: a better image would be the knot or Mobius strip, ‘with no permanent “above” or “below” ’ (p. 13). This elegant formulation works better in theory than in practice. however. IVhat Hunt proceeds to show is not a dialectical back-and-forth between culture and politics, but what might be termed a structural homology between a new political class drawn from the social and geographical boundaries of the nation, and the feverishly improvised, ‘liminal’, culture of an era of political innovation. The connection she presents is extremely convincing, and the very organisation of the book does a good job of subverting the conventional class-to-culture progression adopted unthinkingly by most historians. But what we are offered in the end is a rather static, structural relationship, not the roller-coaster ride announced in those opening pages. The author might be taken to task for sidestepping some delicate issues ofcausality, and in particular for completely ignoring the vexed question of the relationship between Enlightenment and Revolution, which bears directly upon her topic. Historians of the old regime may find her insistence on the absolute novelty of revolutionary culture somewhat exaggerated, since some of them now argue that the political legitimacy of divine-right monarchy had begun to ‘unravel’several decades before 1789.’ These and other issues will be debated at conferences and in seminars for years to come. That this book represents a major and welcome breakthrough in the historiography of the French Revolution, seems however, well beyond dispute. Sarah Maza Northwestern
University
NOTES I. Most notably The& Skocpol, Slates and Social Revolurions: A Compararive AnalJ,sis ofFrance. Russia, andChina(Cambridge, !979); Francois Furet, PenserlaRevo/urionFranCoisz(Paris. 1978). 2. Speech of 17 Pluvibse, Year II, as quoted in Richard Bienvenu, The :l’inrh o/Thermidor: The Fall of Robesprerrr (NW York, 1968). p. 33. 3. For instance Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the L’nrarrliing of the Ancren RL;gime (Princeton, 1983).
Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). xiv + 417, pp. S24.95. To the late Raymond Aron, Marx theorists of modern society, theorists answers to the fundamental questions
Boesche
and Tocqueville appeared as the two seminal who provided opposing but equally coherent of contemporary social philosophy. The one