The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution

701 Pages·2015·10.066 MB·English

by  David Andress

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
THE FRENCH
R E V O L U T I O N

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
Edited by
DAVID ANDRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 0x2 6dp,
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Forew ord
Although the demise of the French Revolution as a field of active study has some­
times been prophesied, and in recent years cautioned against if a new ‘paradigm’ is not
found to revive it, in practice it is an area prone to recall the biblical injunction that:
‘Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the
flesh’ (Ecclesiastes 12:12). A recitation of the edited collections that have appeared in
French, English and other major languages devoted to the events and antecedents of
the 1790s, even limited to those after the flood of bicentennial celebrations of the 1990s,
would absorb more space than is available here.1
One of the challenges of producing a major collection on the French Revolution is
thus to avoid the thought ‘Oh no, not again!’ in the mind of the prospective, yet poten­
tially already jaded, reader. This was particularly the case with this collection, as it began
construction when a volume under Peter McPhee’s editorship, A Companion to the
French Revolution was already underway, and a second text, The Routledge Companion
to the French Revolution in World History, was in formation.2 As this editor is not alone
in having contributions to all of these volumes, the challenge is only redoubled.
This volume seeks to be an original, complementary, and engaging contribution by
looking both backwards and forwards in ways which are unlike the parallel offerings
mentioned. Global contexts and perspectives, for both the French Revolution and the
Age of Revolutions in general, are a significant and fruitful development in current his­
toriography.3 Understandings of the French Revolution as part of an ‘Atlantic world’,
and writings about events in the French Antilles, have flourished in recent decades.4
Indeed, while the first generation of scholars to write of the ‘Atlantic Revolution’ did so
without mentioning Haiti, the events which overtook people of all colours on French
Saint-Domingue now merit, quite rightly, treatment as one of the major revolutions of
the era.5
It is precisely for that reason—that the French Revolution in its Atlantic dimension
now represents an entire field of historiography in itself—that this collection chooses
to return its focus, thematically at least, on to new developments in historiogra­
phies of events within European France. This is not to say that wider perspectives are
neglected: our very first chapter on economic and demographic developments in the
eighteenth century points clearly to the significance of colonial trade in understand­
ing the state of the nation in the years before 1789. The chapters immediately follow­
ing, though, show that on very ‘traditional’ questions of the role of the bourgeoisie, the
nobility, and the monarchy itself in that situation, there are still important new debates,
and as-yet unanswered key questions to be posed.
vi FOREWORD
In general, this is the pattern for the whole volume. Individual authors were asked
to write about what made their particular area still an active field of debate, to review
the ‘state of the art’ in current understanding, and to suggest ways forward for future
research. Some chapters offer in themselves striking new interpretations—Lauren Clay
on the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie is one such, as is Simon Burrows on the extent to
which the pre-revolutionary literary sphere was simply not what a previous generation
of historians assumed it was. Contributions such as those of Ambrogio Caiani, Charles
Walton, Marisa Linton, and Ronen Steinberg represent significant new work as well as
opening spheres of exploration for the future. But to name those is only to give examples
of one kind of valuable approach here.
Kirsty Carpenter, Marc Belissa, and Mike Rapport draw together strands of their own
and others’ work on still relatively neglected areas of the border-crossing impact of the
Revolution. Manuel Covo demonstrates that we do not need to look to the Caribbean
to see the direct impact of slavery and race, for it penetrated to the heart of debates in
Versailles and Paris. Michael Fitzsimmons, Jeremy Popkin, and Peter McPhee are
among those who take superficially straightforward topics and add an original and
thought-provoking twist of chronology, setting or conclusion. And thus I have named
only a third of what is on offer here. The rest is for the reader to discover.
In aiming to put a twist on existing debates, there may appear to be some surprising
absences: contributors have, for example, tended to write around the question of actual
violent conflict with counter-revolution, rather than zoom in on it as an issue. Perhaps
even more disconcertingly, there is no ‘gender chapter’ in this collection.6 Contributors
were asked to consider the place of gender within the various topics they were discuss­
ing, and to treat it as a mode of analysis wherever appropriate. This is visible, for exam­
ple, in Kirsty Carpenter’s chapter on emigration, in Jean-Luc Chappey’s discussion
of elite reconstruction in the later 1790s, and as part of my own understanding of the
sans-culotte phenomenon and crowd activity in general. Jeremy Popkin’s treatment of
revolutionary identities addresses what some women tried, and failed, to get from the
determinedly masculine political sphere of the 1790s. Jennifer Heuer’s wide overview of
revolutionary legacies discusses gendered issues from contests over women’s perceived
‘place’ in post-revolutionary society to the mutilated masculinity of injured war veter­
ans. Marisa Linton’s reading of the personal stakes of terrorist politics is a study, among
other things, of the construction of a certain form of public and private masculinity.
I hope readers will agree, ultimately, that the absence of gender from the contents page
has produced an enhanced sense of the integration of such issues into the wider land­
scape of thematic debate.
Such continuing debate is the ultimate goal of this volume. We have, as contributors,
set out to ask more questions than we answer, or at the very least, to reframe old answers
and new understandings in a way that will point others to new and better questions of
their own. We offer new opportunities for reflection on the revolutionary past, in a dec­
ade that has already seen more than its share of upheavals in the name of revolutionary
futures. Many of those recent events have run out of the control of their more optimistic
advocates in ways that might seem very familiar to a French émigré in 1794, or an exiled
FOREWORD Vii
regicide a generation later. It is not the historian’s job to preach solutions—and indeed
the history of beliefs about revolution over the last 200 years illustrates the problem of
trying to do so all too neatly.7 But if history does have a role in the public sphere, it is
surely to promote a more reflective approach to the kind of very vexed questions—of
social justice, of power in its manifestations both subtle and violent, of freedom and
its limits, and of the intersection of all these things with the two contemporary shib­
boleths of identities and rights—that the French Revolution allows us to discuss. If this
volume makes a small contribution to such a large and urgent goal, we will be more than
satisfied.
It remains only for me to thank all my fellow contributors, with a special mention
for Manuel Covo, who stepped in as a very-close-to-last-minute replacement. Thanks
also to Christine Baycroft for her translation work, to Christopher Wheeler for commis­
sioning this volume originally, and to Cathryn Steele and Michael Déla Cruz for taking
it forward through production. If I use my editorial privilege at this point to name my
own family, Jessica, Emily and Natalie, as the ones that keep me going, I will also gladly
note that they stand among a crowd of those who do the same for all of us who have
written here.
David Andress
Notes 1
1. For a brief discussion of why I think alarm over lost paradigms is misplaced, see my
‘Introduction: Revolutionary historiography, adrift or at large? The paradigmatic quest
versus the exploration of experience’, in David Andress (ed.), Experiencing the French
Revolution (Oxford, 2013), 1-15.
2. Peter McPhee (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (Chichester, 2013); Alan Forrest
and Matthias Middell (eds), The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World
History (forthcoming in 2015).
3. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (eds), The French Revolution in
Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY, 2013); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyan (eds),
The Age of Revolutions in Global Context (Basingstoke, 2010).
4. See Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World
1450-1850 (Oxford, 2011), including chapters by Silvia Marzagalli and David Geggus on
French/Haitian events and structures, and many other contributions that include compar­
ative discussion of French engagement in social, economic, and political developments.
5. Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770-1799
(New York, 1965), contains no reference to Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Slavery is noted simply
as a form of agriculture in the Americas, and as an unresolved problem of the United States
Constitution: 10-11,37-9. More recent historiography that explodes this view is summa­
rised in Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Malden, MA, 2012).
For unequivocal discussion of Haiti as a revolution worthy of comparison with the canoni­
cal events of the period, see Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World; a comparative
history (New York, 2009).
viii FOREWORD
6. In keeping with the theme of complementarity, chapters on both topics can be found in
McPhee (ed.)> Companion: Anne Verjus, ‘Gender, Sexuality and Political Culture’, 196-211;
Jean-Clément Martin, ‘The Vendée, chouannerie, and the State, 1791-99’, 246-59. There is
also an excellent piece by Suzanne Desan, ‘The French Revolution and the Family’, 470-85,
which could have found a home in the present volume, had she not already written it.
7. A subject on which I have blogged: www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/return-
revolutions/>
C ontents
List of Contributors xiii
PART I ORIGINS
1. Economic and Demographic Developments 3
Silvia Marzagalli
2. The Bourgeoisie, Capitalism, and the Origins of the
French Revolution 21
Lauren R. Clay
3. Nobility 40
Jay M. Smith
4. Monarchy 56
Joël Félix
5. Books, Philosophy, Enlightenment 74
Simon Burrows
6. Tumultuous Contexts and Radical Ideas (1783-89). The
‘Pre-Revolution’ in a Transnational Perspective 92
Annie Jourdan
7. The Diplomatic Origins of the French Revolution 109
Thomas E. Kaiser
PART II THE COMING OF REVOLUTION
8. The View from Above 131
John Hardman
9. The View from Below: The 1789 cahiers de doléances 149
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire
X CONTENTS
10. A Social Revolution? Rethinking Popular Insurrection in 1789 164
Peter McPhee
11. A Personal Revolution: National Assembly Deputies and
the Politics of 1789 180
Micah Alpaugh
PART III REVOLUTION AND
CONSTITUTION
12. Sovereignty and Constitutional Power 201
Michael P. Fitzsimmons
13. The New Regime: Political Institutions and Democratic
Practices under the Constitutional Monarchy, 1789-91 218
Malcolm Crook
14. Revolution and Changing Identities in France, 1787-99 236
Jeremy D. Popkin
15. Religion and Revolution 254
Edward J. Woell
16. Urban Violence in 1789 272
D. M. G. Sutherland
17. Race, Slavery, and Colonies in the French Revolution 290
Manuel Covo
PART IV COUNTER-REVOLUTION
AND COLLAPSE
18. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette 311
Ambrogio A. Caiani
19. Emigration in Politics and Imaginations 330
Kirsty Carpenter
20. Challenges in the Countryside, 1790-2 346
Noelle Plack