Henri Lefebvre

What is the Historical Past?

Albert Sobouls work on the Parisian Sans-Culottes in the Year Two of the
French Revolution1 begins with the victory of the Montagnards over the
Girondins, a bloodless political triumph despite the fact that it was won with the
support of the armed people of Paris: On 2 June 1793, the Montagne took
power by pressuring the Convention with the threat of the Parisian sansculottes. It did not, however, intend to let the sans-culottes rule . . . From the
very outset of his book, Soboul focusses on the problem which he intends to
study: the conflict, at first latent and then open, between the revolutionary
government and the masses which had brought it to power. This conflict was
eventually to exhaust both the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses and the
authority of those in power. Its final outcome was Thermidor. The author
deliberately limits the object of his research. He ignores or passes over other
aspects of this turbulent period, in particular the foreign policy of the revolution, the subject of a recent debate between Jean-Paul Sartre and Daniel Gurin.2
Soboul confines his study (by a conscious methodological limitation) to the
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determinant social force in the revolutionary process, the Parisian Sections. Historians, he tells us, know this period well at the level of the
State, Institutions and Leadersin other words, from above. Albert
Soboul, on the other hand, following in the steps of Georges Lefebvre,
but advancing yet further, seeks to study the Parisian populace in its
general assemblies and socits sectionnaires. To the earlier histories of the
events of the Revolutionof the men, ideas and institutions it producedand to the economic histories of Mathiez or Labrousse,
Soboul has now added a history of the social forces of the French
Revolution, in a volume, whose essential concern is sociological. The
research this involves is sometimes surprisingly detailed: it includes
the biographies of individuals who played some part in the great drama,
however minimal or local. We learn of their social origins, and thereby
discover the social composition of the different Parisian Sections, which
illuminates their respective political roles remarkably, and is in turn
clarified by them. Though Soboul purposely avoids other questions,
particularly the general political problems of the French Revolution, he
does not separate his meticulous research from the total movement
which is the object of his study; the rise, stabilization, reflux and decline of
the mass movement of the Parisian sans-culottes.
Disturbances

With a rare wealth of documentation, Soboul shows howvery soon

after the Montagne had won powerdisturbances broke out that
promptly polarized different economic attitudes and political programmes within the victorious camp. These disturbances were provoked by apparently trivial and invariably everyday reasons. Thus, by
the end of June 1793, soap was scarce in Paris. Laundresses thereupon
started to loot soap from the boats docked at the Parisian quays. In
effect, these women were forcibly taxing a scarce commodity and, by
their intervention, posing the problems of provisioning in the capital,
control of distribution and generalization of the laws of the maximum governing prices and wages: in other words they were raising
the question of economic equality in a situation of shortages. Soboul
points out the significance of this intervention by womenhousewivesin the political democracy of the time; an intervention spontaneously pushing the latter towards a directly social form of democracy. He follows its evolution and that of other small disturbances in
great detail, because they show the depth of the social crisis by putting
in question the foundation of society and not merely its political and
ideological superstructures. In doing so, Soboul transforms Michelets
prophetic but generic vision of the Revolution as a series of epic
descriptions of the battles of insurgent Paris.
In 1793, the popular masses of Paris manifestly neither wanted nor were
able to go on living as they had previously done. Thisaccording to
1

Albert Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en lAn II, Paris 1958. Shortened English
translation, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution 17934, Oxford 1964.
All page references hereafter are to this English translation.
2 J. P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Paris 1960, pp. 3340; and Daniel
Gurin, La Lutte de Classes sous la Premire Rpublique 17937, (new edition), Paris
1968, Vol. II, pp. 51420.
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Leninis the definition of a profoundly revolutionary period. Soboul

shows how the process of radicalization that had begun in 1789, and
then become bogged down in Girondism, gathered momentum again.
The upsurge of the masses worsens the economic crisis and this worsening then intensifies their pressure. They push towards goals determined by the demand of a daily life which has become intolerable. They
want State power to be used for the satisfaction of their needs, right up
to outright control of distribution and even of production, if necessary
through their direct delegates. The Jacobins in power, on the other
hand, want to use the State for very different purposes. They have other
perspectives, and also other responsibilities, particularly those of
national defence, of the war and how to fight it. Political democracy,
which they are willing to make as egalitarian as possible, is enough for
them, particularly since through their actions it rapidly becomes a
centralized and dictatorial State power, which uses its legality to suspend the rights of individuals and of personal freedom. Objectively,
conflict between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes was inevitable. Very
early, a gulf opened up between the language of leaders who talked of
patriotism and of masses who more and more spoke of food. By its
very nature and necessary limits, the Jacobin (bourgeois-democratic)
Revolution was incapable of solving this contradiction. A hundred and
thirty years later another revolutionqualitatively distinct but not
absolutely separated from itwould try to push democracy in every
field to its limits, by simultaneously achieving political democracy,
economic democracy and social (socialist) democracy.
As early as July 1793, the leader of the Parisian masses, Jacques Roux,
was politically defeated. His fate was a fore-shadowing of what was to
follow, but nobody in July 1793 realized this. In this respect, Sobouls
book has the suspense of a great novel: destiny is decided, declared,
presaged and yet none of the actors or characters is aware of it. He who
knowsthe historianshows their uncertainty, ignorance and lack of
consciousness. It is to be noted that in July 1793, both Hbert and
Marat participated in the Jacobin operation against Jacques Roux;
however, the force behind the popularity of the leader whom they had
eliminated, in other words, the pressure of the masses, was to sweep them
up in their turn and impel them farther, too far, along the same road.
Soboul provides us with an impressive account of how, in this period,
politics were conducted. Those whom the people already called statesmen invented or perfected all the devices of modern politics; they
manipulated the masses, utilized them and confiscated their energies to
mobilize, repress or break them. The Jacobins, those great (bourgeois)
revolutionaries, created and employed every contemporary means of
maintaining power: the communications system, newspapers and
rumour, informers and police, mystification and slander. (Hbert was
attacked as an English agent.) Manoeuvring was constantand utterly
unscrupulous. For example, the Moderates set the Sections against the
Commune and the Jacobins by whipping up agitation over the food
crisis; after which, pretending to deal with the shortages, the Government dissolved (from above) the Provisioning Commission set up by
the Sections, which was an expression of direct democracy and represented an aspiration towards greater social and economic equality.
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Economic freedom thereby triumphed: in other words, the exact

opposite of what the militants in the Sections had wanted! The manoeuvre thus concluded with a victory of the most powerful and dominant economic tendency at that moment, amidst fluctuations caused by
demagogic initiatives and clashes of contradictory currents of opinion
and action. Another example of the same type can be cited from a later
episode of the Revolution. When the Jacobin revolutionary government struck at the extreme-left opposition which had sought to appeal
to the masses, it fabricated a remarkable amalgam; it tried and condemned a sizable contingent of Moderates together with a crowd of
Hbertists.
Wider Implications

In this respect Sobouls book has a very wide significance, perhaps

greater than its author intended. Far better than in any previous work on
the French Revolution, the reader can follow here the birth of modern
politics, both in their ignominy and their tragic grandeur (when executioners become victims). For all its size, the book could serve as a
breviary for many different people, some of them to learn politics, the
others to feed their hatred for political mystifications and trickery, even
when these are historically effective.
To sum up: according to Soboul, for several months in 1793 there
existed in Paris a form of dual power. On the one hand there was the
peoples power of the socits sectionnaires and the comits, and on the
other a Government which had originated from this popular movement, but was now attempting to break away from it; a terrible and
complex political struggle ensued. The Jacobin Government was only
maintained in power by the support of a social base that it could only
disappoint. A right opposition and a left opposition emerged and crystallized. They fought each other and at times became confused with
one another. The right opposition pulled the administration backwards
towards the interests of the propertied classes (the bourgeoisie). The
left opposition, without making socialist demands (an anachronistic
term avoided by Soboul), sought to outflank the Jacobin Government
and to draw it beyond a politically egalitarian republic. The Government hit out in both directions; a new crisis then developed which was
only resolved with the overthrow of Robespierre, partly abandoned by
the masses. This political crisis was never distinct from an economic
crisis, which was already beginning to pose problems with which we
are now very familiar. In 1793 and 1794, of course, they were not posed
in the same terms as in the mid twentieth century, if only because of the
social composition of the sans-culottes: the Sections were essentially
recruited from petty shopkeepers and artisans, together with a fairly
large number of wage-earners.
Who, then, did the Jacobins and Robespierre represent? The militant
wing of a bourgeoisie which was learning to become a ruling class in
the midst of a revolutionary process, which was seeking by successive
(and bloody) approximations to discover its politics, its perspectives,
its institutions, its ideologies. This militant wing was petty bourgeois
by origin and initially close to the leading elements of the popular
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masses; it accepted an advanced political democracy as long as it remained within the limits of (bourgeois) political democracy. It had no
compunction in exercising dictatorial power under the ideological
banner of Freedom and Democracy, in the name of the Nation. Its
primary objective was to win the war, and it got rid of Robespierre as
soon as he had won it and because he had won it. Robespierre represented the politics of a class, the audacious section of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, the political objectives of the Montagne were to mobilize popular forces and to wear them out, to canalize sans-culottes energies and
to exhaust them, to slow the movement down without bringing the
Girondins back to power, to reassure bourgeois notables and
especially the new rich, without bringing on an insurrection of the
masses. These contradictions were to bring Robespierre and Saint-Just
to the scaffold.
We have so far deliberately emphasized (with a certain insistence) expressions and phrases which have a very modern meaning. Some
such as dual powerare directly borrowed from Lenin. There is
hardly a page in Sobouls book that does not evoke present memories
of some kind in a reader who is versed in the political life of the
twentieth century. These echoes between past and present multiply the
interest of reading this history, particularly given the often astonishing
exactitude of parallels and the intimate correspondence between the
scholarly accuracy of the historian and his implicit reference to modern
political experience.
The Historians Stance

Very cleverly, and instinctively constructing his book like a skilful

novelist (whereas he is, in fact, essentially concerned with precise
documentation), Soboul does not reveal his true thoughts at the beginning of the work. At the end, after he has provided his arguments
and established his proofs, he says everything (or nearly everything).
Every historian of the French Revolution has contributed something
a new set of facts, or a new light on themout of his own period and
his own experience. The historians of the Restoration, who inspired
Taine, recorded the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism;
they portrayed its last battles, drew up a balance-sheet and traced its
history backwards into the remote past (Augustin Thierry). For the
nascent socialist movement, the Revolution appeared in a different
light: it was a premonitory explosion, a movement that was a precursor and harbinger of a new revolutionfor some, intimately linked
with the latter, for others, separated from the proletarian revolution
by a radical discontinuity. When economic research became widespread, economic histories of the revolution came to the forefront, and
so on.
What is, according to Soboul himself, his own contribution? He summarizes it at the end of his book. There, he condenses into a few lines
his account of the internal contradictions (economic, social, ideological
and political) of the sans-culottes, who constituted neither a class, nor
the party of a class, but a coalition. He shows how these contradictions
exploded, and yet were not the only elements in the revolutionary
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crisis: The disintegration of the popular movement was inscribed in

the dialectical march of history itself.3 Why? Firstly, for a reason of a
biological nature. Badly fed, constantly on the alert, the sans-culotte
militants inevitably suffered physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion.
Five years of revolution had drained the physical resources of the
sectionary personnel who provided the cadres of the popular movement.
This physical exhaustion . . . also affected the militants, always in the
thick of the battle. Moreover, the end of the civil war, the halt to the
invasion, and finally, the realization of victory led to an understandable
relaxation of tension. . . . The people were anxious to reap the benefits of
all their effort. . . . Since victory was at last in sight, they expected, if not
exactly abundance, then, at least, less difficulty in being provided with
food as well as a daily supply of bread. In fact, victory led to the demobilization of the popular movement.4
There was a second reason. The younger, more active, and more enthusiastic men of the Sections left for the front. The result of plebeian
enlistment in the army was to age the whole popular movement in
Paris: the inevitable effect on the revolutionary enthusiasm and combative keenness of the Parisian masses can readily be appreciated.5 This
was not all: Finally, the dialectical effect of success led to a gradual disintegration of the framework of the popular movement.6 Numerous
sans-culottes joined the State apparatus, the bureaucracy: Many
sectionary militants, even if they were not motivated by ambition alone,
regarded an official position as the legitimate reward for their militant
activity. The stability of the popular movement largely depended upon
the satisfaction of these personal interests which happened to coincide
with the need for purging the various committees. But, in such cases,
success breeds a new conformity.7
The reader may savour the phrase in such cases: sole perceptible intrusion of the subjectivity of Soboul the individual into the objective
movement studied by Soboul the historian. It is true that these three
short words speak volumes. They are enough. They emphasize the
significance of the lines that follow: At the same time, the democratic
ideal was being weakened in the sections, the process of bureaucratization gradually paralyzing the critical spirit and activity of the masses.
The eventual outcome was a relaxation of the control exercised by the
popular movement over the Revolutionary Government, which became increasingly authoritarian in character.8 There could be no better
way of saying that a mass political movement, and its historical efficacy,
presuppose a number of different conditions, among them physiological,
moral, and ideological conditions. Such a movement constitutes a conjuncture; it is in no way permanent and does not possess an immediate
and stable link with the structural characteristics of this or that class.
It is thus that it enters into history and becomes a history. Time plays
an essential role in its being.
3

The Parisian Sans-Culottes, p. 257.

Ibid. p. 258.
5
Ibid.
6 Ibid. p. 259.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
4

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Past and Present

In this dramatic picture of a rise and a decline, of a growth and an exhaustion, who can fail to perceive certain features of the proletarian
movement in the last forty years of our own century: the effects of
lassitude, age, sclerosis, conformism and the integration of militants
into bureaucratic apparatuses?
But then, the methodological problem of the writing of history is posed
in a new and intense way. Is it in the final analysis the subjectivity of
the historian which triumphs, even if it lies hidden, even (and especially) if it lurks concealed beneath impeccable scholarship? Is the
historian cheating when he accumulates documents? Does Sobouls
work, restored to its contextthe sum total of recent works on the
French Revolutionfinally and arrestingly confirm this ruse? Alternatively, does history depreciate like a literary genre, the interest of
each work lying essentially in its organization of texts and documents,
its composition, prose and style?
Or must one accept absolute relativismthe thesis that there are
always new approaches and new points of view (on the past as well as
the present), which are equally valid? Discussion and polemic are then
reduced to virtually superfluous games. For the arrested and frozen
historicity of dogmatism, closed and definitive, is merely replaced by an
indeterminate, shifting and floating historicity, in which historians and
periods proceed by projecting themselves onto the past and interpreting
it in terms of themselves.
Or (a last hypothesis? there is nothing to prove it so!) must we even
return to Raymond Arons views? For him, real development is not
immediately intelligible; the historian alone gives form to groups of
ideas as well as to social groups; the totality of a historical process can
only be attained through a plurality of understandings, hence a
plurality of independent histories and interpretative systems. The
historian and historical study differ but they belong to the same
totality. Therefore the historian puts history in perspective, and a
plurality of interpretation is legitimated by a plurality of perspectives.9
As Daniel Gurin has rightly remarked, such a theory justifies outright
anachronisms.10 For Arons limited relativism, history is necessarily
filtered through a philosophy and a philosophy of history: Philosophy
and history, philosophy of history and total philosophy are inseparable.11
Sobouls work, however, suggests a different hypothesis, which can be
formulated in two phases:
1. The French Revolution was a total phenomenon, resulting from a
total social and historical process, that was simultaneously economic,
9

Raymond Aron, Introduction la Philosophie de lHistoire, Paris 1938, pp. 134, 146,
147, 151.
10
Gurin, op. cit. Vol. II, p. 494.
11
Aron, op. cit. p. 344.
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sociological, ideological and so on. This total phenomenon, as such,

appears to be inexhaustible. Consequently new aspects of it perpetually
emerge, or are uncovered; and these are not only historical aspects in
the narrow sense of the word; they are also economic, sociological and
ideological, while no one of them can be accorded an absolute causal
privilege. Thus, the works of successive historians are not incompatible; nor do they merely constitute novel approaches, interpretations
or perspectives. They bring to light real historical contents which had
previously been concealed, masked and unseen in the explosive mass of
the total phenomenon.
2. The French Revolution made a certain number of events possible,
through a process of which it was either the origin or a decisive element. Each time one of these possibilities is realized, it retroactively
sheds a new light on the initial event. Thus the revolutionary event, as
a totality, belongs not only to so-called narrative history but to a
deeper historicity, which reveals itself slowly with the realization of
such possibilities and the advent of new possibilities, in the course of
this realization itself. Thus, when historians take into account their own
experience in their research into the past, they are profoundly right to
do so. They do not mistakenly project the present onto the past; they
do not each merely elaborate a personal philosophy of history. For the
introduction of the concept of the possible should not be confused with
any merely philosophical interpretation of history. This concept,
although philosophical in origin, has been adopted in all fields of the
social sciences and therefore now has a very general methodological
character. It is thus in no way an external importation into historical
method, but the formulation of a principle hitherto absent yet inherent
in it.
We can thus arrive at an objective relativism, or rather a theory of a
deeper objectivity which does not exclude a certain relativity. The past
becomes present (or is renewed) as a function of the realization of the possibilities
objectively implied in this past. It is revealed with them. The introduction
of the category of the possible into historical methodology permits us
to conceive the objectivitywhile yielding its due to the relativity,
novelty and inexhaustibilityof history, without collapsing into pure
relativism. It restores historical actions and personages to the effective
movement of history, without falling into subjectivism.
If this is so, anachronism is neither to be recommended, nor to be
tolerated. Rather, it represents the necessary risk which research must
accept, but proceed immediately to eliminate by the exactness of its
documentation, the careful collation of its evidence and sources. Controversies such as those which oppose Daniel Gurin to other contemporary historians of the French Revolution, and in particular to Soboul,
have their own utility; they tend to eliminate anachronisms. The history
of the French Revolution has thus not come to an end with the work of
Albert Soboul, any more with that of Daniel Gurin, Ernest Labrousse,
or Georges Lefebvre. Further research is precisely suggested by reading
Soboul. We may ask ourselves, for example, what exactly was going on
among the nouveaux riches and the careerists of the Revolution, how they
were living while the militants were rushing to the local offices of the
Sections: how they were preparing themselves for power and ease?
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