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Review Essay

REINTERPRETING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

A discussion of Francois Furet, lntetpreting the French Revolution (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

JACK A. GOLDSTONE

1789 is often taken as the date of the great divide between the old world and
the new, as the point at which "modern society" - the society of the bourgeoi-
sie, of capitalism, emerges from the old regime almost as a butterfly emerges
from a crumbling pupa. "Beginning in 1789, the obsession with origins...
came to be centered precisely on the Revolutionary break . . . . 1789 became
the birth date, the year zero, of a new world" (p. 2). 1

This of course is arrant nonsense, and Furet will have none of it. Capitalism,
bourgeois political leadership, and social and political equality emerged
slowly and painfully in Frane over the course of the entire nineteenth
century. Furet reminds us that Republic and Monarchy alternated to 1851,
even to 1877. "Only the victory of the republicans over the monarchists at the
beginning of the Third Republic marked the definitive victory of the revolu-
tion" (p. 4). Explicitly aligning himself with Alexis de Tocqueville, Furet thus
stresses the continuity of France's development from the Ancien Regime
through the nineteenth century.

Yet if the French Revolution was not a break in France's development, it

most certainly was a breakdown - of the government, and much of the social
order. Though all were soon to return, the monarchy, the nobility, and the
Roman Catholic church were briefly eclipsed. If Furet's first task is to
demonstrate the continuity of France's history, his second is to explain why
in 1789-1799 there occurred a governmental collapse of exceptional violence
and thoroughness. Here Furet turns to another predecessor, though less well
known than Tocqueville: Augustin Cochin. Using Cochin's theories of revo-
lutionary ideology, Furet constructs his own views of the process of revolu-
tionary breakdown.

l)epartment ~/'Sociology, Northwestern University.

698

Furet's book comprises four essays. The first two attack the views of Soboul,
Mathiez, and Mazauric; these essays aim to dismantle the "linear schema of
history, in which the bourgeois revolution, uniting the peasantry and urban
masses behind it, achieves the breakthrough from the feudal to the capitalist
mode of production" (p. 88). The latter two are interpretive essays on
Tocqueville and Cochin. Though peppered with cogent points regarding
these thinkers, greater rewards lie in the first two papers.

These essays themselves pose a striking contrast. "The Revolutionary

Catechism" was first published in the Annales in 1971. 2 Strident and taunt-
ing, it shows Furet's early clash with the "orthodox" Marxist interpretation
of the Revolution in France, an orthodoxy Furet feels had to be repeated
ritually (hence the catechism) in all studies of 1789 and its aftermath. The
companion essay, written nearly a decade later, restates the same position,
but with a relaxed authority stemming from an intervening decade of schol-
arship that has largely reinforced Furet's initial views. Furet has marked his
assurance by stating with the title of this essay that"The Revolution is Over."

Controversy over the Revolution, however, is likely to continue. For if not a

radical break, the Revolution was no ordinary breakdown. It was the
breakdown of the dominant state in what was already the world's dominant
civilization. The visibility of the Revolution has thus made it an obvious
model (to be imitated or avoided) for revolutionaries and statesmen ever
since, while as our central revolutionary "case," our interpretation of the
French Revolution inevitably molds our views of revolution in general.

Furet's interpretation runs over a host of topics, and full coverage is beyond a
brief review. I shall thus focus on three themes central to Furet's work:
1. Elites and the Crisis of the Old Regime; 2. The Origins of 1789 and the
"High Road to Revolution"; 3. The Revolutionary Process and the Terror. I
conclude with an attempt to lay out the implications of Furet's interpretation
of the French Revolution for general theories of revolution.

Elites and the Crisis of the Old Regime

Furet argues that the conflicts that brought down the Old Regime are not to
be found in divisions between nobles and bourgeois (pp. 100-116). Instead
Furet focuses our attention on the"dominant classes" as a whole. This group
included court nobles and high army officers, intendants and parlementaires,
financiers and royal councillors, state, provincial, and municipal officials,
and academiciens and professionals. It embraced members of the old nobil-
ity of the sword, the newer judicial and bureaucratic nobility of the robe, the
 699

recently ennobled, those still in the course of acquiring nobility, and

throughout the urban centers and lower courts the non-noble ranks of large
merchants, writers, physicians, notaries, avocals, and minor officials.

Furet joins a chorus of recent scholarship 3 that has shown that the elites of
France noble and non-noble shared the same complex of investment in
offices, seigneuries, and state bonds, the same pursuits and social aspirations,
and even shared kin through marriages linking rising bourgeois or recently
ennobled families to ancient, if often indigent, nobility. Moreover, the line
between bourgeois and nobles was easily and frequently crossed; the "aristo-
cratic reaction" of the later eighteenth century appears upon close study to
have been more a psychological reaction on the part of conservatives to the
rapid entry of commoners into the nobility than an actual closing of the
doors to social advance. Access to the parlements, the law courts, and the
ministries continued to remain open to recently ennobled families and even
to commoners born down to the end of the Old Regime. 4 As one scholar
summed up, "it seems quite clear that the rise of members of the Third Estate
into the Second Estate in the eighteenth century was relatively easy, rapid,
and continuous. ''5

Yet this elite was not united; quite the reverse. France had never adopted a
disciplined service nobility on the Prussian model, nor had it extended
political partnership and initiative to an elite assembly as in England. The
French monarchy preserved an autonomous noble elite while seeking to
tame it by keeping it divided, intermittently attacking its authority and
privileges, and adding new elements to it under direct control of the King.
The parlementaires and intendants, municipal authorities and provincial
governors, royal councillors and court nobles, all formed overlapping yet
distinct and competitive bodies in the Old Regime. Among these groups, and
within them, subtle distinctions were magnified in the pursuit of power.
Furet insists "the major question for eighteenth-century elites was not only:
bourgeois or noble? but: noble or ennobled'? and even: ennobled, but since
when?" (p. I07). As Colin Lucas has written: "At the end of the Ancien
regime, rank in the upper reaches of society was far too subtle a notion to be
confined within the ungainly corsetry of nobles versus commoners. It depen-
d e d . . , on wealth, profession, family background, patrons and connections,
title, privileges, and office. ''6

Furet tells us this system of"divide and rule" over the French elites worked
well enough under Louis X1V. But Louis XV and a fortiori Louis XVI were
unable to keep the system in motion. "The essential factor was the opening in
the ranks of the nobility," as financial pressures induced the monarchy to
700

increase sales of ennobling offices (p. 108). The sale of offices and ennoble-
ments was great enough to weaken the Crown's administrative control and to
antagonize the old nobility, but not large enough to satisfy the flood of
aspirants to elite positions produced by France's early and mid-eighteenth-
century prosperity. After the Seven Years War, attempts to reassert royal
administrative control and to balance the demands of old nobles, new
nobles, and those aspiring to noble status led to reforms in the army,
municipal government, taxation, and the law courts. These reform efforts
punctuated by retreats and waverings among ministerial and court factions
antagonized virtually every element of the elites while gaining the Crown
neither new prerogatives nor new allies.

The economic downturn that plagued the last two decades of the old regime,
added to the bitterly fought and ineffective efforts of reforming ministers
since the 1770s, especially Maupeou and Terray, lost the Crown the confi-
dence of the elites. By the time of the financial crisis of 1787, all of France's
political elites were ready to raise their voices against further royal dictates
and to demand the right to participate in directing needed reforms. Thus the
desire for a new convening of the Estates General the only body represent-
ing all segments of France's elites and empowered to consider fundamental
reforms - became irresistable. For Furet, the fundamental crisis of the Old
Regime was a crisis of absolutism, not of class struggle.

The Origins of 1789 and the High Road to Revolution

Geoffrey Elton, in an influential essay, accused historians of seventeenth-

century England of letting their view of the entire Stuart and Tudor period be
dominated by the English Revolution of 1640. Knowing a revolution lay
ahead, every ideological, political, and social trend was seen as contributing
to the forthcoming upheaval. Every bit of that history had to be fit into place
as one or more milestones on the "high road to revolution. ''7

Furet levels a similar accusation against French historiography of the Old

Regime. In the "catechism" of bourgeois revolution, the revolts of urban
masses and rural peasants are seen as aiding a bourgeoisie whose strength
and hatred of "feudal" practices has steadily grown through the eighteenth
century. These three elements combine to topple a decaying feudalism that is
nonetheless ever more staunchly and irreconcilably defended by a reaction-
ary nobility.

Of course, ever since Lefebvre, the separate roots and purposes of the
peasant revolt, urban uprisings, and the National Assembly have been on
 701

display. ~ As Lefebvre notes, "'the majority of p e a s a n t s . , , had their own

interests which were in conflict with the progress of capitalism... : they were
hostile to commercial liberty. "9 Furet accuses the "orthodoxy" of misappro-
priating Lefebvre, and forcing his separate bourgeois, peasant, and urban
revolts into the procrustean bed of the bourgeois Revolution. Furet argues
that there was no steadily growing opposition to the nobility that united all
society against them.

Furet drives home his views on class conflict with a penetrating examination
of the role of ideology in the Revolution. According to the revolutionary
"catechism," the ideology of the Enlightenment heralded the rise of the
bourgeoisie; it was the weapon that was nurtured in the Old Regime, yet
smote it down. Furet claims this view is simply the outcome of taking literally
the propaganda of the Revolution's peak years, 1792 1794. For Furet, the
verbiage of the Revolution must be seen as a veil that shrouds the true motives
of actors: indeed, "revolutionary times are precisely the most difficult to
understand, since they are often periods when the veil of ideology hides most
completely the real meaning of the events" (p. 159).

Furet attacks Soboul's claim that the Enlightenment represented a unified,

pro-bourgeois, program for reform. He notes that while Voltaire could
attack inequality based on birth, the clergy, and revealed religion, "subse-
quently the physiocrats were to construct the theoretical framework for a
society of landowners that would serve as the mainstay of enlightened
despotism" (p. I 14). The Enlightenment provided not a unified program, but
terms of discourse that embraced a wide variety of views.

What then was the role of the Enlightenment? Furet draws on Augustin
Cochin to present a unique view: the contribution of the Enlightenment to
the Revolution was not ideological, but organizational. The siecle des lu-
mieres gave birth in France to a peculiar institution: the philosophical
society. Born of the rise of literacy, of educated professionals with few official
prospects seeking life as intellectuals, of the desire of anoblis and gen-
tilshommes to compete in cosmopolitan sophistication, and perhaps of the
French preference for abstract discussion (as opposed to Britain, where
philosophical societies, such as the Royal Society, were more interested in
empirical scientific problems), the philosophical society evolved.

It was a new organizational form, where rank and birth were second to
oratorical ability, and oratorical ability was employed for abstract argument.
"It was a form of social life based on the principle that its members, in order
to participate in it, must divest themselves of all concrete distinctions, and of
702

their real social existence" (p. 174). Moreover, it was a meeting place of the
"dominant classes" that eschewed class divisions. "The highest social circles,
the academies, the masonic lodges, the cafes and theatres . . . . gradually fused
into an Enlightened society, very largely aristocratic yet also open to non-
noble talent and money" (p. 114). It was in this mixed company, not in the
combat of classes, that the Old Regime notions of a society of corporate
entities based on specific occupational and social interests melted away. "The
philosophical society of the 'enlightened' type was the matrix of a new
network of political relations that was to be the main characteristic and the
outstanding innovation of the French Revolution" (p. 175). When the crisis
that resulted in the calling of the Estates General arose, the philosophical
society which had been the mode in which all political problems and
reforms had been discussed for the last decades was the obvious model for
the national debate. But the Estates were essentially a corporatist body,
whose organization reflected the traditional divisions of French society.
What then could be more natural for the Patriot party, led by that mix of
nobility and talent that characterized the philosophical societies, than to ask
that the Estates be constituted along Enlightened, rather than corporatist,
lines'? The request for voting by head and double representation of the Third
thus originated not in the demands of the hostile bourgeoisie against the
nobility, but of the enlightenment philosphical society against old corporate
organization,l~ Indeed, in its transmutation into the National Assembly, the
delegates modeled themselves on, and became, the chief philosophical soci-
ety of France. It was this organizational model, peculiar to France, that
accounts for much of the conduct of the Assembly, a body that saw its role as
defining abstract ideas, as conceptualizing, not acting; until the need for
action swept the Assembly away.

Thus the view of the eighteenth century as a highway to the bourgeois

revolution with the Enlightenment as its beacon must be abandoned. The
origins of 1789 are not to be found in the language or actions of the revolu-
tionary decade 1789 1799. For the eighteenth century, instead of a growing
division of classes, of anti-noble hostility led by an Enlightenment program,
Furet gives us the picture of numerous Enlightenment societies, drawing
talent from throughout the nation, gradually breaking away from corpo-
ratist organization in favor of an organizational model free of class or social
cleavages.

Yet the calling of the Estates General in 1789 itself created a quantum change
in the situation. Struggles for power among factions of the elite crystallized
along new organizational lines, and language and myths were invented and
employed to justify the various protagonists. "Revolutionary ideology was
 703

born . . . in the battles of the election itself . . . . Robespierre became

Robespierre only when he had to win his seat as deputy for the Third Estate
from Arras. It was then that the young conformist invented the discourse of
equality" (p. 43). Furet admonishes us not to seek the origins of 1789 in those
myths and that language, nor to take the events of the decade 1789 1799 as
the natural outcome of the century preceeding it. Instead, to understand the
course of the Revolution, we must examine it not as the culmination of a
century, but on its own terms, as a sequence of events initiated, not pre-
figured, in 1789, and developing through its own dynamics.

The Revolutionary Process and the Terror

The calling of the Estates General aroused hopes for change; hope aroused
fear that changes would be blocked by counter-revolutionary plotters. Fears
of sinister plots aroused panic, which stirred frenzied action to forestall the
hidden enemy. Thus "the revolutionary event totally transformed the exist-
ing situation" (p. 22), creating a new dynamic, new possibilities, and new
problems that were a product of the Revolution itself, not of the Ancien
Regime that preceded it. "The causes of the Revolution... might 'explain'
1789, but not 1792 or 1793; [these were an outcome of] the Revolutionary
dynamic itseW' (p. 195).

How then to explain 1792-1793, Jacobinism, the war, and the Terror? Here
Furet breaks new ground, though starting from Cochin's analysis of' the
Jacobin era.

1789 brought forth a complete anomaly in French history: a deliberative

body, the National Assembly, empowered to debate and legislate fundamen-
tal laws. It was inevitable that such a body would need to adjudicate conflicts
of views, to reconcile opposing interests. Yet no mechanisms for the process
existed. Party government, and even "parties" organized to forge legislative
compromises and orchestrate peaceful conflict, had yet to be developed.
There was only one principle that all accepted to adjudicate conflicts, one
principle that represented the legitimacy of the Assembly the will of the
people.

Thus the Revolution sought to place the will of the people at the font of
power. Yet as this was an administrative impossibility, the result was an ever
escalating struggle among the various non-representative groups competing
for"the exclusive right to embody the democratic principle" (p. 77). The key
struggle of the Jacobin period was precisely the struggle to gain the role of
"voice of the people," a struggle carried out in large part by seeking to
704

dominate the Revolutionary dialogue. "Revolutionary activity par excel-

lence was the production of maximalist language . . . . The constant raising of
the ideological stakes was the rule of the game in the new system" (pp. 50, 55).

As the legitimating principle of the Revolution was the will of the people, the
enemy was embodied in its anti-principle, the "aristocratic" or "counter-
revolutionary" plot. "The 'aristocratic' plot thus became the lever of an
egalitarian ideology that was both exclusionary and highly integrative" (p.
55). It provided an enemy against which the masses could be mobilized to
support whichever group was temporarily successful in arrogating to itself
the role of representative of the popular will. The plot became ever expand-
ing as competing groups raised the volume and extremism of discourse.

The growing pursuit of internal and external enemies, the Terror and the
war, were the natural outcome of the terms in which Revolutionary power
struggles were framed. "The revolutionary ideology.., in its chemically pure
form of 1792 1793, had engendered the Terror and the war" (p. 76); in fact
"the Terror was an integral part of revolutionary ideology" (p. 62). The
Terror was the product of an ever escalating struggle to gain leadership of the
people through ever escalating opposition to those who could be labeled the
people's enemies.

For Furet, the Terror both in the form of the guillotine, and in the variety of
repressive episodes raging over the civil war, sporadic assasinations, and the
spontaneous massacres perpetrated by revolutionary crowds - thus was
neither a regrettable deviation brought into the Revolution by the unfortu-
nate pressures of a war launched by its enemies, nor a necessary step in the
abolition of the feudal Old Regime. The war was itself a product of the
Revolution precisely because, in the words of Brissot, it"needed great acts of
treason," (cited by Furet p. 128). And the feudal Old Regime was effectively a
dead letter by 1790. Terror arose because the power struggles of the Revolu-
tion gave it life, because the way to rush to the head of "the people" was to
serve them the heads of their enemies.

If the Terror was an inherent part of the process of revolution, so too was its
conclusion in military rule. For as Furet quotes Marx (in a rare case of the
devil quoting scripture), "Napoleon was the last stand of revolutionary
terror . . . . He carried the terror to its conclusion" (The Holy Family, cited p.
129). Furet suggests that when a society breaks with a monarchical past, and
sets up a republican government with neither experience in, nor rules for, the
conduct of republican government, the struggle for popular leadership takes
a course of excess, what Furet has called a tendency for the Revolution to
 705

"skid out of control" (p. 129). As the purges and terror escalate, as parties
fragment and shrink into a paranoic attack on all outside the party's ortho-
dox pale, the leader of the people's attack on its enemies may become
isolated, and may be pushed aside by those desiring a surcease from terror.
At this point, the terror may be repudiated. Yet the logic of the revolution has
not then fully run its course. The terror derives from the struggle to embody
the will of the people; its logical conclusion is the succeeding ofthe"leader of
the people's attack on its enemies" by the "national hero," who in his own
person represents the plebiscitary will of the nation. The democratic despot
despotic in authority, for both monarchy and republican rule have been
discredited, but legitimized as representing the will of the people, the "na-
tion" this is the principle of the revolution brought to its logical conclusion.
Thus Furet cannot abide the view of Napoleon as the consolidator of a
bourgeois revolution brewing through the eighteenth century; Napoleon is
the product of the new situation, the revolutionary situation, ushered in with
the fall of the Old Regime in 1789. The "type" of Napoleon the democrati-
cally legitimized authoritarian ruler was a pure product of the process of
revolution.

Furet casts his argument in general terms, but limits his discussion to the
French Revolution. It would be fascinating were Furet to undertake histori-
cal comparisons, but this he does not do. The progress of rhetorical competi-
tion and escalation leading to terror and democratic despotism that he
describes may be common to social revolutions: Napoleon succeeded
Robespierre, Cromwell replaced Pyre, Stalin succeeded Lenin, Chiang and
later Mao replaced Sun-Yat Sen. But these analogies are merely suggestive;
Furet's analysis of the revolutionary process would gain from close examina-
tion of the course of other revolutions to test the limits of its validity.

Furet and the Theory of Revolutions

Furet provides sharp insights into intra-elite conflicts, and a rich characteri-
zation of the process of revolution. He offers us, instead of a crisis of class
struggle, a crisis of absolutism. Yet Furet's account is less satisfactory on the
problem of the causes of the revolution and its timing in France's history -
why did the Old Regime absolutism suddenly break down in 1787 1789?
Why did the crisis of absolutism take on an explosive form in the late
eighteenth century, not soon after the death of Louis X1V, nor in the
minority of Louis XV (minorities were commonly the periods of state crises
and rebellion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), but more than two
generations later? Furet's answer is bound to disturb many historians, and
has discomforting implications for theorists of revolution. He remarks that
706

The 'revolution" was born of the convergence of very different series of events, since an
economic crisis (a complex phenomenon in itself, involvingagricultural, "industrial,"metero-
logical and social factors) took its place alongside the political crisis. . . . This convergence of
several heterogeneous series [was] surely a fortuitous situation" (pp. 24 25).

The French Revolution was thus a fluke? An outcome of an unexplained

"convergence" or "conjuncture" of unlinked event streams? Betty Behrens
recently gave voice to the discomfort such a view evokes, in an essay
published shortly after Furet's work appeared in French:

It has often been pointed out, and is now publicly admitted, that the orthodox explanation
of the Revolution in terms of a class struggle will not stand the test of facts. [But] now that
the orthodoxy is discredited we do not know what to believe. In the days of Mathiez and
Lefebvre's ascendency we thought we knew. Now there is no coherent explanation. II

Of course in a sense we now know far more than before a b o u t the origins of
the revolution; what we do not know is how to fit these facts into a coherent
story that will again m a k e the Revolution seem a likely event in late eigh-
teenth-century France, sharing kinship in its origins with other revolutions.
There is an extensive literature on whether e x p l a n a t i o n in history requires
subsuming specific events under more general principles, 12 and 1 do not
intend to argue the limits or desirability of generalization here. But certainly
the notion that the French Revolution was a " b o u r g e o i s " revolution brought
on by class struggles gave a reassuringly general f r a m e w o r k to the various
struggles that brought down the old regime. A n d that theoretical f r a m e w o r k
was reassuring in part because it solved three key problems. First, the
p r o b l e m of conjuncture: why did an economic crisis and a political crisis
coincide in such fatal fashion at the end of the Old Regime? Second, the
p r o b l e m of the timing of the Revolution in France's history: why the late
eighteenth century? W h a t long-term trends or new conditions rendered this
particular c o n j u n c t i o n of fiscal and economic crises more fatal to the mon-
archy than the a p p a r e n t l y equally dangerous conjunction of 1710 1715,
which saw the death of the king and a royal minority, a state b a n k r u p t c y , a
humiliating defeat after twenty-five years of war, and a severe economic crisis
with grain price increases (relative to the m e d i a n price of the preceding five
years) in 1709 and 1713 exceeding the price shocks of the 1780s? j3 Third, the
p r o b l e m of historical generality: was the timing and magnitude of the
b r e a k d o w n in 1789 due to factors that can be discerned playing a similar role
in other revolutions?

The "bourgeois" theory neatly answered all these questions. As Colin Lucas,
in criticizing that theory, summarized it: "In the eighteenth century, the
French bourgeoisie had become aware of the increasing disparity between its
 707

wealth and social usefulness, on the one hand, and its social prestige and
opportunities, on the other. Its way was blocked and recognition of its worth
denied by a decaying class of parasitic, hereditarily privileged, noble land-
owners . . . . The conflict of these elements produced the French Revolu-
tion. ''E4 Though this summary verges on caricature, it yet provides our
answers. If the capitalist initiative and the political rise of the bourgeoisie
both were blocked by an aristocratic reaction, then economic stagnation and
a rising tide of political demands would naturally coincide. Moreover, if only
in the eighteenth century did the bourgeoisie become sufficiently powerful
and aware of their worth to challenge the monarchy, only then could there be
a revolution of such magnitude. And of course, the rise of the bourgeoisie
and its conflict with aristocratic crowns was prefigured in the English Revo-
lution of the seventeenth century, and the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish
Crown in the sixteenth century.

However, the Old Regime did not close political opportunity to the readily
ennobled bourgeois so much as it divided opportunity and fractured author-
ity among a host of economically unified but politically divided contenders.
Nor was a challenge to the monarchy by the bourgeoisie the chief cause of the
French Revolution. And one should add that recent scholarship on the
English Revolution has questioned the degree to which it too can be seen as a
conflict in which class struggles played any significant role. 15 In short, as
Behrens notes, the class struggle will not fit the facts. But Furet's view of the
Revolution as caused by a fortuitous convergence of a separate economic
crisis with a crisis of absolutism fails to solve the problems of conjuncture,
timing, and even limited historical generalization. It is in regard to these three
questions that we do not know what to believe.

Theda Skocpol's comparative study of revolutions, with the French Revolu-

tion as one of its key cases, offers an alternative to the "class struggle" view. 16
Skocpol depicts the French Revolution not as a "bourgeois revolution," but
as a centralizing, mass-mobilizing revolution, brought on by a crisis of the
absolutist state faced with competitive pressures from the international
arena. This alternative is a major advance in the theory of revolutions; yet a
brief critical examination underscores its convergence with Furet's views and
some of the problems that remain.

Skocpol builds her case from the latest scholarship, and has been much
influenced by Furet. Indeed, Skocpol's discussion of conflicts in French
society rests on a long quotation from Furet and she too stresses "'the
conjunctural unfolding interaction of originally separately determined pro-
cesses" as essential to understanding the revolution. ~7 However, her work
708

improves on Furet by laying out the structural preconditions of such a

conjuncture. Skocpol persuasively argues that a conjuncture of popular
uprisings (which Furet attributes largely to the economic crisis) and political
crises of the kind that brings social revolution is only possible where there
exist weaknesses in the state administration or the national economy that
hamper the state's ability to mobilize resources for international competitive
struggles, as well as peasant community (or party) organizations capable of
united attacks on landlord property. These structural preconditions, found
in eighteenth-century France and twentieth-century Russia and China, help
us understand why the convergence of political crises and popular uprisings
was objectively possible in these countries, but not in countries where social
revolutions did not occur.

In France, state weakness was rooted in the institutional leverage exercised

by the nobility within the state administration. Having purchased the right to
hold and to bequeath to their heirs many of the monarchy's judicial and
financial offices, tightly controlling the chiefj udicial bodies- the Parlements-
and in some provinces defending the independence of their provincial
Estates, the nobility formed an autonomous body within the state adminis-
tration well placed to resist and hamper the Crown's attempts to increase its
control of French resources. Yet the strength of the nobility vis-a-vis the
Crown was paralleled by its weakness in the countryside. There the commu-
nal organization of the peasant village, electing its own officials and manag-
ing its fields largely independent of the supervision of local landlords,
provided the organizational basis for coordinated peasant attacks on seig-
neurial privileges and coordinated resistance to payment of tithes and seig-
neurial dues. This combination of elite institutional leverage against the
Crown and peasant organizational strength in the countryside formed the
structural basis for the conjuncture of political crisis and peasant revolts in
the Revolution.

Yet Skocpol has not solved the problem of conjuncture entirely. Skocpol
provides an elegant explanation of one critical conjuncture, that of political
crisis at the top of French society with peasant revolts from below. In regard
to this conjuncture, the economic decay of 1770 1789 was an exacerbating,
but not crucial, factor, for the peasantry always had reason to resist landlord
exploitation and the political crisis of 1789 provided an opportunity for open
resistance. Yet this analysis understates the role played by urban, particularly
Parisian, unrest in precipitating the Revolution. 18To the extent that popular
agitation in Paris was crucial to the progress of the Revolution, so too was
the economic crisis building from 1770 to 1789, for it was the high price of
bread arid the high level of unemployment that led crowds to respond to the
 709

elite struggle by putting forth their own claims. Though Skocpol shows how
a coincidence of peasant uprisings and political crisis was rendered objec-
tively possible by structural conditions in Old Regime France, her presenta-
tion, like Furet's, leaves the coincidence of political and economic crises so
crucal to events in Paris as a bit of historical fortune.

Skocpol's analysis is also problematic in regard to the problem of timing.

The harvest failure and price shocks of 1789 were not unprecedented
severity, and conflict between the Crown and the nobility over taxation was
hardly novel. Why then was the objective possibility for political crises and
popular uprisings realized only in the late eighteenth century, rather than
half a century earlier or later? And from the point of view of the theory of
revolution, what causal patterns did late eighteenth-century France share
with other revolutions'? In answer, Skocpol cites the pressures of increased
international competition. She tells us that in each of her cases, "the revolu-
tionary crisis developed when the old-regime state became unable to meet the
challenge of evolving international situations. Monarchical authorities were
subjected to new threats or to intensified competition from more economi-
cally developed powers abroad. "19

It is no doubt true that the insistent pressures of international warfare from

1689 to 1783 forced the monarchy into repeated attempts at reform and
struggles with its own elites. International pressures were part of the structu-
ral situation of the French monarchy, providing a constant prod to conflict
with its elites. But state/elite conflict and reforms extended back to the
capitations of 1695 and 1701, and the dixieme of 1710. Neither intense
military pressure, nor state bankruptcy, nor attempts at reform were new to
the scene in the 1780s. Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries France had faced more intense military struggles with its major
rivals, and heavier losses, than in the two and a half decades preceding the
revolution. The Wars of 1688 1714 had lasted twenty-five years, ending in
humiliating defeat and bankruptcy; the wars of the Austrian Succession and
the Seven Years War were long and world-wide losses. By contrast, the years
1763 1778 were years of peace, and the French role in the American Revolu-
tion marked France's resurgence and England's temporary defeat. True, the
war of American Independence was costly; but recent scholarship has argued
that Necker's loans were successful, and that it was the inadequate financing
of ordinary expenditures in the 1770s and the 1780s, not the costs of the
American War, that brought on the financial crisis, z~ Moreover, as Skocpol
herself notes, citing J. F. Bosher, "the financial difficulties in the later years of
Louis Xlll, Louis XIV, and Louis XV were probably as bad as those on the
eve of the French Revolution. ''2j
710

Why then did the monarchy fail in the late eighteenth century? Skocpol
relates that the fiscal crisis of the 1780s was fatal in part because the"general
economic recession [after 1770] reduced tax receipts and investment funds
and spurred bankruptcies a m o n g the state's financial agents, "22 Even more
crucial, the m o n a r c h y faced disaster in 1789 because it could no longer
wring money from its elites as it had done in similar situations in the past.
The system of divide and rule had become so tangled and extensive that
attempts to confiscate the fortunes of a few financiers would be resisted by
large segments of the dominant classes. Again quoting Bosher, Skocpol
notes that

During the eighteenth century, the Farmers General, ReceiversGeneral, Treasurers General,
Payers of the rents and other high accountants had becomenoble in such large numbers, and
merged with the ruling classes to such an extent, that the Crown was in no position to [move]
against them.... Those Finance Ministers who attempted anything in the nature of an
attack on the financiers.., suffered political defeat and were obliged to retire. It was in these
circumstances that the financial trouble ripened into a major c~isis.23

Unprecedented military pressures thus were not the crucial element in the
financial crisis; instead the economic recession and the social mobility of the
financiers were the factors that turned the financial difficulties of the 1780s
into a regime-shaking debacle. What then of Skocpol's claim that intensify-
ing military competition from more advanced states in the world system was
crucial, and common, to the timing of revolutionary political crises'? It must
be admitted to have limited validity at best. However true this may be of
Russia and China, "intensifying international competition" cannot be
blamed for the downfall of Old Regime France. Its fiscal crisis was due to the
inability to handle severe, but not unprecedented, military conflicts, due to
growing internal weakness. A similar statement may be made regarding the
fiscal crisis that ushered in the English Revolution. That crisis followed on a
small war with backward Scotland, not an intensified struggle with more
developed powers. In both the English and French Revolutions, it was not
more intense wars that caused, but fairly routine wars that revealed, the
internal administrative and fiscal decay of the Old Regime.

The keynotes of the Skocpol theory peasant organization, the existence of

an elite with institutional leverage through Parlement and provincial Estates,
and international military pressures - thus are not sufficient to explain why
France had a revolution in 1789. Peasant organization, elite resistance to tax
increases through Parlement and Estates, and international military pres-
sures were present in varying degrees throughout the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries; yet prior to 1789 no revolution occurred. Given that neither
the Crown'.s military involvement nor its financial difficulties in the 1780s
 711

were unpecedentedly severe, one must look outside the theory to explain
the timing of the Revolution.

Presumably, in the late eighteenth century other factors arose that further
weakened the French monarchy, making it newly vulnerable to previously
manageable difficulties. The factors that Skocpol cites in her analysis are
virtually the same as those cited by Furet the economic recession of
1770 1789 and increased social mobility that curtailed the Crown's ability to
manage and extract resources from elites. Skocpol's presentation of the
origins of the Revolution here converges with Furet's. For both scholars the
economic crisis is considered fortuitous, and the decay of the CroWn's ability
to "divide and rule" the French elites, due to excessive ennoblements in the
eighteenth century that reduced the Crown's room to maneuver, is crucial.

Where do we then stand on the three problems of conjuncture, timing, and

generalization? Furet's answer is that the conjuncture of economic and
political crises was fortuitous. In regard to timing, Furet notes that the death
of Louis XIV "gave the signal for a battle that w a s . . , at once political,
social, and economic" (p. 104), for the fundamental contradiction between
the centralized state and the autonomy of the elites "became obvious as soon
as Louis X1V had died" (p. 111). Why then did the battle erupt into Revolu-
tion only in the 1780s? Furet suggests (pp. 113 114) that the Revolution
occurred in the late eighteenth century because Louis XIV's successors could
not handle the conflicts within the system of competing elites, a fatal weak-
ness in the economic crisis that happened to coincide with the fiscal problems
of the monarchy. In regard to generalization, Furet's depiction of the Revo-
lution as due to fortuitous circumstances, plus growing frictions within
France's unique system of competing elites, leaves little room for general
theory. Skocpol provides an elegant modification, noting that the contradic-
tion between state centralization and elite autonomy was part of a complex
set of structural conditions that France shared with certain other societies
that experienced social revolution, conditions that provided the objective
possibility for a conjuncture of political crisis and peasant revolts. Yet
Skocpol too fails to provide a general theoretical answer to why this objective
possibility was realized in France in the late eighteenth century. Though her
account of the timing of the Revolution points to international pressures,
Skocpol's admission that the fiscal troubles of 1786 were no more intense
than those of 1715 or 1770 leaves her echoing Furet, citing the particularistic
details of fortuitous economic conjuncture and the erosion of the monar-
chy's ability to "divide and rule" over its elites.

The problem of identifying a shared pattern of causal relationships behind

712

Europe's major revolutionary crises thus remains open. The notion of the
French Revolution as a "bourgeois" revolution has been discredited; yet
many historians and social scientists may well be reluctant to abandon that
notion, for with it they abandon answers to key questions about the timing
and the generality of the processes behind the Revolution itself. The search
for an alternative theory that might explain both why the French Revolution
occurred in the late eighteenth century and why the English Revolution
occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, and that could account for their
similarities, thus poses a crucial problem. Furet's book should be widely read
not only for its insights into the French Revolution but for its implications
for theories of revolution. It poses thorny questions, and discomforting
conclusions, that sociologists, political scientists, and historians wrestling
with the problem of revolution cannot ignore.

NOTES

I. Page numbers in parenthesis give citations to Furet.

2. (March April 1971), 255 289.
3. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, "Aux Origins de la Revolution: Noblesse et Bourgeoisie,"
Annales, E.S.C. 30 (1975): 265 278; G. V. Taylor, "The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the
Revolution, 1781 1789," American Historical Review 67 ( 1962): 956 977; idem, "Types of
Capitalism in Eighteenth Century France," English Historical Review 79 (1964): 478 497;
idem, "N oncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution," Ameriean Histori-
cal Review 72 (1972): 469 496; Robert Forster, "The Provincial Noble: A Reappraisal,"
American Historical Review 68 (1963): 681 691; Monique Cubells, "La Politique d'ano-
blissment de la monarchie en Provence de 1715 ~t 1789," A nnales du Midi 94 ( 1982): 173 196;
Betty Behrens, "The Ancien Regime and the Revolution," Historical Journal 17 (1974):
630 643; Olwen Hufton, Baveaux in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Social Study(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967): William Doyle, "Was There an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-revolu-
tionarv France?" Past and Present no. 57 (1972): 97 122; Colin Lucas, "Nobles, Bourgeois
and tl~e Origins of the French Revolution," in French Society and the Revolution, ed.
Douglas Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19~76), 88 13 I.
4. In addition to the above, Robert Forster, Merchants, Landlords. Magistrates: The Depont
Famih' in Eighteenth Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981);
and David D. Bien, "La reaction aristocratique avant 1789: l'exemple de l'armee," Annale~
/z:S. C. 29 ( 1974): 27 48. While the evidence against an effective aristocratic reaction and in
favor of the openness of the elites seems overwhelming, there are still gaps in the records, and
caution is needed. For example, Furet notes that "in the last two decades of the Ancien
Regime 426 of the 757 members of the thirteen parlements and the two sovereign councils
were newcomers" (p. 105). Yet Furet errs here; checking the article by Egret that Furet cites,
one finds that Egret had data only for the 426 lay councillors of the parlements and sovereign
councils admitted to office between 1774 and 1789, out of the 757 members in office in 1789.
Of those 426, 160 came from parlementaire backgrounds; 266 were "new men." But by this
term Egret means men drawn from outside of the parlementary aristocracy: most of these
266 were from families already noble. Egret does give evidence that many of these new men
were only recently ennobled, and that a good number a quarter or more in some
parlements were of non-noble birth. Thus the evidence still demonstrates an open and
heterogenous composition for theparlements; yet the evidence is not nearly so complete nor
overwhelming as Furet implies. Cf. Jean Egret, "Was the 'Aristocratic Revolt' Aristocratic?"
in The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, ed. Frank A. Kafker and James M.
Laux (New York: Random House, 1968), 37-49.
5. Elinor G. Barber, The Bourgeoisie in 18th Century France ( Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1955), 118.
6. Lucas, "Nobles," 99 100.
7. G. R. Elton, "A High Road to Civil War'?" in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and
Government, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 2:164 182.
8. Georges Lefebvre, The Coming o f the French Revolution, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1947).
 713

9. Idem, "The Movement of Prices and the Origins of the French Revolution," in New
Per.v~ectives on the French Revolution, ed, Jeffry Kaplow (New York: Wiley, 1971), 133.
10. The decidedly mixed and largely aristocratic social background of the Patriot party in the
opening months of the Revolution is detailed by Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Was the 'Bourgeois'
Revolt Bourgeois?" pp. 50 69 in Cot~/licthtg lnteq,'etation.s, ed. Kafker and l,aux.
11. Behrens, "Ancien Regime," 637.
12. Carl Hempel, A~v~ects qf Scient([~c Evl~lanatton (New York: Free Press, 1965): William
Dray, l,aw,s and Lvplanation in Histol3'(London: Oxford U niversity Press, 1964).
13. Alfred Cobban, tti.~torr o['Modern France, Vol. 1:1715 1799 (Baltimore, MD: Penguin,
1957) describes the political crisis; the magnitude of the economic crisis is detailed in
Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, eds., Histoire Econimiaue et Social de La France,
4 vols. ( Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970 80), 2: 332; and Alan Milward and J. B.
Saul, The Ecotlomic l)eveh~pment o/('otttitwJtta[ L)~rope 1780 1870 (Totowa, N J: Row-
man & Littlefield, 1973), 42.
14. Lucas, "Nobles," 88.
15. J. A. Goldstone, "'Capitalist Origins of the English Revolution: Chasing a Chimera," Theoo'
andSocietv 12 (1983): 143 180. Some English historians have denied not merely the role of
class st ruggle, but denied an,,' long-term origins to the English Revolution, insisting instead it
was due to political errors by Charles 1 and unfortunate circumstances. See Mary Full-
brook's fine review essay, "q~he English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt," Social
History 7 (1982): 249 264.
16. Fheda Skocpol, State,~ and 8"odal Revolution,s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979).
17. Ibid., 320.
18. l h e importance of the Parisian revolt in the Revolution is recounted by William Doyle,
Origins o/the ]7tvnch Revohaion, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Chapter I I.
Urban revolts have often been underrated in bringing on revolutions; a useful account of
their crucial role in modern revolutions is Josef Gugler, "The Urban Character of Contem-
porary Revolutions," Studies in Comparattve International Devehymwnt 17 (19821:60 73.
19. Skocpol, States, 17.
20. Robert Harris, "French Finances and the American War, 1777 83," Journal q[Modern
Histot3' 58 ( 1976): 233 258.
21. Skocpol, 63, citing J. F. Bosher, kkench Finances 1770- 1795: From Business to Bureaucracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 304 305.
22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 63 64.

Acknowledgments

Victoria Bonnell, Lynn Hunt, Sara Maza, Theda Skocpol, Mark Traugott,
a n d C h a r l e s Tilly all r e a d e a r l y d r a f t s o f this e s s a y , a n d g r e a t l y i m p r o v e d it b y
their apt criticisms.

Theory andSocieO' 13 (1984) 697 713

0304-2421/84/$03.00 9 1984 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.