Cox, Furet, Cobban and Marx: The Revision of the "Orthodoxy"

Berghahn Books is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Historical Reflections / RflexionsHistoriques.

http://www.jstor.org

Berghahn Books

Furet, Cobban and Marx: The Revision of the "Orthodoxy" Revisited Author(s): Marvin R. Cox Source: Historical Reflections / Rflexions Historiques, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 49-77Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41299194Accessed: 19-04-2015 06:36 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41299194?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 200.10.244.14 on Sun, 19 Apr 2015 06:36:48 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Furet, Cobban and Marx: The Revision

of the "Orthodoxy" Revisited

Marvin R. Cox

In the introduction to an anthology of recent writings on the French Revolution, T.C.W. Blanning informs his readers that "after thirty years of vigorous argument" the field remains divided between adherents of the Marxist "orthodoxy," for whom the "old . . . view still stands like a rocher de bronze," and revisionists who believe no less firmly that their criticism has undermined the "classical" Marxist interpretation. Anyone familiar with historiographical developments during these thirty-odd years is likely to find this statement misleading. The truly salient feature of the study of the Revolution over the last quarter century is not continuity. Change has been conspicuous among the revisionists whose "concentration," as Blanning himself observes, has shifted from criticism of the Marxists to the study of revolutionary "political culture."1 But there have been important changes on the other side as well. Among avowed Marxists, Gwynne Lewis concedes that revisionists were right to find fault with the rigidly "determinist (that is Marxist) laws of development" which, in its original form, the "orthodox" interpretation reflected, and he argues for a complex and nuanced re-evaluation of the concept of a Bourgeois Revolution. George Comninel, while calling for a return to "materialist" research, suggests that Marx may have distorted the idea of a Bourgeois

1 . T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash? (New York, 1998), pp. 1,8.

Marvin R. Cox is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

2001 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol. 27, No. 1


50 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

Revolution when he borrowed it from Guizot and other Restoration historians.2 More striking is the emergence of non-Marxist advocates of various neo-"orthodox" interpretations such as Colin Jones, who reaffirms in a postrevisionist idiom the "orthodox" belief the Revolution was part of a social process, and William Sewell, who shares much with the revisionists and discerns within their revolution in political culture "A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution."3

Mutations in both camps indicate a lack of consensus and a high level of intellectual vitality. Yet Blannings' remark points to an important truth about the state of the study of the French Revolution. Despite the many changes that have occurred among revisionists and "orthodox" historians, each side's perception of the other remains much as it was at the beginning of their confrontation. Revisionists still share the conviction that the Bourgeois Revolution is a delusion born of ideological necessity rather than dispassionate inquiry - a "myth" in the Sorelian sense.4 Contemporary "orthodox" and neo-"orthodox" historians, conversely, maintain that revisionists are oblivious to the obvious, and thus echo Georges Lefebvre's charge that in their zeal to turn the "orthodoxy" into a myth, they deny the French Revolution ever happened.5

The persistence of these mutual accusations confirms Blannings' assertion that the argument has degenerated into a "dialogue of the deaf." Genuine debate, even meaningful communication, has become difficult because neither side adequately recognizes the basis of the other's claims. This deafness has less to do with differences in the perception of "factual knowledge," as Blanning further says, than with "presuppositions about such imprecise matters as the course of modern history, social relations and human nature."6

2. Gwynne Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (London and New York, 1 993), pp. 1 08-1 09; George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London and New York, 1987) pp. 1 18,160-161 .

3. Gary Kates, ed., The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (London and New York, 1998), pp. 143-1 56.

4. T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p. 8; Francois Kuret, Penserla Revolution (Paris, 1 978); in English, Interpreting the Revolution (Cambridge and Paris, 1981).

5. Peter Jones, ed., The French Revolution in Social and Political Perspective, p. 7; William H. Sewell, Jr. "A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution" in Kates, The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, p. 145; Georges Lefebvre, "Le mythe de la Revolution ii&nqaXse," Annates hi storiq lies de la Revolution fr an i;aise , XXVIII (1 956), pp. 337- 345.

6. T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, pp. 1 -2.


Furet, Cobban and Marx 51

Near-sightedness is as much a problem as deafness. Myopia becomes most apparent in contemporary revisionist accounts of the Marxist interpretation which, in Colin Jones' apt phrase, are little more than a "knockabout pastiche," of which perhaps the most memorable example is Francois Furet's reduction of 'orthodox' chronology to the simplistic formula '"avant la feodalisme. . . . apres le capitalisme.'"7 Time has also blurred perceptions of the revision. What David Bell wrote in a recent paper about attacks on Furet applies equally to criticisms of the revisionist camp as a whole: they "tend ... to be somewhat dismissive and ill- informed."8 Jones' description of revision "as a kind of pantomime in which a succession of . . . Prince Charmings rescue Marianne from the clutches of . . . the wicked, mean-spirited Stalinist Baron . . . Albert Soboul" is one comic case in point.9 More telling is Gwynne Lewis' charge that in denying "the importance of the abolition of feudalism and the legal and juridical changes which the Revolution" made, the revisionists "barter historical truth for ideological advantage."10

Unlike the problem of presuppositions this myopia involves a lack of factual knowledge - more precisely an unawareness of what "orthodox" and revisionist historians said a generation ago. It consequently lends itself to the solution expressed in the French adage, reculer pour mieux sauter. Roughly translated, and restated in terms appropriate to the prevailing impasse, this means to move back in time in order to advance to a more constructive dialogue.

This article aims to initiate that process by revisiting the original sites of revision. These sites are located in the 1950s and 60s. Stepping backwards takes us to the basic case against "orthodoxy." It also reveals the primary objectives of the revisionists, which went well beyond their critique of the Marxist interpretation. Scrutiny of the period reveals the historical context from which revision emerged. It also brings into focus the largely forgotten fact that most of the "orthodox" texts criticized by revisionists were published either shortly before, or shortly after, the

7. Furet, Penser la Revolution, p. 27. Colin Jones, "The Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change" in Kates, op. cit ., p. 163. For other examples of reductionist perceptions of the "orthodoxy" see Jeremy D. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995), p. 139; and Kates, pp. 44, 23, 108.

8. David A. Bell, "Remarks on the State of French Revolutionary Studies," Symposium on the Relevance of French Revolutionary Studies as the Millennium Approaches, Plenary Session, Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1999, p. 1.

9. Colin Jones, "The Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1 789 and Social Change" in Kates, op. cit , p. 163.

10. Gwynne Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate , p. 72.



beginning of the revision (which indicates that in its final form the "orthodoxy" was short-lived). Understanding "orthodoxy" and why it continues to command respect after thirty-odd years of criticism, however, will require an extension of this exercise in reculer pour mieux sauter to the early years of the twentieth century, when the Marxist interpretation initially took shape. Finally, evaluating revision, this article's ultimate goal, will entail a fuller consideration of the current impasse.

Three specific points of reference are identified in the article's title. Among the three Furet and Marx (and by extension, French Marxist historians) are of course familiar and predictable. The other, Alfred Cobban, is not so well known. Each of the recent anthologies cited above duly mentions him. But some readers, especially those under forty, may well ask how such a relatively obscure figure came to be bracketed with such a famous historian as Frangois Furet.

The answer to this question is fairly simple. Cobban initiated revision, and he did so twice over. His first initiative was a lecture given in 1954 called "The Myth of the French Revolution." In its published form it attracted the attention of major scholars in the field but had little impact on the historical profession at large. Revision was truly launched ten years later with the publication of The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, a book-length collection of Cobban's lectures that inspired historians throughout the English-speaking world to reassess the Marxist interpretation.1 1

Furet's major historiographical work, Penserla Revolution, appeared nearly a quarter century later. Though critical of the "orthodoxy," it marked the beginning of a shift away from a critique of the Marxist social interpretation to "neo"-revisionist concerns with reinterpreting the Revolution. To this end Furet changed the terms of discourse from social to political history. Following Tocqueville's lead, he focused on the Revolution's role in expanding the omnipresent modern state. Breaking new ground, he drew attention to revolutionary "political culture," with emphasis on what would later become known as the radical "representation" of reality. Furet's book also differed from Cobban's work

1 1 . Alfred Cobban, "The Myth of the French Revolution" in Aspects of the French Revolution (New York, 1968), pp. 90-1 1 1 , first published, 1954; The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964).



in that its criticism extended to non-Marxist as well as Marxist historians, and because Furet was reticent about criticizing Marx himself.12

Direct connections between Cobban and Furet are hard to find. Understanding what links them requires another exercise in reculerpour mieux sauter - specifically to 1963, when Furet and his brother-in-law Denis Richet completed what was to become a lavishly illustrated, two- volume history of the Revolution.13 A work Furet subsequently disclaimed as too partisan, it is less well-known than his longue-duree history of the Revolution ("le best-seller du bi-centennaire," according to his obituary in Le Monde ) where he worked out the implications of his concept of "political culture."14 Yet in its time the Furet/Richet text was significant. It went through several editions, was translated into English, and created a public for Furet's historical ideas well before the appearance of Penserla Revolution .15

The text is also significant because embedded within it - most notably in the chapters attributed to Furet - is a critique of the Marxist interpretation. This critique focuses on many of the same points found in Cobban. It was this book, moreover, which truly launched Furet's revisionist career - a fact which indicates that, contrary to a prevailing "Anglo-Saxon" assumption, revision began in France at approximately the same time as in the English-speaking world.16 A detailed examination of the Furet/Richet text also reveals what is clearly meant to be an alternative to the Marxist interpretation.17 Concomitantly, and more

12. For Furet's later criticism of Marx's philosophical reflections on the Revolution's significance, see his Marx et la Revolution (Paris, 1 986); in English, Marx and the Revolution (Chicago and London, 1988), pp. 12-20; 28-30; 48, 54, 94.

1 3. La Revolution , 2 vols., (Paris, 1 965). Reference to date of composition in subsequent edition, La Revolution franqaise , (Paris, 1973), p. 7.

14. Francois Furet, La France revolutionaire (Paris, 1988); in English, Revolutionary France: 1 770- 1 980 (Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, MA, 1991); Le Monde, July 17, 1997.

1 5. The French Revolution (New York, 1 970, 1 977); La Revolution franqaise, (Paris, 1 973, 1979).

1 6. In addition to exposing Marxist historical errors, the text inspired a hostile review by Claude Mazauric: "Une nouvelle conception de la Revolution," Annates historiques de la Revolution franqaise XXXIX (1 967): 339-368, which in turn led Furet to write "Le catchisme rvolutionnaire," the first open and conspicuous attack on the "orthodoxy" in France: Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution , pp. 8 1 - 1 3 1 . For an example of "Anglo-Saxon" assumptions about the late start of revision in France see Blanning, op. cit , pp. 3-7.

1 7. Particularly in the chapters specifically credited to Furet with which this article is concerned: "La France de Louis XVI," "La rvolte des nobles," "La Rpublique bourgeoise," "La France nouvelle," "La fin d'un regime," La Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1973).



surprisingly, a close reading of Cobban shows that he, too, provided an alternative to the social interpretation under attack.

Revisiting the original sites of revision necessarily leads to a re- examination of "orthodoxy." Here the focus will be on Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul. Significant differences separated the two, but they generally agreed on the propositions which the revisionists called into question. As between the two we will focus on Lefebvre. Though Soboul ranked as the pre-eminent "orthodox" historian when revision hit its stride, it was Lefebvre who, by virtue of his international reputation, made an "orthodoxy" of the Marxist interpretation.

The introduction to Lefebvre's famous text provides the clearest statement of "orthodoxy'"s basic propositions, including the celebrated belief that the Revolution resulted in "the ascent of the bourgeoisie." Contemporary commentators assumed that this referred to the triumph of capitalist entrepreneurs, and "corsairs"of this type duly figured in Lefebvre's account of postrevolutionary society. In fact, capitalists were a distinct minority within the bourgeoisie which, as Soboul noted, was "too diverse [to) constitute a homogenous class."18 Further, the postrevolutionary bourgeoisie included large numbers of professionals and landed proprietors whose wealth and outlook linked them to the Old Regime rather than modern capitalist society. The leading professionals were former venal office-holders of the royal administration. The pre- eminent group among landowners consisted of families formerly identified as "bourgeois vivant noblement de leur bien," aristocrats in all but legal rank, with an aristocratic indifference to productive agricultural endeavor.19

A roll call of the victorious class thus appears to contradict "orthodoxy"'s basic postulate. Received wisdom is sustained, however, by accounts of what the bourgeoisie experienced after 1 789. Though the class as a whole is supposed to have risen, its precapitalist elements actually lost ground. This was obviously, and predictably, the case of landed proprietors. Dependent like the nobility on low-yield feudal property, and in some cases on feudal dues, they shared the nobles' economic fate. Venal officers were hurt by the suppression of corporate institutions on which "their social rank, and a part of their income, depended." During the "montagnard period", wrote Lefebvre, even the prerevolutionary business class "saw its future compromised." Alongside

18. Georges Lefebvre, La Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1956), p. 1,584; Albert Soboul, Precis d'histoire de la Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1962), p. 38.

19. Georges Lefebvre, La Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1956), p. 1,584.



these declining groups, however, one bourgeois category managed to profit from the dislocations of the Revolution. It consisted in part of adaptable Old Regime businessmen. But most of the successful bourgeois were " hommes nouveaux" - men of little standing before 1 789 who had amassed great fortunes before and after Thermidor. Historical jackals battening on the remains of the old order, they provided a marked contrast to demoralized professionals and landed proprietors noted for their social graces. These new men were adventurous and dynamic. It is among them that Lefebvre specifically located the "corsairs . . . who bounded" from modest circumstances into "excessive wealth." They above all validated the "orthodoxy." Animated by a "ferocious, unscrupulous, very nearly naive appetite for profit," these new "directors of the economy" displaced the former leaders of the Third Estate, giving "strength and new blood" to the class, and modifying

" its internal equilibrium."20 However diverse the new ruling class, entrepreneurs had won hegemony within it and thus by extension over French society as a whole.

Cobban initiated revision in 1954 by challenging what he took to be its central weakness. For him, the revolutionary bourgeoisie, by which he meant the bourgeoisie which actually made the Revolution, did not consist of capitalists but venal officiers who were backward-looking economically, and mainly interested in furthering their careers by breaking the nobility's hold on positions in the high administration.21 Two years later Lefebvre responded to Cobban's challenge with an article in which he rightly pointed out that he had amply acknowledged the revolutionary role of bourgeois bureaucrats. He argued, however, that Cobban failed to recognize that the professionals who seemingly led the Revolution were influenced by capitalists. Above all, Lefebvre concluded, Cobban failed to recognize that "the significance of the Revolution did not result solely from the intentions of those who made it." 22

After an eight-year silence Cobban returned to the charge in The Social Interpretation with a more detailed and tightly argued critique. He still contended that bureaucrats, rather than capitalists, were primarily responsible for the Revolution; but in his final analysis of the bourgeoisie his focus, like Lefebvre's, fell upon those who won it, rather than those

20. Ibid., pp. 546, 584-586. 2 1 . Alfred Cobban, "The Myth of the French Revolution" in Aspects of the French

Revolution , pp. 90-108. 22. Georges Lefebvre, "Le mythe de la Revolution frangaise," Annates historiques de la

Revolution franqaise XXVIII (1956): 337-345.



who made it. Like Soboul, he saw the bourgeoisie as too diverse to constitute a homogenous ruling class. He predictably included professionals, and even capitalists of a sort. But it was landed proprietors who comprised the class's high command. As the title of his chapter on the subject affirmed, it was "A Bourgeoisie of Landowners."23

Furet and Richet had nothing directly to say in their text about the deficiencies of this Marxist concept. Furthermore, on first examination their postrevolutionary ruling class more closely resembled Lefebvre's than Cobban's. Its core consisted of financiers and contractors - capitalists, according to the strict definition of the word. They characterized the class, however, in terms suggesting that Marxist historians had misconstrued their data. Postrevolutionary bourgeois "fortunes were built up by traditional methods of speculative trading . . . taking advantage of the chaotic state of the treasury ..." This "kind of operation [was] fundamentally different from the normal methods of bourgeois investment . . . the profit-oriented methods of modern capitalism . . . the diversion of funds into productive fields of investment and savings."24 They were unorthodox capitalists, who shared the values, if not the objective identity, of Cobban's bourgeoisie of landowners.25

Revision also raised questions about the "orthodox" interpretation of the Revolution's place in history. Here the basic idea, as summarized by Soboul, concerned the ascent of the bourgeoisie which "paved the way for capitalism," specifically capitalist industry.26 Here, too, much of the evidence in "orthodox" texts appears to contradict Marxist postulates. The revolutionary upheavals which reduced the fortunes of many Old Regime capitalists also destroyed most of France's embryonic capitalist infrastructure. War with Great Britain did irreparable damage to overseas trade. During the montagnard period the Convention outlawed joint-stock companies which, Lefebvre reminds us, represent "the highest form of capitalism." Even worse for the future of French business was "the disappearance of la Caisse d'Escompte," the makeshift Old Regime version of a national bank.27

23. Alfred Cobban, Social Interpretation, pp. 81-90. 24. Furet and Richet, French Revolution , pp. 323-325; 263-265. 25. Cobban, Social Interpretation, p. 85. 26. Albert Soboul, Precis d'histoire de la Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1962), p. 470. 27. Lefebvre, La Revolution franqaise , p. 547.



The Revolution's manifestly negative impact on French capitalism is in a sense irrelevant to the Marxist interpretation of its significance. Conventional "orthodox" wisdom holds that the economic progress for which the Revolution "paved the way" really began under the July Monarchy, when the bourgeoisie definitively consolidated its power.28 Yet Lefebvre, who managed to identify an ascendant capitalist elite within a largely precapitalist bourgeoisie, also discerned intimations of impending capitalist development amid the ruins of the Old Regime's commercial economy.

Lefebvre's main argument was that the upheavals which undermined the original bourgeois elites concomitantly eroded the value of "la richesse acquise" - the distinctive, archaic form of wealth, yielding fixed income, and largely fixed in value - upon which privileged elements in eighteenth-century French society depended. He found evidence of this erosion even in the countryside, arguing that before the Revolution landed proprietors, and many bourgeois money-lenders, made their money from rents which rarely varied in value over time. After 1 789, under the impact of inflation, peasant tenants were able to pay off their obligations in depreciated currency, thereby impoverishing their creditors. Inflation also hit urban landlords, but its effects were most keenly felt among state bondholders, the largest category of bourgeois investors. But the aspect of the post-Thermidorean economy which most clearly pointed in a capitalist direction was the obverse of this erosion of la richesse acquise. The declining value of the assignat set off a frenzy of buying and selling: "Only those who speculated on the purchase of confiscated property [biens nationaux]" held their own in postrevolutionary society.29

Cobban challenged this argument in a chapter of The Social Interpretation entitled "The Economic Consequences of the Revolution." He argued that such industrialization as France experienced really began under the Second Empire - much too late to have been a logical consequence of the Revolution. But he also rejected the idea that capitalist conditions were prefigured after Thermidor. Stressing the harm

28. This point is not developed in either of the standard "orthodox" texts, but it is a recurrent theme in course lectures on the period which Lefebvre published on the eve of World War II. Geogres Lefebvre, La Monarchic de Juillet, Les Cours de la Sorbonne, 6 vols., 1939.

29. Lefebvre, La Revolution franqaise, pp. 583-584.



the Revolution did to French business, he drew attention to the backwardness of the agrarian sector that still dominated the economy.30

Arguments concerning social and economic conditions after Thermidor form the core of the case against the "orthodoxy.

" But revision also questioned the Marxist explanation of the Revolution's causes. The most important of these, as Soboul succinctly said, was a "contradiction between the economic and social movements."31 This somewhat complex concept derives from a materialist reworking of an idea that Marx took from Hegel's philosophy of history.32 One "orthodox" historian, Albert Mathiez, managed to reduce it to a relatively simple and plausible proposition. The Revolution, he argued, resulted from a disharmony between the "the spirit and the letter" of eighteenth-century conditions.33

In Lefebvre's introduction this disharmony is the ultimate consequence of the "rise of the bourgeoisie within the bosom of the feudal world it undermined." By the eve of the Revolution the bourgeoisie had risen to a position of virtual dominance, and the spirit of the economy was clearly capitalist. The most basic sign of an emergent capitalism was a vast accumulation of precious metals, capital itself. France had the largest store of gold and silver in Europe. This wealth derived most conspicuously from overseas trade, which "on the eve of the Revolution had reached a volume of a billion [livres]." "State finance had also brought vast fortunes into being." The Caisse d'Escompte, "authorized by the state to print banknotes," prefigured modern banking institutions. Capitalism was also "bringing artisan production into its orbit." Here and there outcroppings of capitalist agriculture were to be found as well.34

Vestiges of the eviscerated feudal world, however, impeded the full development of capitalism. These vestiges, according to Lefebvre, included the official social hierarchy, which sustained the pre-eminence (and noncapitalist values) of the aristocracy. The complex of political privileges which endowed the aristocracy with control of the state

30. Cobban, Social Interpretation, p. 80. The Furet/Richet text conveys much the same message. The "French Revolution had not been an economic revolution ..." "Industry and commerce [made] no progress" because there had been "no real improvement in the techniques or the methods of mobilizing capital." La Revolution, 1:335-336.

31. Albert Soboul, La France a la veille de la Revolution, 2 vols., Les Cours de la Sorbonne (Paris, 1969), 11:49,69.

32. Roy Bhaskar, "Contradiction," Irving Fetscher, "Hegel" in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 93-94, 199-200. See also G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (Princeton, 1978), pp. 85-86, 256-263, 311, 324.

33. Albert Mathiez, La Revolution franqaise, 3 vols. (Paris, 1932), 1:3. 34. Lefebvre, La Revolution franqaise, 1 :35-38.



apparatus also figured among the residues of feudalism.35 Further, remnants of the feudal economy, particularly manorial institutions and especially seigneurial rights, were important obstacles to capitalism. "All the inhabitants of the [peasant] village were subject to seigneurial authority," and therefore "to personal and real obligations." Thus burdened, the peasant "lacked the reserves necessary to change his methods of production."36

Given this disharmony between the capitalist spirit of the commercial sector and the feudal letter of the Old Regime's institutions, the economy remained "essentially agricultural and artisanal" - in the medieval sense of both those words.37 The actual events of 1 789 were precipitated by an accentuation of this contradiction. The declining and defensive noblesse , tied to feudalism, attempted simultaneously to monopolize significant political and administrative positions and maximize its income from seigneurial dues. This aristocratic reaction alienated the rising bourgeoisie, exasperated the beleaguered peasantry, drove the two into an incongruous alliance, and ultimately moved the entire Third Estate to revolt against the archaic and oppressive ruling class.38

This explanation of the onset of the Revolution was as much a revisionist target as the idea that it paved the way for capitalism. Though Furet and Richet accepted Lefebvre's argument that the late eighteenth- century nobility exploited the peasantry "by increasing feudal dues," they denied the more fundamental "orthodox" premise that the Old Regime economy was on the brink of full-fledged capitalist development. The bourgeoisie was "precapitalist," not protocapitalist, as Lefebvre and Soboul suggested. "The economy was based on the principle of survival," and characterized by "backward technology" and "low productivity of labor," which resulted from "the stagnation into which the country's economy had been allowed to sink."39 Capitalism was thus thwarted as much by France's inherent backwardness as by any possible feudal impediments to growth. Cobban made much the same point, but his argument mainly concerned the so-called feudal impediments themselves. Over time, he wrote, "feodo-vassalique" institutions in general and "seigneurial rights" in particular had become "alienable, and

35. Ibid., pp. 1,49, 101-102. 36. Ibid., pp. 53, 30. 37. Ibid., p. 38. 38. Albert Soboul, La France a la veille de la Revolution , 1:11, 49, 65-69. 39. Furet and Richet, French Revolution , pp. 12, 15, 7.



roturiers," as well as noblemen, possessed them. By 1 789 "the distinction between feudal and non-feudal property . . . was almost impossible to make. " Seigneurial rights were as much a bourgeois investment as a prop for the declining noblesse. 40

Whatever else, the "orthodox" historians scrupulously included in their texts evidence that contradicted their thesis. Lefebvre and Soboul were apparently as much concerned with writing thorough social history as validating Marxist theory. This set them apart from the originators of the Marxist interpretation, Jean Jaures and Albert Mathiez, whose treatments of the postrevolutionary ruling class and eighteenth-century socio- economic conditions were rather superficial.41 And this underscores another important, but now dimly remembered, aspect of revolutionary historiography. Within the "orthodox" tradition Lefebvre and Soboul were revisionists. In lectures he gave at the Sorbonne in 1932 Lefebvre took Jaures and Mathiez to task for forcing the rural revolution into the rigid framework of a bourgeois capitalist offensive, and he identified the revolutionary peasantry as an autonomous, and largely anticapitalist, class.42 A quarter-century later Soboul argued, against Mathiez, that the people of Paris had little in common with a proletariat and that Saint- Just's seemingly socialist program of 1 794 was in reality an impractical bourgeois experiment in poor relief.43 In interpreting the bourgeoisie as a socially eclectic class, both Lefebvre and Soboul contradicted received Marxist wisdom that it consisted of capitalists. At the time of his death in 1959 Lefebvre was therefore better known as a revisionist than as a proponent of Marxist history.44

What ultimately stands out from a comparison of "orthodox" and revisionist arguments, however, is the effectiveness of Furet's and Cobban's critiques. The comparison lends support to Gerald Cavanaugh's claim, in an early assessment of revision, that its proponents were to revolutionary historiography what Copernicus was to the Scientific Revolution. Where the great astronomer synthesized late medieval

40. Cobban, Social Interpretation, pp. 43-44, 40. 41 . Jean Jaures, ///sto/re socialiste de la Revolution franqaise , 8 vols. (Paris, 1 927), 1: 1 -27,

29-33, 52-62; Albert Mathiez, La Revolution franqaise , 1:1-1 7, 111:1 70-1 75. 42. Georges Lefebvre, Etudes surla Revolution franqaise (Paris, 1954), pp. 246-253. 43. Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens de Van II (Paris, 1958), pp. 160, 427-431 ,

454, 473. 44. As late as 1967 Jeffrey Kaplow could still praise him for reducing Marxist influence

on revolutionary historiography: "Class in the French Revolution: A Discussion on 'Who Intervened in 1788 American Historical Review 72 (1967): 496-502.



astronomical observations at variance with the prevailing geocentric "paradigm," Cobban and his followers worked out the implications of recent research that raised questions about the Bourgeois Revolution.45

Furet and Richet provide some examples of Copemican insights. The precapitalist financiers of their postrevolutionary bourgeoisie recall a historically distinctive type of court capitalist identified by Herbert Liithy in a study of Protestant bankers under the Old Regime.46 But the close connection between revision and new, counterintuitive research emerges most clearly from The Social Interpretation. Cobban's account of the postrevolutionary bourgeoisie relies on studies of that class which document the predominance of landowners.47

Cobban's ability to exploit recent research was put to further advantage in his discussion of seigneurial dues. Here he relied on the concept of "noncapitalist wealth" developed by George V. Taylor in the 1960s. Taylor demonstrated that this type of wealth, like capitalist investments, could be bought and sold, and yielded unearned monetary income. Unlike true capitalist wealth, however, that income was invariably low. And like feudal wealth it had no potential for growth. Taylor had in mind mainly investments in unproductive land and various archaic forms of bonds and annuities - in his view the most common forms of bourgeois wealth before the Revolution.48 Cobban convincingly extended the concept to cover manorial institutions.

Scrutiny of the critique also shows that revisionists could work out the implications of evidence provided by "orthodox" historians (another of

45. Gerald F. Cavanaugh, "The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond," French Historical Studies 7 (1972): 587-606.

46. Herbert Liithy, La Banque protestante en France de la revocation de I' edit de Nantes jusqu'a la Revolution (Paris, 1959).

47. E.g., P. Bouyoux, "'Les six cents plus imposts' du dpartement de la Haute Garonne en Tan X," Annates du Midi 70 (1958): 317-27. In his later exchange with Eleanor O'Boyle [Alfred Cobban and Eleanor O'Boyle, "The Middle Class in France, 1815-1848," French Historical Studies (1967): 41-56], he cited the book which became the standard source on the postrevolutionary ruling class, Andre -Jean Tudesq's Les Grands Notables en France, 1840- 1849 , 2 vols. (Paris, 1964). Cobban's analysis of the Revolution's consequences also incorporated recent research by Frangois Crouzet which documented the Revolution's disastrous effects on overseas trade: "Les consequences conomiques de la Revolution frangaise," Annates historiques de la Revolution franqaise , no. 168 (1962): 214-15.

48. Cobban cites Taylor's "The Paris Bourse on the eve of the Revolution, 1781-1789," American Historical Review 67 (1962): 976-7. Taylor's concept was fully developed in "Non- capitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 72 (January, 1967): 469-496.



Cavanaugh's claims in Cobban's favor).49 Cobban frequently invoked the authority of Georges Lefebvre. The latter's great work, Les Paysans du Nord, reveals that in the eighteenth century noble and bourgeois landowners alike used seigneurial dues as a device for squeezing extra income from the peasantry.50 By the same token, Lefebvre's admission that the Revolution destroyed the protocapitalist institutions of the Old Regime clearly supported revisionist contentions.

For Cobban, his critique represented a considerable personal achievement. Before initiating the revision he had been "more interested in what went on in people's heads than . . . what went into their pockets."51 From the appearance in 1929 ofhis admiring study ofEdmund Burke to a 1951 article comparing the revolutionary wars of the late eighteenth century with the Cold War, Cobban had been primarily concerned with the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution - above all with the ill effects of one idea, popular sovereignty.52 The knowledge of social and economic history exhibited to such impressive effect in both "The Myth of the French Revolution" and The Social Interpretation bears witness to his concentrated scholarly labor over a relatively brief span of time.

Looking back from Furet's later works, the critique of the Marxist social interpretation implicit in the Furet/Richet text represents an equally significant achievement. As Le Monde observed at the time of his death, Furet was famous not for having written "a history of the Revolution, properly speaking, but rather for a long, indeed a very long, [history] of the destiny of revolutionary passion" - in other words the history of the Revolution's political culture.53

His critique of "orthodoxy" in the 1 960s testifies to Furet's intellectual courage. That decade was the final phase of the long postwar period

49. Cavanaugh, "The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond," pp. 587-606.

50. Georges Lefebvre, Les Paysans du Nord (Paris, 1924). 51 . Alfred Cobban, The Myth of the French Revolution , p. 94. 52. Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (New

York, 1960), pp. 121, 135; Rousseau and the Modern State (London, 1934), pp. 149, 252; Dictatorship: Its History and Theory (New York, 1939), pp. 287-288; 112-113; "An Age of Revolutionary Wars: An Historical Parallel," Review of Politics XII (1951): 141.

53. Le Monde, 17 July 1997.



during which left-leaning, right-thinking French intellectuals subscribed to what Furet called "la religion de I'histoire."54 Marxism provided the theoretical underpinning for this cult, and the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution was one of its important tenets. Historians who challenged the "orthodoxy," even indirectly, risked being branded as heretics.55

A full evaluation of Cobban's and Furet' s achievement, however, requires an assessment of their alternative interpretation as well as their critique. This aspect of their revision is not always readily discernible. Indeed, it is easily missed. Gerald Cavanaugh's final verdict on Cobban is that he put nothing in place of the "paradigm" he had exploded. A careful probing of both original texts, however, brings an alternative social interpretation to the surface. In the case of Furet and Richet it is the subtext of their more conspicuous political narrative. In Cobban's case the obverse of every point in his critique is an alternative reading of certain aspects of the Revolution's social history.

There are signs that providing a new social interpretation was as important to Cobban as exposing "orthodox" errors. His intention, he wrote, was to "treat the social interpretation ... as a series of specific historical problems" and questions (e.g., "What are the facts of the so- called bourgeois revolution?"); . . to get away from . . . traditional sociological cliches" regarding social class, and to "substitute for them social distinctions and classifications based on historical actualities."56 Attaining this objective promised to solve "the problem of social history" which had initially inspired his interest in the French Revolution. He described this as a variegated problem, but at its core he identified the influence of sociology, which in turn stemmed from the influence of Marxism.57 To the point, Cobban's ultimate aim was to move beyond the Marxist conceptual framework and thus complete the "paradigm" shift. The task, to paraphrase the title of Furet's most famous book, was to rethink the Revolution in non-Marxist terms.

At this juncture we need to review the new interpretation's points of divergence from the "orthodoxy" - the most salient of which was its characterization of the postrevolutionaiy ruling class. Moving beyond their account of how little this class resembled an entrepreneurial elite, Furet

54. Francois Furet, Le Passe d'une illusion (Paris, 1995). 55. Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford, 1 986), p. 1 77. See also Judt's Past

Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1998), pp. 54-55. 56. Cobban, Social Interpretation, p. 24. 57. Ibid., pp. 12-17.



and Richet emphasized how much it resembled its Old Regime counterpart. Nouveaux riches financiers and contractors were compared to the court capitalists and fournisseurs of the declining monarchy. With them the "social pleasures of the Old Regime reappear," and provide "the aura of nobility" with which "the new society of bourgeois France unconsciously tried to endow itself." Though "the most distinguished figures of the old society" remained abroad or in provincial seclusion, "the new society had in its midst a number of deserters of the old aristocracy," who served as role models for the precapitalist financiers and contractors: Talleyrand and, above all, "Barras himself, formerly a viscount and now an immovable Director, the new regent of a kingless France."58

On this point Cobban diverged even more from the "orthodoxy. " As his chapter on the postrevolutionary ruling class progressed,

" bourgeoisie of landowners " became a term of irony. "If such a class can be called a bourgeoisie," he wrote, "then this was the revolutionary bourgeoisie." It should clearly be called something else, he added, and if we give up the term "we shall not vainly search for a non-existent Industrial Revolution in a country dominated by a landed aristocracy." He located the core of the class among the survivors of the old nobility.59 In a subsequent exchange with Eleanor O' Boyle on the nineteenth-century middle class, the Bourgeoisie of Landowners virtually disappeared. Postrevolutionary France was ruled by a "new aristocracy (created ] by the purchase of biens nationaux . . . and by successful speculation."60

The revisionists also provided an alternative interpretation of postrevolutionary economic conditions. The main feature of the Furet/Richet reading of these conditions - when compared with corresponding accounts in the Marxist histories - is the absence of any sign of impending industrialization. No less important, given the country's agrarian character, is the fact that "in the economic sphere provincial France remained unchanged." Overall, in town and country alike, "the new France resembled the old in more ways than men believed." Cobban's verdict is virtually identical: "France remained essentially a rural country and its old agricultural methods continued unchanged."61

58. Furet and Richet, French Revolution , p. 324. 59. Cobban, Social Interpretation, p. 89. 60. Alfred Cobban and Eleanor O'Boyle, "The Middle Class in France, 1815-1 848, " pp. 4 1 -

56. 61 . Furet and Richet, French Revolution , pp. 336, 323; Cobban, Social Interpretation, p.

78. This interpretation seems to reflect the influence of Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution , which Cobban admired and which Furet held up as an alternative to orthodoxy.



Even more important to the revisionist argument was the relationship between the Old Regime and the Revolution. Like the Marxists, the revisionists explained this relationship in terms of an historical contradiction, one which did not, however, reflect disharmony between a capitalist socio-economic base and a superstructure of residual feudal institutions. Instead, it was the result of the impact of economic modernization upon a profoundly traditional society.

Furet and Richet located the agents of this incipient transformation within the bourgeoisie. Like the rest of French society, most of the bourgeoisie was conservative and backward-looking. The agents of change were an anomalous minority. But at this particular point in time they played an historically important role. Men such as the "great textile patrons" Doffuss and Oberkampf, the "iron king " Dietrich, and Wendel of Creusot," who had "benefitted from the slow progress of technology [and] the multiplication of methods of payment," constituted "the dominant stratum" of the Third Estate. By the eve of the Revolution "the gradual introduction of English techniques," which they had initiated, stimulated "the growth of private enterprise," tremors from which were felt far down the social scale among "the small shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans of the lower bourgeoisie." It was this "spirit of capitalism" that gave "the revolutionary movement its impetus."62

Like much else in the Furet/Richet text, this account of the Old Regime reads like a paradoxical variation on a standard "orthodox" theme. Cobban's picture of the period, on the other hand, departs further from the "orthodoxy." For him the agents of change were not an anomalous bourgeois minority, but an omnium gatherum of outsiders and social misfits. The most conspicuous were "hommes nouveaux." Though technically commoners, they had no place within the Third Estate or indeed any of the settled structures of French society. They included men whom Cobban, drawing on Robert Forster's research on the aristocracy, identified as "middle class nobles," relatively recent recruits to the noblesse who retained their families' original commercial outlook. He rounded off the group with references to greedy peasant farmers.63

However, the revisionists were concerned with aspects of the postrevolutionary economy for which Tocqueville had little interest, and they failed to deal with aspects of postrevolutionary society, such as the reappearance of "democratic" conditions, which were of considerable importance to him; see Marvin R. Cox, "Tocqueville's Bourgeois Revolution," Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 19 (1991), pp. 279-300.

62. Furet/Richet, French Revolution, pp. 16, 22, 25, 29. 63. Cobban, Social Interpretation, pp. 55-57.



According to Cobban, people in this eclectic category managed to create conditions for an economic transformation. The most obviously promising of these involved an influx of foreign capital by means of which the "hommes nouueaux" made Paris the money capital of Europe. Even more important, however, was the transformation of manorial institutions. Against the Marxist understanding of manorialism Cobban argued that seigneurial rights had evolved into a postfeudal form of investment property.64 He also argued that during the last years of the Old Regime as new economic conditions emerged, these misnamed feudal vestiges underwent a further metamorphosis. For Cobban's greedy commoners and "middle class" noblemen fixed income was not enough: "There are many indications that the new owners [of seigneuries ] were determined to maximize return on their investment."65

In the Furet/Richet interpretation new economic forces brought old France to the early stages of industrialization; in Cobban's to the verge of an agricultural revolution. For both, modernization destabilized French society. The result, predictably, was wholesale resistance which occurred under the guise of revolution. To Furet and Richet this resistance began in 1 791-92, the period of derapage when the Revolution was "blown off course." The most conspicuous aspect of this deflection was political. The fall of the monarchy put an end to the efforts of moderate revolutionaries to found a stable order based on liberty and inaugurated the radical republican experiment which gave rise to the Terror.66 But derapage also entailed what Furet and Richet called "a social mutation," which involved the sharing of power by the peasants and the artisans of Paris. This resulted in an ill-fated attempt to compel "the vibrant, scarcely liberated forces of capital" to return to "the yoke of the poor and virtuous communities of the Middle Ages." Concomitantly, within the power elite, control shifted downward from the prosperous advocates of laissez-faire to the Girondins and Jacobins, "couches plus modestes de la bourgeoisie." Finally, after Thermidor came the ascent of new groups "enriched by war and speculation," who recreated the conditions of the Old Regime. "War and . . . the Parisian mob," Furet and Richet concluded, deflected the

64. Ibid., pp. 152,55. 65. Ibid., p. 46. 66. Furet and Richet, The French Revolution , pp. 145-146.



Revolution from the grand trajectory which "the intelligence and wealth of the eighteenth century" had traced for it.67

From this vantage point the reappearance after Thermidor of an aristocratic ruling class and the presence of a stagnant agrarian economy makes for an argument that goes beyond Tocqueville's persistence of the Old Regime. The argument portrays the Revolution as the result of French society's self-conscious repudiation of the Old Regime's capitalist promise, and the first chapter in a prolonged history of arrested development. The revisionist social interpretation accordingly seems to offer an effective means of moving beyond Marxist discourse. This is most obviously true of the revisionist perception of the postrevolutionary ruling class, but it also includes the revisionist judgment on the Revolution's consequences. Cobban summarized the contrast between the competing schools of thought: "According to prevailing social theory, steps in history must always be taken forward." Like Furet and Richet, however, he suggested "that [the Revolution] may not have been a step forward at all, but rather a step backward, that instead of accelerating the growth of a modern capitalist economy, [it] may have retarded it." 68

As Cobban recognized, a meaningful revisionism requires historians to rethink the Revolution in non-Marxist terms. This entails the rejection of the Marxist "philosophy of history, [which] like all philosophies of history. . . .embodies a view of the nature and ends of human existence," and is thus "a sort of secular religion." It also entails the rejection of a seemingly less problematic corollary of the philosophy: "its appearance of providing a scientific statement of the laws of human development."69

Marxist social science is thus the primary obstacle to the study of the French Revolution. To transcend this obstacle, according to Cobban, historians must discard "the large omnibus social classes" of Marxist theory "which are calculated to accept practically any passenger who can

67. Furet and Richet, La Revolution franqaise , 1:359, 229, 358. In Cobban's account resistance to modernization came earlier - during the last years of the Old Regime and above all during the peasantry's misnamed revolt against "feudalism" in 1 789. But for him, as for Furet and Richet, the decisive instances of resistance - the repudiation of laissez-faire policies, the guillotining of "the great Farmers General," the closing of the Paris Bourse - coincided with the radicalization of the Revolution; see Cobban, Social Interpretation , pp. 34, 154-156, 165.

68. Cobban, Social Interpretation, p. 79 69. Ibid., pp. 16-24.



pay a minimum set fare," and define new social categories in which "an estimate of social position" would be based "on a plurality of tests - actual wealth and its nature, social status and prestige . . . contemporary esteem, personal aspirations and so on." Above all they must distance themselves from the simplistic scenario derived from Marx's theory of development in which "social history is divided into a few large and homogenous phases which are repeated in the same order and the same shape in all societies . . . in which "feudalism is taken to extend in European history from the early Middle Ages to its overthrow by the Bourgeois Revolution, which in England occurred in the seventeenth century, in France in the eighteenth, and in most of the rest of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth."70

Cobban's goal of liberating social history from the postulates of Marxist social science was clearly spelled out. His definition of these postulates, however, was incomplete. According to a familiar formulation, Marxists define classes in terms of their relationship to the means of production and exchange. Mandel Morton Bober, whose book on Marx's interpretation of history was a standard reference during the period, long ago indicated that the most historically important classes are defined in terms of the actual "possession of the means of production" - in the case of the bourgeoisie, possession of the banks, factories and other businesses of the capitalist economy; in the case of the feudal aristocracy, the land.71

In this abstract reading bourgeoisie and aristocracy do not conform to Cobban's idea of large, omnibus categories. In Lefebvre's classic text, however, they do. His postrevolutionary bourgeoisie includes not only the entrepreneurial "corsairs," but also professionals who owned little wealth of any kind and large numbers of landowners who would seem in Marxist terms to be aristocrats rather than capitalists.72 The "orthodox" version of the Old Regime aristocracy, conversely, includes elements equally far removed from landowning - high level administrators and even, by ultimate extension, tax farmers and financiers who seem to prefigure the postrevolutionary bourgeoisie.73

It is hard to see how such disparate groups fit into a class defined by their relationship to the means of production. The most conspicuous

70. Ibid., p. 25. 71 . Mandel Morton Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History (2nd edition, New York,

1950), p. 97. 72. Georges Lefebvre, Rev. fr, p. 583 73. Ibid., pp. 46-47.



common denominators have to do with what Marxists call "consciousness," and what historians of the Annates school call "mentalite." Postrevolutionary landowners are crasser than prerevolutionary aristocrats. Prerevolutionary financiers partake of the aesthetic and spiritual values which Lefebvre associates with the nobility. Yet his account of the economic conditions providing operational context suggests that there was also a minimum material fare which these incongruous categories paid for admission to the two ruling classes. The professionals of the postrevolutionary period created the laws and institutions essential to capitalist progress. Within the landed bourgeoisie the most important proprietors were those who profited from the ruinous inflation of the time and accelerated the "social upheaval" from which the capitalist economy was emerging. Conversely, all of the variegated categories which comprise the Old Regime's ruling class depend upon the perpetuation of feudal stagnation.74

Marx's theory of development provides a more difficult case. Nonetheless, as Rene Remond suggested in a study of development written during the period, it is possible to make meaningful distinctions within Marx's historical scenario because it unfolds on at least two levels. One involves a teleological progression in which, through class conflict and upheaval, humankind advances to a state of perfect freedom under communism. The other involves a "succession of [economic] systems," which conform to the stages of development that Cobban had in mind. Despite their interconnectedness the two levels are distinct. In the former, "each regime ... is determined by the relation of man to work and by the legal status of the worker (slave, serf, or wage earner)." Each regime is therefore different. Each results from a unique social upheaval.75

On the economic level, however, genuine change and significant development occur earlier during the convulsive transformation marked by an increase in the means of production. Lefebvre spelt out the implications of this development and the French Revolution's place within it: "Until the middle of the eighteenth century," he wrote, "it was still possible to imagine that Europe would experience the fate of Rome, whose purely commercial and financial capitalism had ultimately ruined her subject countries. " Because of "the economic revolution inaugurated by Great Britain," however, hopes justifiably existed that "Europe's

74. Ibid, pp. 49, 549. 75. Ren Remond, The Industrial Society: Three Essays on Ideology and Development

(New York and Washington, 1 967), pp. 2 1 , 63-65. The book is based on lectures given in 1 962 at a UNESCO symposium on "Development Theory and Evolutionist Philosophy."



supremacy was growing stronger." "Coal and iron were replacing wood, steam and machinery were multiplying the output of labor, [with] agriculture . . . fueling the process." The problem of converting the continent to the new economy still remained, "but this was only a matter of time . . ."n

Lefebvre's text indicates that the French Revolution ended this waiting period. The triumphant bourgeoisie provided the means by which industrial capitalism passed to the continent and thence to the rest of the world. The implicit message of this particular passage, however, is that without such a conversion Europe risked economic reversion. Only by replicating Britain's world-historical economic transformation could catastrophe be avoided.

The Marxist theory of development, redefined to fit the requirements of French history, is as much a part of "orthodoxy" as Marxist social categories. What matters for evaluating the revision is that both the categories and the theory reappear in the Furel/Richet text and in Cobban's Social Interpretation. Indeed, it is in Marxist terms that the revisionists draw parallels between the postrevolutionary ruling class and the Old Regime nobility. To Furet and Richet the postrevolutionary ruling class resembles the noblesse not simply because of the incongruous "aura of nobility" which it imparted to Thermidorean society, but primarily because its wealth, though "new [was] of the same nature" as "the spectacular fortunes of the Old Regime [that] had gone under during the Terror"; because, specifically, the Directory's financiers and contractors, like the Old Regime's court capitalists, skimmed money from the retrograde peasants who maintained the stagnant agrarian economy: "The rapacity of Louis XVI's tax farmers was surpassed by that of their descendants, les fournisseurs de la Republique."77 Concomitantly, in Cobban's case, what made his bourgeoisie a landed aristocracy was not simply the nobility at its core or even the ownership of land. Postrevolutionary bourgeois were similar to Old Regime aristocrats because of their place, or lack of place, in the productive process. The words he uses to establish their historical character - " non-regardant ," from vulgar peasant parlance, "non-exploiting," from Lefebvre's standard French usage - identify the class as parasitic.78 Moreover, like the classes in Lefebvre's text, this is an "omnibus" category. It includes all those who shared a minimum stake in the perpetuation of precapitalist conditions:

76. Lefebvre, Revolution franqaise , p. 39. 77. Furet and Richet, La Revolution franqaise , 1:245. 78. Cobban, Social Revolution, p. 86.



landed aristocrats; "rentiers and officials,"; "big fish, many of moderate size, and a host of minnows, who all knew that they swam in the same element." 79

Signs of Marx's theory of development are less evident. Revision is as much a case against Marxist teleology as against "orthodoxy." It denies the occurrence of a crucial event in the sequence leading to communism. Cobban saw himself as a successor to historians of the seventeenth century who maintained there was no English Bourgeois Revolution,80 thereby suggesting there were no radical social convulsions in early modem Europe. With the Bourgeois Revolution thus denied, the inevitable Proletarian Revolution disappeared.

As for the Marxist succession of economic systems, things are more complex. Cobban questioned the Marxist assumption that history can be divided into large, homogenous phases which recur "in the same order and shape in all societies," and he was especially skeptical about the revolutionary transition from feudalism to capitalism. Yet he - like Furet and Richet - accepted the well-documented fact that in Great Britain at least a radical transformation of the medieval economy did occur. More important, both versions of the revisionist social interpretation incorporated two Marxist assumptions concerning this transformation: that the transition to capitalism must everywhere follow the revolutionary English pattern; and the corollary presupposition that a country which fails to do so will remain wedded to the past.

These assumptions figure in the revisionist analysis of the Old Regime. Even more than anything suggested by Lefebvre, who believed that post- medieval changes had brought France to the verge of industrialization, it presumed that the static agrarian character of France's economy had changed little since the Middle Ages and, conversely, that only a radical catalyst of the kind at work across the Channel could move things forward. This shows through clearly in the Furet /Richet account of the energizing effects which the introduction of "English methods" had on a listless eighteenth-century French economy. The influence of these assumptions on Cobban, though subtler, appear to have been even stronger. He maintained that the cities of the Old Regime "drained wealth from the surrounding countryside" like their counterparts under the

79. Social Interpretation, pp. 46, 76, 80-85, 173. 80. Cobban, Social Interpretation , p. 9. For an early overview of this controversy see

Philip A.M. Taylor, ed., The Origins of the English Civil War (Boston, 1960); for recent commentary see Ann Hughes, The Origins of the English Civil War (New York, 1 99 1 ), pp. 117- 154.



Roman Empire.81 This situation, he implied, could change only through a process analogous to enclosure in England - the radical, and paradoxical, exploitation of seigneurial rights to maximize returns on rural investments.

The influence of the Marxist theory of development is most apparent in the revisionists' interpretation of postrevolutionary conditions. The negation of the incipient English-style economy did not simply slow the pace of change. Nor did it move matters back to some pre-existing, but less dynamic, pattern of growth. The Revolution put France outside the mainstream of Western development. Furet and Richet argued that the "alliances" the bourgeoisie made with the peasantry in "the year II," to preserve common lands and consolidate the regime of small property, perpetuated agricultural "archaism ... in the nineteenth century" and over the long term impeded "capitalist expansion."82 Similarly, though Cobban made allowance for significant industrialization under the Second Empire, his picture of the bourgeois/aristocratic way of life - "confined, unchanging, conservative, repetitive" - indicated that nineteenth-century France had more in common with the countries of southern Europe than her expansive neighbors to the north and east.83

The efforts to transcend the Marxist theory of development were as much a failure as the attempts to move beyond the Marxist concept of class. The revisionists inadvertently contributed another Marxist interpretation to the already abundant store supplied by "orthodox" historians. This newer interpretation has not been systematically revised, but commentaries on various aspects show it to be as inaccurate as its predecessors. For example, Robert Forster, whose writings significantly contributed to the revision, took issue as early as 1967 with Cobban's argument that the postrevolutionary ruling class was essentially the same as the Old Regime's aristocracy. This characterization, Forster maintained, reflected a failure to recognize differences between the relatively easy- going landed proprietors of the earlier period, and "the emerging society of self-confident, tenacious, middling and small landowners" of the Restoration. A more fundamental problem, Forster argued, was Cobban's exclusive reliance on "economic materials" which led him to neglect "subtler changes, both legal and psychological" in the upper reaches of postrevolutionary society. Concern with the ownership of low-yield landed property prevented him from seeing that in the nineteenth

8 1 . Cobban, Social Interpretation , pp. 1 0 1 - 1 02 . 82. Furet and Richet, Revolution franqaise , 1:233. 83. Cobban, Social Interpretation , 1: 1 73.



century, even more than in the eighteenth, proprietors were town- dwelling rentiers, not rural seigneurs. On a deeper level Cobban's focus on seigneurial dues blinded him to the significance of the old nobility's residual political and administrative prerogatives and, conversely, to the difference the suppression of these prerogatives made in relations between landed proprietors and the greedier, more assertive peasants of the nineteenth century.84

Frangois Crouzet, another historian cited by Cobban, scored equally telling points against the revisionist contention that the Revolution set back economic development. The revolutionary bourgeoisie, though hardly capitalist, nonetheless passed legislation that ultimately contributed to a "balanced and moderately successful growth rate in the nineteenth century." More important, by expanding his social focus beyond the bourgeoisie and the nobility, Crouzet demonstrated that however insignificant it may have been for capitalist development, the suppression of seigneurial dues " improved" the peasantry's "standard of living . . ." 85

The revisionists' inability to transcend the Marxist conceptual framework has had important consequences. Rather than redefining class or opening a new perspective in which to evaluate the Revolution's social significance, Cobban and his French counterparts simply turned the Marxist interpretation "upside down," as Richard Cobb put it in his review of Cobban's book in 1 965.86 In doing so they illustrated what David Hackett Fisher has called "the fallacy of counter-questions, . . . [an] attempt at a revision of an earlier interpretation which becomes merely a mindless inversion and a reiteration of its fundamental assumptions . . ."87

With an effective critique of "orthodox" postulates still lacking, and a "counter-orthodoxy" still riding the underside of the revision, Marxist

84. Robert Forster, "The Survival of the Nobility during the French Revolution," Past and Present , no. 37 (1967): 71-86.

85. Francois Crouzet, "The Economic Consequences of the French Revolution: Reflections on a Debate" in Marvin R. Cox, ed., The Place of the French Revolution in History (Boston, 1998), pp. 201-212, editor's translation. Little has been made of these observations, or indeed of the revisionist social interpretation itself, in the on-going debate. Nonetheless, closely intertwined as it is with their critique of "orthodoxy," the revisionists' flawed reading of social history seems likely to have exerted a considerable influence on the prevailing "dialogue of the deaf." It helps account for the obdurate refusal of neorevisionist historians to see any promise in the efforts to breathe new life into the concept of a Bourgeois Revolution.

86. Times Literary Supplement, 7 January 1965, p. 3 87. David Hackett Fisher, Historians' Fallacies (New York, 1970), p. 28-29.



assumptions still pervade the field. This is obviously true of neorevisionists who, following Furet, accept what William Sewell calls the "enemies' definition of the terrain," and thus "implicitly define the social in the same narrow and reductionist way."88 But Sewell's strictures apply equally well to neo-"orthodox" historians who, sensitive to the limitations of Marxists and revisionists alike, are attempting to reconceive the social history of the Revolution in non-Marxist terms.

Conspicuous examples of this tendency appear in a well-regarded article by Timothy Tackett called "Nobles and the Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of the National Assembly." Tackett's purpose is to demonstrate that, contrary to the neorevisionists, revolutionary violence reflected not merely, "semiotic or ideological differences, " but also "deep- rooted social conflicts." He uses the deputies of the Third Estate in 1789 to make the point. These men, though clearly noncapitalist, were prosperous representatives of "small to medium-sized provincial towns," and thus, according to contemporary perceptions, representative bourgeois. Their antagonists were noble deputies who, though equally far removed from the stereotype of landed aristocrats, were nonetheless "genuinely, genealogically certified aristocrats, swords at their side." Clashes between the groups bore a close resemblance to class conflict. But Tackett's final word is that "the social differences operative were not those of class [because] most of the noblemen and most . . . wealthy commoners . . . had basically the same relation to the means of production."89

More complex, and more significant, illustrations of the currency of Marxist postulates among neo-"orthodox" historians figure in Colin Jones' previously cited article. Like Tackett, Jones shifts his focus from the anomalous protocapitalists of the "orthodoxy" to bourgeois whom contemporary Frenchmen would have seen as representative: the elite professionals at the core of the Third Estate in 1 789. Jones persuasively argues against Cobban's characterization of these men as a declining "bourgeoisie d'office," and documents the emergence among them of an ethic which "legitimated the attack on privilege" and a new ideal of administrative reform, entailing "[state] services, rational organization, [and] public accountability." All this was clearly as subversive of the Old Regime as the imaginary capitalist agenda of the "orthodoxy." Surveying

88. William H. Sewell, Jr. "A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution" in Kates, The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies , p. 1 44.

89. Timothy Tackett, "Nobles and the Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of National Assembly, 1789-90" in Kates, op. cit ., pp. 192, 197, 217, 219-220.



the impact of these reforms, Jones perceives aspects of the Revolution's significance which Marxists and revisionists largely disregard: "... the formidable strengthening of the . . . bureaucracy; ... the emergence of a prestigious scientific profession, under the wing of the state; . . . the arguments of state utility." Yet Jones sees his professionals not as the leaders of a new society, a class in itself, but rather as central figures within "the service sector [of] a capitalist economy." By the same token the professionals' radical "commitment" to reform of the state reflected not the well-documented expansion of the Old Regime administration, and its concomitant assumption of new public functions, but rather "the inroads and potentialities of commercial capitalism." Marxist preconceptions color his final verdict on the Revolution's place in history as well. Well-documented social changes resulting from administrative reforms do not count as much as less discernible changes in the economy. Though the Revolution, Jones concedes, failed to generate industrialization, it did accelerate "commercialization," and thus contributed in the long term "to the development of capitalism." 90

Marxist influence clearly persists among historians of the French Revolution. Why it persists is something of a mystery. Anyone even slightly familiar with recent social thought must be aware, as Sewell says, that "the human sciences" have given us a wealth of alternatives to "Marx's concept of class and mode of production"; that, more directly to the point, "just as there is more than one way to skin a cat," so "there is more than one way of identifying the Revolution as bourgeois." 91

Yet this embarrassment of conceptual riches does not necessarily provide an easy means for transcending Marxist influence. Three of the "human scientists" whom Sewell suggests for this purpose - Weber, Gramsci, Foucault - were directly influenced by Marx.92 Furthermore, as the case of the revisionists amply demonstrates, even thinkers who self- consciously resist such influence fall prey to it.

Marxism owes its hold on historical thinking to unexamined and emotionally compelling assumptions about human nature and history.

90. Colin Jones, "The Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1 789 and Social Change" in Kates, op. cit.t pp. 176, 166, 169, 174.

91 . William H. Sewell, Jr. "A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution" in Kates, op. cit , p. 145 92. H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path (New York, 1 968), pp. 1 89-1 91 ; James Miller,

The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993), pp. 51, 137, 232-234, 305.



These assumptions were especially powerful during the early Cold War when Cobban, the professed admirer of Burke, challenged the avatars of dialectical materialism. Indeed, Cold War competition between the capitalist democracies and the Soviet bloc for the allegiance of former European colonies made development and underdevelopment urgent issues. Marxist definitions of these concepts - simple, coherent and at the time intellectually prestigious- outranked other variants in the West as well as the East.93 They are reflected in the best-known book on the subject, W.W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth, a "Non- Communist Manifesto" in which modern capitalism is described as emerging from a conflict between an entrepreneurial elite reminiscent of the bourgeoisie of Marxist history and a landowning class committed to perpetuating stagnant agrarian conditions. Even the famous term "take- off' refers to a dramatic, English-type mutation of the kind that Marx thought necessary to human progress.94 These assumptions were also reflected in the writings of Cobban and Furet - as was a related concern with what was perceived as French backwardness."95

Marxism's influence on Western social thought stretches back even further - through the Great Depression and the twenties, to the final decades of the nineteenth century.96 It has been a constant for more than a hundred years. Though unaware of its hold upon him, Cobban convincingly explained its persistence: first, because Marxism combines the religious appeal of a teleological philosophy of history with the intellectual attraction of a seemingly scientific theory of development; but secondly, as he noted almost in passing, because its "broad generalizations" reflect both the distortions of "sociological thought" and "present-day social conditions."97 Our conditions as well as his clearly

93. Ren Rmond, The Industrial Society: Three Essays on Ideology and Development , pp. 21, 63-65.

94. Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1 965), pp. 4-8, 39-40, 57

95. That concern led Herbert Ltithy, another economic historian on whom the revisionists relied, to label France "the sick man of Europe." See his France against Herself , pp. 74-78.

96. For an account of Marxism s earner influence on rrencn social tnougnt, see, in addition to Judt's and Hughes' works, Raymond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals (Garden City, NY, 1957); for its impact in Great Britain, see Noel Annan, Our Age: English Intellectuals between the World Wars, a Group Portrait (New York, 1991); for its role in the shaping of American historical thought, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ' Objectivity ' Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988).

97. Cobban, Social Interpretation , p. 2 1 .



indicate a relationship between social classes and the capitalist means of production. And capitalism remains dependent upon continuing development.

Under these conditions no one can easily fulfill revision's ultimate promise of reinterpreting the Revolution by redefining classes and putting French development in a different perspective. There remains the possibility of extending the process of reculer pour mieux sauter beyond the late nineteenth century to the largely forgotten conceptual world in which revolutionary historiography began. This was Marx's world, and Marx's classic works on nineteenth-century France may ironically offer some useful alternatives to the presuppositions of Marxist historians. But it was above all the world of the historians among whom the "orthodoxy" originated: the bourgeois historians of the Restoration, Michelet, and, in the view of this historian, Tocqueville. This would provide the vantage point that would allow us to see what the French Revolution looked like before Marxism and capitalism distorted our perceptions of the past.


Article Contentsp. [49]p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71p. 72p. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77

Issue Table of ContentsHistorical Reflections / Rflexions Historiques, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 2001) pp. 1-176Front MatterA Notorious Woman: Possession, Witchcraft and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century Provence [pp. 1-26]James Baldwin in Paris: Exile, Multiculturalism and the Public Intellectual [pp. 27-47]Furet, Cobban and Marx: The Revision of the "Orthodoxy" Revisited [pp. 49-77]From Emotionalized Language to Basic English: The Career of C. K. Ogden and/as "Adelyne More" [pp. 79-105]The Etruscans in the Renaissance: The Sacred Destiny of Rome and the "Historia Viginti Saeculorum" of Giles of Viterbo (c. 1469-1532) [pp. 107-137]DOCUMENT AND COMMENTARYThe Discovery of the Holy Patriarchs: Relics, Ecclesiastical Politics and Sacred History in Twelfth-Century Crusader Palestine [pp. 139-176]

Back Matter

Cox, Furet, Cobban and Marx: The Revision of the "Orthodoxy"

Documents

Transcript of Cox, Furet, Cobban and Marx: The Revision of the "Orthodoxy"