BOOK REVIEW You Say You Had a Revolution Tony Iudt A Cultural History of the French Revolution by Emmet Kennedy. Yale University Press, 1989, 448 pp. Macbeth: Avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee. Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold. Lady Macbeth: Think of this, good peers, but as a thing of custom. ?Tis no other; only it spoils the pleasure of the time. ?Macheth, Act 3, Scene IV ike Banquo?s ghost, the French Revolution haunts the France of President Mitterrand. It can hardly be ignored?July 14 this year marks the bicentennial of the capture of the Bastille, and France is awash in literary and audio-visual acknowledgment of the fact. There is a government com- mission charged with the task of or- ganizing and promoting the matter, led by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, a prominent historian and former director of Radio France. Yet the whole affair is shrouded in self-doubt. Should the Revolution be commemorated, celebrated, or merely analyzed? Whose Revolution is it any- way? Right-ng papers and magazines have predictably taken the occasion to remind their audience of the more unpleasant features of the Revolution (mass drownings in the Loire, injustice, murder, rapine, and so on); but few on the left seem enthusiastic about invoking the Revolution en bloc, which leaves them endlessly squabbling over those parts worth salvaging and those (the Terror, Jacobin extremism) best excluded. Tony Iudt is a professor of history at New Ybr/e University and the author of Marxism and the French Left, 1830- 1981 (Oxford, 1986) and is the editor of Resistance and Revolution in Mediter- ranean Europe, 1939-1948 (Routledge, 1989). Yet, once upon a time, and well within the adult experience of France?s present political class, the legacy of the Revolution was unambiguous. It was the undisputed fons vivus of contempo- rary France?the source of the nation, the Republic, the ideals of freedom and equality, the modern French state and its institutions, the very people themselves. Against and in denial of it were gathered the religious and monar- chical opponents of secular republican democracy, well represented in the per- secutors of Dreyfus at the turn of the century and in the architects of col- laboration and worse in Vichy France. The Revolution gave to the language of the Enlightenment a radical, social meaning that was to color all puhlic discourse in nineteenth- and twentieth?century France. The family of the Revolution included anyone who claimed descent from it, stretching from conservative republican parties to the Communist movement. Divisions within this community re- ?ected divisions within the Revolution itself (Jacobins, Girondins, and so on), and modern French history and politics were but the updating (and, prospec- tively, completion) of the internecine struggles of the 17908. But the last two decades have seen precipitate changes in this comfortable political topography. Marxism is dead in France; the Communist party has been reduced to a marginal actor and has been replaced on the left by a Socialist party led from the center and indebted for its rebirth to a man no- toriously light on ideological baggage. The presidential Fifth Republic estab- lished by De Gaulle is now universally accepted, and its special combination of republican forms and monarchical content (which so enraged its oppo- nents in earlier years) has put an end to the institutional con?icts that were so central to the legacy of the Revolu- tion. Because politics is no longer about the very structure of society but rather about the business of generating and distributing limited social resources, the old forms and their accompanying language (left/right, socialist/liberal, democratic/hierarchical) seem oddly inappropriate. France, it has been sug- gested, has ?caught up? with the rest of the West. All this has been well reflected in the historiography of the Revolution itself. Indeed, historians are prominent and in?uential agents of opinion in France, providing an important clue to the mortgage laid upon contemporary France by its revolutionary past. 'Domi- nated by Professor Francois Furet and his students, the historiography of the Revolution in recent years has been acutely ?deconstructive,? in the commonsense meaning of the term. The revolutionary catechism of three generations of left-wing historians-? the account of the years 1789- 1794 as a ?bourgeois? revolution, with everyone from the aristocracy to the sans-culottes assigned an immanent social and his- torical identity?has been exploded. There has been a subtle and enlighten- ing concentration on the self-invention of the Revolution, the way in which the Jacobins, in particular, imagined into being various abstract categories people,? counterrevolutionaries,? ?the national interest?) and then acted upon their proclaimed existence. Rev- olutionary language, the discourse of politics, thereby replaces social con- ?icts and political goals as the motor of revolutionary action. The legacy of the Revolution, for Furet and others, has been not a particular society (for, 115 socially speaking, the Revolution al- tered remarkably little) but a very special way of conceiving of society. This, it is suggested, is the Revolution?s main bequest to modern France, and it accounts for the the irresolv- able and violent conflicts, and the often frustratingly abstract nature of French political discourse. There are other accounts, of course. Furet is opposed, on the one side, by the last remaining proponents of the old interpretation, and on the other by his former friends in the Annales school whose vision of history in the structurally continuous longue dur?e consigns the Revolution to little more than a footnote. But because Furet?s interpretation takes the Revolution seri- ously while undermining the ideological claims of its protagonists, it is naturally the one that has had the greatest public impact. It leaves unresolved, however, the larger question that all recent his- tories implicitly address: how do you describe and give recognition to a revo- lutionary legacy whose importance is declared to lie in its own mythology? merican historians of the Revolu- tion are relieved of this burden. But they share certain other constraints with their French colleagues. They too struggle constantly to give shape to a historical moment that their own re- search has tended to dismantle. For a long time the dominant mode in the US. was social history; it had the virtue of casting new light on many neglected aspects of eighteenth-century history, and it contributed signi?cantly to the general undermining of the old, posi- tivist account of the Revolution as an agent of progress and change. But fashions in the American historical profession have moved on and the current preference is for ?cultural? history. Like other recent historical trends in the English-speaking world, this change owes much to French in- novations. But it has characteristics, and problems, of its own. Emmet Kennedy?s new book, A Cultural His- tory of the French Revolution, is symp- tomatic in this regard. What, after all, is ?culture?? The arts, literature, beliefs? The forms in which they are inscribed (public insti- tutions, language, educational estab- lishments, the church)? High culture (theatre, poetry, design, philosophy) or low culture (popular songs, super- 116 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 4 stitions, daily life and its rules)? For Kennedy, and for many of his fellow historians, the answer is all of the above, which means that his book is ambitious and hopeless, a compendium of every- thing (rather like G. M. Trevelyan?s de?nition of social history as history ?with the politics left out?-though Kennedy even includes some of that, too). There is nothing unworthy about such an undertaking?indeed, it is courageous and mostly admirable. But the author writes badly, wavering be- tween the sententious and the bland, and always in a labored and sopori?c syntax. He is also an unreliable guide to the aesthetic aspects of the ?higher? culture, capable of asserting that the ?eighteenth century was bereft of good poetry,? which is rather hard on Andr? Ch?nier, not to mention the poetic geniuses just across the English Channel. But the book is, in the end, undermined not by its shortcomings but by its ambitions. For the author seeks to establish Braudelian categories for cultural history?short-, medium-, and long-term signi?cance and so forth. And here the outcome is predictable: the short-term cultural impact was tiny, since the Revolution produced little in the way of high culture, and altered in few respects the daily world of most of the population. In the medium term, we got the legacy of a few abstract concepts together with the Romantic movement, while the long-term result was political republicanism and the altered place of religion in public life. Well and good. And true. But what has ?culture? to do with this? The word is super?uous, except in its restricted and traditional usage as the description of artistic production. Beyond the ac- cumulation of information, Kennedy?s book adds very little to our sense of what the Revolution was, or meant, or left behind upon its completion. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the new historical categories of ?political culture,? ?low culture,? and even ?cul- tural history? are inherently problem- atic. To justify their use, historians perennially claim for them more than they can deliver. A history that brackets popular medical lore with a computer- ized list of theatrical performances in Paris requires a sustained epistemology, a theory of what all this is about and how it is interrelated. Otherwise it is just a mess. Fortunately Kennedy (fol- lowing Hunt?s Politicr, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 1984) offers us a solution, albeit by inadvertence. The ?cultural? account of the Revolution tells us little, but it does point to the Revolution?s one unambiguous legacy: political repub- licanism. Expanding a little on this point, we might say that what the Revolution undoubtedly did create and transmit was politics (not a ?political culture,? which weakens the force of the-observation). On this point, Ameri- can historians agree with their French counterparts. There is a further common trait in the historiography: the French RevolutiOn seems often to be the subject around which categories and approaches tend to collapse, despite working well enough for earlier (and later) periods. Our grasp of the past becomes uncertain when we write about the complex events of the late eighteenth century. And this fact, perhaps, indicates paradoxically one aspect of the French Revolution about which we may feel con?dent: the Revolution is dif?cult to pigeonhole and package, precisely because it was the moment when the very categories of modern history itself were born. It is one thing to describe a grand transition from one sort of society to another (as in the decline of Rome or the revolution in China). But when it comes to writing about the transition, in the political sphere, from one sort of society to our own world, things become murky; and the way to make sense of the process is colored by whatever understanding we have (usually not artiCulated) about ourselves and our own experience. The French Revolution bequeathed us not only modern politics, but whatever apparatus we now have for political (and therefore historical) analysis. Whatever it calls itself, any serious historical account of the French Revo- lution is also an engagement with the various ways in which the modern world, our world, tries to explain itself to itself. A younger generation of his- torians in France understands this point and has begun to write the sort of intellectual history not seen in France for over a century?that is to say, the history of political and philosophical concepts (as distinct from that tired genre, the conceptual history of poli- tics). These historians seek to under- stand what became of liberal political thought in France, once so fertile and all but invisible after 1840. Why, they ask, have moral arguments in France so often turned upon historical rather than ethical premises? A prominent discussion of this theme can be found in the recent work by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pem?e, 1968. This sort of investigation takes historians beyond Furet?s concern with the Jacobins? ?in- vention? of radical politics and into interesting and dif?cult terrain?long neglected by the French intelligentsia at whose hands moral philosophy and its history received short shrift. nfortunately, intellectual history in the US. has in recent years been polarized between those who write social history of literature, and the advocates of the so-called linguistic turn who are obsessed with the form of language use but are radically un- interested in the content of the ideas themselves. This is a pity, because the history of ideas, conceived as a historically sensitive account of the self-understanding and self-criticism of past communities, is now uniquely placed to make sense of the French Revolution, given the present intellec- tual uncertainty and political trans- formations in France (most notably the reelection of a Socialist president and the formation this year of a left- center government). True, earlier at- tempts to write of the relationship between ideas and the Revolution were often so crass as to give the whole enter- prise a bad name; claims made for Voltaire or Rousseau as the ?father? of the Revolution seem now merely jejune, while the suggestion that the Revolu? tion bequeathed to us, unproblemati- cally, the Rights of Man and assorted worthy abstractions is precisely the sort of unreflective (and self-serving) anachronism attacked by Furet and others. All the same, the legacy of these concepts has, more than anything else, colored the post-Revolutionary experience in France, and it constitutes that very special public culture to which we are all indebted. Here, surely, is the terrain on which historians might hope to contribute to France?s self-understanding as the modern nation enters its third century. We are still surprisingly ignorant of just how political concepts such as ?democracy, rights, republicanism,? and the like took their peculiarly French form in the troubled decades following the fall of Napoleon. Why did the heritage of the Enlightenment in France diverge so sharply from the experience of Britain or the United States? For our insights on such matters we con- tinue to depend on Tocqueville (who is much in fashion in Paris just now). We could do worse, of course, but the interesting question is why the same Tocqueville was utterly ignored in his own land for so long. There were two reasons for this neglect. First, he emphasized the fun- damental continuity of French history, pointing out that the Revolution pur- sued and accentuated certain aspects of French public life that were already characteristic of the Ancien Regime, notably the centralized state and the corresponding weakness of intermedi- ary institutions and the absence of any separation of powers. Second, Tocque- ville?s approach was precociously struc- tural, concerned with social forms and practices rather than with ideas and in- tentions. This approach put him rather out of sympathy with his nineteenth- century contemporaries on both ends of the spectrum. But from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, we can see that his insights were essentially correct. The Ancien Regime was more complex than its successors wished to believe, and revolutionary France is better seen as its heir than as its grave- digger, socially, culturally, and even ideologically. On the other hand?and here the renewed interest in the history of ideas has exerted an important claim on our attention?the Revolution was also a decisive break. It gave to the language of the Enlightenment a radical, social meaning that was to color all public discourse in nineteenth- and twentieth- century France (and, in passing, distort the later historical understanding of the Enlightenment and the Revolution alike). Terms such as ?natural rights,? ?society,? ?social duties,? and the like, products of the eighteenth century?s fascination with the newly emerging ?social sciences,? acquired speci?cally political connotations as a result of the experience of the 17905. They were then further transformed in the 1) (t RABBI WANTED Small liberal conservative congregation Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Must read Torah, teach, etc. Beautiful synagogue/ adjacent residence, 40?s+ (part time negotiable). Search Committee, Congregation Beth Israel, 265 Church Street, North Adams, MA 01247. political melee of the years 1830?1850, the generation in which were drawn up the main battle lines of modern French ideological politics. Because this was also the era of the great liberal histories of the Revolution, history and politics became inextricably interwoven in the ideological consciousness of left and right alike. It should now be clear why the recent ideological ?thaw? in Paris provides a renewed occasion for rethinking the cultural meaning of the Revolution. Historians are largely free of the pres- sure to see the events of 1789- 1799 as either a radical break or an element, despite itself, of continuity in the deep structures of French public life. The events were, quite simply, both, de- pending upon the arena of your inves- tigation. In social terms, there was almost certainly less than met the eye; given that for the nineteenth century and its radical heirs the ?social? had primacy, this argument might once have sounded dangerously close to the claim that the Revolution ?changed nothing.? But society consists of more than the sum of landholdings, tax-rolls, and rates of industrialization or demographic in- crease. It is also the product of the language it employs to describe itself, and in this respect the Revolution al- tered everything. But for this funda- mental change to become clear, a lot of dust had to settle; even now, as the present situation in France indi- cates, confusion and disagreement per- sist. The history of this confusion is also, of course, the history of modern France. In this sense, the true cultural history of the French Revolution begins in 1815 ?and it awaits its historian. l:l REVIEWS 117