A Permanent Revolution

Abstract

There are few things in this world as vast as the historiography of the French Revolution. As much as the Russian and Chinese revolutions have shaped our century and served as ideological touchstones for statesmen and scholars alike, the volume of literature on 1789 surely exceeds the writings on the two more recent revolutions combined. The sheer bulk of the French revolutionary historiography accounts for part of its continuing influence, but substantially more important has been the widespread significance of the ideological and theoretical discussion it has spawned. Lenin and Trotsky were avid students of the French Revolution as, of course, was Marx himself. And historians of the Russian Revolution have long viewed that event through the lens of 1789.' Perhaps because the Chinese Revolution seems so clearly to be a phenomenon of the contemporary world, China scholars have not paid as much comparative attention to France. But, as I suggest in this article, a number of developments in the historiography of the French Revolution may be of intellectual and theoretical interest to China scholars searching for new approaches and new paradigms in our current period of ideological uncertainty. These developments include the collapse of the Marxist interpretation in the face of new empirical research; the revival of interest in politics as an independent phenomenon; the shift in emphasis from socioeconomic to cultural explanations of the origins and meaning of revolution; the preoccupation with language and rhetoric, with the idea that power resided in those who controlled the discourse of revolution; and, finally, the use of gender as a category of analysis in the scholarship on 1789.