An Assessment of the Writings of Francois Furet

Abstract

The number of those standing guard around the sacred flame of historiographical orthodoxy of the French Revolution dwindles each year. No doubt the general disillusionment with Communism has a lot to do with this. It is no longer worth defending a particular vision of the past when there is no longer much faith in a sullied future. At the same time, Anglo-American historians have accumulated quantities of evidence that completely undermine the classic interpretation based upon class struggle and the emergence of capitalism. It is no wonder that the defenders of orthodoxy ended by wrapping themselves in the magisterial ermine of Georges Lefebvre and, like tired actors with breaking voices and cracking make-up, tottered haughtily from the stage. Fran~ois Furet has been a part of this process of pushing the Marxist interpretation into the museum of historiography, a place for antiquarian curiosity and Sunday browsing at old tools no longer of much use to the practicing historian. Unlike the Anglo-Americans, however, Furet is not an empiricist. Faced with the inadequacies of the classical interpretation, he has tried to reconceptualize the causes and course of the Revolution. Thus his great interest in the historiography of the Revolution, because, as he says, it exposes the various sedimentary layers of interpretation that affect us all, unconsciously or not. Thus too his admiration for historians outside the classical genealogy of historiography which generally stretches from Barnave through Jaures to Lefebvre. Instead, he commends an unusual group, Tocqueville, Quinet, and Cochin, who although otherwise with little in common also addressed major problems of conceptualization. Above all, Furet delights at tossing Marx at the Marxists, showing that Marx