Beheading the Revolution: Arno Mayer's “Furies”*

Abstract

Few historical events have been more fully appropriated for presentist purposes than the French and Russian revolutions. Until very recently, the uncompleted narrative of human progress and achievement that organically linked a modernizing French nation to its foundational revolutionary movement had been deployed across a vast range of politics and historiographies, as we know. Whether the revolution’s origins and especially its excesses were properly located in social and cultural circumstances or in the political will of revolutionary activists sharply divided both historians and the ways their narratives appraised the revolution’s virtue, but not evaluations of its determinant importance in structuring positively all of subsequent French history. Until Francois Furet began to undermine the dominant narratives of Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul (not to mention Jules Michelet, Jean Jaures, or Albert Mathiez), the issue has been one of getting the story right in order to draw properly for the current moment its portentous moral and political meaning.1 Similarly, since 1917 the story of revolution gone bad in Russia has consistently situated both the crusade against communism in any form and the deep commitments of those struggling inside and outside the Soviet Union for some form of socialism with a human face. Here, too, despite the official appropriation of Russia’s devastating revolutionary experience to legitimize Soviet power and its changing purposes, the foundational qualities of the revolution itself have not been at issue. Instead, controversies have again centered until recently on the degree to which the revolution and its devastation were man-made or the consequences of deeper social and cultural currents, the connections between the upheavals of the revolutionary period itself and the subsequent horrors of Stalinism, and, again, what meaning this had for current beliefs. As with the histories of revolutions in France, their teleologies have been equally difficult to challenge because they incorporate passionate convictions about progress, reason, human betterment, social justice, and how these modernisms can and, especially, cannot be achieved. What has linked the French and Russian revolutions as historical events has been