Commerce, capitalism and the political culture of the French Revolution

Abstract

A common revisionist view holds that ‘no serious historian would now argue that any significant group set out to introduce capitalism into France in 1789’, this verdict being intended to refute the idea of the French Revolution as a ‘bourgeois revolution’, carried out consciously by and in the interests of the commercial classes.’ It is also, however, frequently stated that no one ‘intended’ to promote a revolurion in 1789, especially since the modern sense of the word ‘revolution’ largely derives from the French Revolution itself. Given that the term ‘capitalism’ dates from the 182Os, the risks involved in applying it anachronistically to the French Revolution are indeed acute. However, while neither words nor intentions are all-important, questions relating to the historical agents’ mastery over discourse, or the related problems concerning their motivations and purposes, are undoubtedly central to current debates on the significance of the French Revolution. Those whom we now call ‘the revolutionaries’ grappled with the bewildering newness of the events with which they were associated and struggled to master them by processes of naming, explanation, interpretation, in order to confer meaning on them-or extract it from them. Any mastery attained, like the multitude of interpretations hazarded, was precarious and problematic. To try to explain and to direct what they were doing, the revolutionaries drew on conflicting currents of thought and complex attitudes. Enlightenment values permeated the Revolution, at least its early years, but this was an already fragmented Enlightenment, as vital and fruitful in its divisions and contradictions as in any superficial or apparent unity based on reason or natural law. Intensely self-conscious, much less sure of themselves than is often even now asserted, philosophes gave a large place in history to conflict and contradiction. What progress had occurred was hard fought for. Victory was never decisive. Often harmony meant inertia, so struggle was a sign of vitality. Only under despotism did peace-or silence-prevail. Moreover, progress was often the unintended consequence of ‘rivalit&’ -a ‘rivalitt’ certainly becoming less red in tooth and claw, no longer fought out just on the battlefield but, increasingly consciously, in scientific and artistic emulation (and cooperation) in the realms of discovery, invention, but also via economic competition. This competition was sometimes seen as a basis of rivalry in other spheres. Rivalry pitted nation against nation, but also social group against social group. Each group affirmed not only its interests but also its ideas and values.2 Economic rivalry, as a motor of progress, had brought impressive gains by