France and the memory of revolution: 1789–1989

Abstract

Historical anniversaries offer useful insights into the way in which societies view their past and in recent years the oppo~unities for such insights have been plentiful, ranging from the extrovert American and Australian bicentennials to the more muted and embarrassed tricentenary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Britain and Ireland. In all three cases commemoration has involved evaluation, and evaluation has raised the problem of national identity and national values. The bicentenary of the French Revolution encountered these very same problems, but there is little new in this for historical interpretation of the Revolution has created division since the early years of the nineteenth century. There has been general agreement on its importance as a major turning point in French history, but disagreement over what that turning point led to. For some it marks the end of a defunct social and political order and the beginning of republican democracy; for others it saw the premature end of a reforming monarchy and the beginning of chronic political instability. The memory of revolution is a divided one. For much of the nineteenth century the effect of the Revolution was to polarise political culture in France into left and right, and this polarisation, with all its intricate subdivisions, resurfaced at moments of political crisis in 1830,1848 and 1870-l. The issues of monarchy against representative government, of Catholicism against secular liberalism, of order against social revolution-all of which had been central to the conflict that erupted in the decade after 1789-recurred for over a hundred years. As a result French political culture was intensely historical and the history of the Revolution intensely political.’ The establishment of the Third Republic in the 1870s led to the institutionalisation of the liberal republican view of the Revolution, which saw the roots of its own democracy and secular political culture in the events of 1789-1794. Politicians, such as Gambetta, Simon and Jules Ferry set out to accomplish the work begun in 1789, and the Revolution became a symbol around which to unify the various strands of the republican tradition. In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, ‘By deliberately annexing the revolutionary tradition, the Third Republic either domesticated social revolutionaries (like most socialists) or isolated them (like the anarcho-syndicalists). In turn, it was now able to mobilise even a majority of its potential adversaries on the left in defence of a republic and a past revolution, in a common front of classes which reduced the right to a permanent minority in the nation’.2 The importance of the Revolution was stressed in a variety of ways: not least through the revival of the ~a~~e~~Za~~e as the national anthem and the making of Bastille day into a national public holiday in 1880. Historical commemoration