Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, by Peter McPhee

Abstract

The history of the French Revolution is often written from a Parisian perspective, with the capital acting and the rest of France either following in its wake with different degrees of grumbling, or resisting. Yet for Peter McPhee this is too one-sided an approach. ‘The Revolution’, he argues (p. xii), ‘is best understood as a process of negotiation and confrontation between government in Paris and people across the country’. Paris was, McPhee accepts, the epicentre, but since only one in forty French people lived in the capital in the 1780s, at the crux of his interpretation is an exploration as to ‘how rural and small-town men and women adopted, adapted to and resisted change from Paris’. These changes challenged and transformed long-held assumptions and practices in the wielding of power across the provinces. The impulse behind this transformation was the great revolutionary project to remake France anew on the principles of popular sovereignty, national unity and civic equality. The revolutionaries faced a series of daunting challenges in pursuit of these aims. France had been an absolute monarchy based on a complex web of privileges and provincial differences. There were powerful and numerous interests, both inside France and without, which were determined to defend those privileges and the hierarchies they underpinned, and which lamented the assault on old habits in the exercise of power and deference, as well as against traditional religious authority and practices. It is this dual, interconnected dynamic—between Paris and the provinces and between revolution and resistance to it—that drives McPhee’s narrative forward at an almost breathless pace.