Lynn Hunt: Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

Abstract

What do interpretations of the French Revolution as diverse as those of Marxist, Tocquevillian, or revisionist historians have in common? According to Lynn Hunt, all share a conscious disregard for, indeed, often a dismissal of, the intentions and the identity of those who made the Revolution. In all three accounts, the specific and unique nature of the Revolutionary project, its immediacy, its innovations, ultimately its lasting creations, are denied. Marxist and Tocquevillian interpretations are caught in a teleological preoccupation with origins and outcomes: the Revolution and its components are the unconscious handmaidens of either the consolidation of bourgeois capitalist hegemony or the modernization of the state. Revisionist historians see the Revolution as an aberration, a historical accident expressing the resentments and the frustrations of a militant minority who possessed no compelling logic behind their actions. Common to all three interpretations is a tendency to transcend the Revolutionary “event,” to consider it as a metaphor for “underlying economic and social interests.” All three share an inability to see the Revolution as an intensely lived, unique experience, whose importance and repercussions its contemporaries were fully conscious of and exploited. In particular, none of the aforementioned schools takes into account perhaps one of the most important and long-lasting inventions of the Revolution: the creation of a new political culture. Lynn Hunt demonstrates how the language, images, rituals, costumes, and daily political activities contributed to conjure up a new French national community that broke consciously with the past. Rather than focusing on how the Revolution divided men, Hunt chooses to examine how it united them into a new political class through the exercise of certain symbolic practices and rhetoric.