Marxist Historians and the Question of Class in the French Revolution

Abstract

In a recent book about Marxist scholarship on the French Revolution, George Comninel notes that in perhaps no other area of historical research has Marxian theory been so dominant among Western scholars. 1 A long line of Marxist and Marx-indebted historians have presented the Revolution as a moment in which the confluence and conflagration of class forces produced a dramatic transformation in Western societies, encompassing sweeping changes in economics, politics, ideology, and culture. The conclusion is supported by an analytical framework known as the interpretation of the Revolution, constructed and elaborated through many decades of work by scholars such as Jean Jaures, Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and George Rude'2 Dominating French Revolution historiography certainly from the early 1900s to the 1960s, the framework brings to bear concepts related to Marxist theories of the conditions and consequences of class struggle, on the one hand, and more broadly conceived transitions between modes of production, on the other. Thus for many years, whatever else they learned, students of the French Revolution learned that Marxian (or Marx-related) notions of class and class struggle are essential keys to understanding how the modern world came to be what it is. From a formal standpoint, however, the analytical framework that characterizes much of the work of Lefebvre, Soboul, and others, can be maddening. A plethora of often conflicting and confusing concepts of class and class struggle inform this tradition. In our view these confusions, along with other characteristics of these authors' understanding of class, help to account for the more recent collapse of the social interpretation's standing among professional historians. They also help to account for the accompanying judgment that Marxism itself is to blame for the tradition's weaknesses, as well as for an interpretative iron curtain which too long protected those weaknesses from criticism and empirical refutation. Charged with a distorting predilection for sociological and economic analysis,