The Attack on the French Revolution

Abstract

The approaching bicentennial of the French Revolution of 1789 seems to be intensifying the national divisions that are its legacy. Strangely enough, it is the counter-revolutionaires who are getting the most sympathetic treatment in the press and the popular media. Maurice Agulhon, Professor at the University of Paris-I, spoke on Current French Debates Concerning the Revolution of 1789, at the Fourteenth Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, in February, 1984, at Duke University. He saw two reasons for the current hostility to the Revolution, one deep-set as a fundamental part of the new French mentality and the other related to comtemporary politics. The first and most important is related to the change in French mentality symbol ized by the triumph of the Annales school of history. This school, taking its name from the journal, Annales (Economics, Soci?t?s, Civilisations), devotes itself to a study of the basics of life (food production, demography, mentality) over long periods of time. Like Fernand Braudel, the Annales historians (Agulhon considers himself to be one of them) tend to look for a gradual sea changes and to ignore ephemermal political cataclysms like the French Revolution, which one of them calls a magnificent irrelevance. The pages of the Annales are filled with statistical tables and graphs rather than political narrative. The triumph of the Annales school in France, according to Agulhon, has had two effects. First the role of the military has become less significant, because Annales historians seldom mention battles. Second, political thought has also lost its central place because less attention is paid to political leaders. A second issue related to contemporary politics is giving the French Revolu tion a bad press. Regionalism is the strongest political force in France today, and in a nation devoted to the ideals of personal freedom and regional autonomy the Revolutionary Jacobins represent dictatorship and centralization. Now that the Socialists are in power there is an additional fear that the nationalization of industry could lead to totalitarianism. Some newspapers have made heroes of the counter Revolutionary monarchist Chouans because they opposed a strong central gov ernment.