The Role of Memory in the Historiography of the French Revolution

Abstract

French historians have been called upon to commemorate the French Revolution on the occasion of its bicentennial. But to commemorate the Revolution is not the same thing as to understand it historically. Since Herbert Butterfield offered his famous critique of Whig history some sixty years ago, historians have been particularly suspicious of historical writing that eulogizes the subjects it considers. Butterfield condemned the Whig historians for ascribing to the historical actors of an earlier age their present bias about the meaning and direction of modern English history. The past, he advised, is better appreciated with a disinterested curiosity, and countless historians have since echoed his caution about an anachronistic reading of the historical record. 1 But as the bicentennial of the French Revolution has revealed, anniversaries of memorable personalities or events continue to quicken the historian's interest, as even those who decry commemorative historical writing take advantage of the opportunity to state or restate their interpretations.' To offer an historical interpretation of a memorable event need not be a form of commemoration. Commemoration, after all, is grounded in tradition, toward which all historians will establish at least some critical distance.' But the notion that an historian's inquiry may be completely disinterested is equally problematic.4 The issue is how the relationship between collective memory and historical understanding is established, for often it is tradition that carries the events of the past into the purview of the historian in the first place. The project of commemoration, therefore, prompts us to rethink the relationship between remembering the past and understanding it historically.