What's after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography

Abstract

In 1989, amid the bicentennial’s swirl of celebrations, new books, conferences, and special editions, many historians on both sides of the Atlantic discerned a pattern within the whirlwind. In historiographic terms, the bicentennial marked not just an intense outpouring of new publications, especially in France, 1 but also the triumph of the ‘‘revisionist’’ over the ‘‘classic’’ or ‘‘Marxist’’ social interpretation. Francois Furet, in particular, seemed to emerge the victor from the bicentennial, both in the media and in historiographic debates. Two sets of publications combined to crown Furet’s interpretation as ‘‘the new orthodoxy’’: Le Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution francaise, edited with Mona Ozouf, and the conference series The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, directed with Keith Baker and Colin Lucas. 2 Furet’s success could be read in a variety of ways. Especially within France, his interpretation held considerable political resonance, made even more loaded by the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He inevitably ignited controversy by proclaiming that the Revolution was over and insisting that the democratic impulse within the Revolution had in fact led toward the Terror. In the realm of methodology, his minimizing