Farewell, Revolution: The Historians' Feud, France, 1789/1989 9781501727344

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Farewell, Revolution The Historians' Feud, France, 1789/1989

Farewell, Revolution THE HISTORIANS' FEUD FRANCE, 1789/1989

Steven Laurence Kaplan

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA

AND

LONDON

Copyright© 1995 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1995 by Cornell University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

@) The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaplan, Steven L. Farewell, Revolution: the historians' feud: France, 1789/1989 I Steven Laurence Kaplan. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-8014-8271-7 I. Bicentenaire de Ia Revolution fran~aise, 1989. 2. HistoriansFrance-Attitudes. 3. France-History-Revolution, 1789-1799Centennial celebrations, etc. 4. France-History-Revolution, 1789-1799-Influence. 5. Historiography-France-History-20th century. I. Title. DC160.K36 1995 94-44202 944.04-dc20

For Nan Karwan Cutting and James E. Cutting

Contents

Acknowledgments General Introduction

IX

I. The French Historikerstreit 2. Credo and Crusade: Pierre Chaunu's Revised Revisionism 3. Vive le Roi 4. Bicentennial Hotline: Dial 93-89-1917 5. From the Social to the Political via the Nineteenth Century 6. The End of Exceptionalism 7. Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial: Michel Vovelle as Insider and Outsider 8. From the Living Revolution to the Historiographical Journees

12 25 50 80 99 122 144 166

Revolutionnaires

Farewell Notes Index

193 197 227

vii

Aeknowledgments

I

am happy for the opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the many persons who proffered encouragement and assistance. My old friend Guy Sorman whispered "de l'audace" three times, talked issues out with me, and provided me with much help in making connections in all senses of the term. As Fellows at Cornell's Society for the Humanities, Colin Lucas and I shared a seminar and countless hours of exchange that enriched and clarified my thinking at the crucial early stages. We were occasionally joined in a mini-colloquium by Hans-Ulrich Thamer, who pressed me to think comparatively. I rebuffed the cautions of Maurice Aymard and Jacques Revel, but I profited from their insight on many questions that vexed me at the outset. The sage and exigent critic Claude Grignon sought more or less vainly to induce me to stretch beyond my limits. At Editions Fayard, Claude Durand warmly welcomed my project, and Agnes Fontaine gently urged me on. At Cornell University Press, John Ackerman, a wonderfully cosmopolitan intellectual as well as a fine manager, helped me to resolve problems of substance as well as form. Managing editor Kay Scheuer and Joan Howard, the copyeditor, improved the book in countless ways. As usual, Eric Vigne, another gifted bookman, offered his special blend of hearty support and mordant suggestion. Normalien, geographer, and impassioned intellectuel, Andre Charpentier died before he could complete the translation of this book into French, the language in which it first ix

X

Acknowledgments appeared. His many suggestions and refinements helped me to improve the American/English version substantially. In numerous subtle and therapeutic ways, my dear friends Eliane and Frank Simon impelled me to pursue my objectives. With grace, wit, and solicitude, Jean-Nod Jeanneney, president of the Mission du Bicentenaire, guided me, opened countless doors, furnished documentation, and answered endless questions. His collaborator Claire Andrieu showed me infinite kindnesses, shared precious information, and challenged me to rethink certain problems. Another Mission agent, Christian de Montrichard, enlightened me on many subjects. Fran~ois Baroin, son of the Mission's first president, generously evoked memories that surely pained him and opened up for me several new vistas on the bicentennial. Among the other members of the Mission who aided me were Thierry Collard, Andre de Margerie, Philippe Blondel, Ange!ique Oussedik, Jean-Pierre Cabouat, and Monique Sauvage. At a very early stage, Yann Gaillard, Edgar Faure's righthand man, obliged me with an interview. A number of historians permitted me to question them as actors on the commemorative stage. Fran~ois Furet, who had helped me launch my doctoral research twenty-two years earlier, once again opened his door. My research itinerary led me to renew an old friendship with Jean Tulard and, I hope, to forge a new one with Michel Vovelle. Another new friend, Claude Mazauric, went to extraordinary lengths to arrange for me to plug into the network of the Vive 89 organization and to have access to its archives and its creations. Without any formalities, he allowed me to interrogate him vigorously, and he engaged me in tonic debate. Though he barely remembered me, Maurice Agulhon accorded me several hours of his time. Madeleine Reberioux patiently fielded my questions. I hope Jean Favier will forgive me for thinking of him first of all as a historian. In addition to affording me his perspective on the commemoration, in his capacity as director of the Archives de France he kindly authorized me to consult the Mission's papers, which were then being catalogued by an extremely considerate curator, Agnes Etienne-Magnien. At Poitiers, Jean-Marie Augustin received me cordially and Jacques Peret twice put himself at my disposition and lavished me with personal testimony and local publications. Ingenious, efficient and irretrievably optimistic, France de Malva! helped organize my field work, marshal documentation, and keep me out of trouble. Guy Rossi-Landi, a master political journalist, contributed useful data. With

xi

Acknowledgments energy and devotion, Sylvie Le Moil took charge of my apprenticeship in the libraries of the Institut d'etudes politiques of the rue Saint-Guillaume. Around the corner, Daniel de Crozefon engaged me in a fecund dialogue on the forms (and pieges) of Parisian cultural expression. Two dear friends, Marie-Cecile and Philippe Desmarest, welcomed me back to Poitiers with touching warmth. A discreet and adroit diplomat, Philippe enabled me to enter into contact with dozens of persons who had played a local or regional role in the commemoration. With the same solicitude, Elisabeth and JeanMichel Voge offered me hospitality in Paris and advice on iconography. Five comrades in the profession, Roger Chartier, Maurice Garden, Michael Kammen, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Denis Woronoff, all distinguished historians, lent bibliographical guidance and procured key texts. Another member of this same category, Louis Bergeron, furnished me an office at the Centre de recherches historiques and chastened some of my extravagant thinking. At the Maison des sciences de l'homme, Clemens Heller and Maurice Aymard extended their support in both very concrete and impalpable ways, for the nth time. For invaluable documentation and commentary, a host of strangers treated me with unwonted friendship: Christian Lescureux of the Amis de Robespierre pour le Bicentenaire de Ia Revolution at Arras; Roger Bourderon of Comite 89 en 93 (Seine-Saint-Denis); Gaston Mertz ofVive Ia Carmagnole at Thionville; Senator-Mayor Paul Souffrin ofThionville; Claudy Valin of the Societe rochelaise de l'histoire moderne et contemporaine; Professors Guy Boisson and Raymond Huard, animators of the Vive 89 association of Montpellier; Jacques Blin of Mille Sete Cent Quatre-Vingt-Neuf; Marcel Alory ofVive 89 in Saint-Brieuc; Hubert Delport ofVive 89 at Nerac;JeanClaude Mairal, president of the Amis de Ia Revolution fran~aise pour Ia celebration du Bicentenaire at Moulins; Andre Leroy of Vive 89 en HauteAlsace; Jeanette Roquier of Vive 89 en Ille-et-Vilaine at Rennes; Jacques Demiot of the Federation des oeuvres lai:ques at Poi tiers; Christine Lazerges, deputy mayor of Montpellier; Colette Deble and Ana Rosa Richardson, gifted artists who took a special interest in Robespierre; and Professor Maurice Moissonnier of Lyon. In personal encounters many others donated time and precious testimony beyond the demands of simple courtesy: my friend Ladislas Poniatowski, deputy from the Eure (to whose father, Senator Michel Poniatowski, I am also indebted); Louis Mexandeau, former socialist minister and party leader and

xii

Acknowledgments

current deputy from the Calvados; Chantal Grimaud, Mexandeau's solicitous parliamentary assistant; Roger Leron, deputy from the Drome; Rector Robert Mallet of Paris; Robert Bordaz, lawyer, urbanist, and eminent grand commis; Christian Dupavillon of the Ministry of Culture; Franr;oise de Panafieu, deputy mayor of Paris; Thierry Aumonier, former top aide to Mayor Chirac; Msgr Claude Dagens, coadjutor bishop of Poitiers; Dr. Louis Fruchard, former president of the Conseil regional of the Poitou-Charente; Claude Moreau, vice president of that Conseil; Jean-Marc Roger, the head of the Archives departementales of the Vienne; Franr;ois Legriel, retired Poitevin business leader; Michel Morineau, one of the driving forces of the Ligue franr;aise de l'enseignement et de !'education permanente; his friend and counterpart at the Ligue des droits de l'homme, Bernard Wallon; Roger Le Coz, president of the Fedederation des oeuvres laiques of the Manche; and Claire and Philippe Luxereau, civic leaders and neighborhood activists in Viroflay. I am sorry that I did not meet historian Patrick Garcia until my project was near completion. Our stimulating exchanges quickened my appetite to read his forthcoming thesis, which deals with the "aestheticization of politics" at several commemorative moments of the Revolution. I am especially grateful to a group of scholars, most of them close friends, who took the trouble to read parts of the typescript and comment on it with great care and vigor. I profited enormously from their wisdom, their corrections, and their injunctions. I apologize to them for failing to defer to many admonitions and to attain certain levels of penetration and lucidity. Unable to embrace each of them before my readers, I list their names alphabetically: Haim Burstin (University of Siena), Roger Chartier (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Claude Grignon (Institut national de Ia recherche agronomique); Carla Hesse (University of California, Berkeley), Lynn Hunt (University of Pennsylvania), Christian Jouhaud (Centre national de Ia recherche scientifique), Darline G. S. Levy (New York University); Colin Lucas (University of Chicago); Philippe Minard (Institut d'histoire moderne); R. Laurence Moore (Cornell University); Gilles Postel-Vinay (INRA); Jacques Revel (EHESS); and John H. Weiss (Cornell). At Cornell I benefited from the devoted and industrious help of my student assistant, Matt Jacobs, adept at both the poetry and the prose of the task, the challenging research assignments and the pedestrian work of proofing, photocopying, and office-keeping. Jennifer Gaffney ably succeeded him. With skill and celerity, Clare Crowston and Janine Lanza crafted the index. A

xiii

Acknowledgments local photographer, Andrew Meyn, availed me of his expert services. Over the phone from Atlanta, my son, Laurence, who earned his summer livelihood for many years as a computer consultant, patiently helped me to overcome hardware and software difficulties. Over the phone from Princeton, my daughter, Renee, in deference to the family fetish for sarcasm, impatiently queried: "Tu travailles toujours sur ce maudit bicentenaire?" My wife, Jane, supplied the counsel of good sense on several delicate matters. My debt to Nan Karwan Cutting requires elaboration. When she was my undergraduate student at Cornell many years ago, she assisted me in preparing my first book for publication. Now an accomplished historian, she read every word of the present book more than once, discussed interpretations, pointed out errors and infelicities, and toiled selflessly to improve the final product. Her husband, James Cutting, intervened at crucial junctures to salvage text that I had lost in the computer and to provide wise advice on other matters. One could not hope for a team of more talented collaborators and faithful friends. With appreciation and affection, I dedicate this book to them. S. L. K.

Paris February 1993

Farewell, Revolution The Historians' Feud, France, 1789/1989

General lntroduetion

M

y title is inspired by Adieux d l'an nee 1789, a work composed by Louis-Sebastien Mercier, one of the most prolific and versatile writers of the second half of the eighteenth century. Adieux is a text of enthusiasm and engagement, of a sort of preemptive nostalgia for the Revolution in its best days, the Revolution of emancipation, dignity and heroism, the Revolution of grandiose symbols in deeds (the taking of the Bastille) and in words (the forging of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen). This is the Revolution with which the majority of the French bicentennial public felt comfortable, the Revolution of quasi consensus. Mercier enumerated the staggering achievements of this singular, beneficent, marvelous year, this period of profound change. It marked the end of "aristocratic despotism" and its multiple forms of enslavement, the ennobling of the people, the emergence of patriotism, the consecration of talent and enlightenment, and the inscription of liberty under the protection of the law beyond the capricious grasp of the prince. All things considered, the relative restraint of the first year of the Revolution impressed the author of Tableau de Paris. At the same time Mercier stressed that year's deeply radical strain, and its potential for exponential explosiveness, for it was in 1789 that "the people" realized that they were "a power, and even the only power." A "regenerating year" was necessarily a "tumultuous year." The suddenness and depth of the transformation awed him: practically overnight, "the misfortunes and the extravagances of several 1

2 General Introduction

centuries were rectified." Mercier oscillated between a yearning for closure (the people were already regenerated and "the government of dreadful memory" was irrevocably overthrown) and a sense that this was only the beginning, the dawn of liberty ("one must still fashion the dream of public happiness in order to build it into a truly durable edifice"). However it would turn out, Mercier felt the need to bear witness to the lofty goals and especially to the indomitable spirit of voluntarism-about whose etiology and consequences historians continue to argue acerbicallythat characterized the early Revolution, still blessed by a populist Providence: "but I'll write down at least what I saw, so that such events do not escape the memory of persons already born or those who will be born; so that they learn, in all times and in all places, that it is strictly up to their arms and to their heads to wipe out every sort of tyranny they encounter, that they need only to will it, and that God (who loves equally all his creatures kneaded of the same substance) manifestly protects all generous uprisings." Neither in its tone nor in its analysis did Mercier's Adieux suggest that he would never again see the stuff of '89. For once, this intransigent Parisian spoke the language of the south of France where adieu often meant both bonjour and au revoir. (The "farewell" of my title carries a similar ambiguity.) It is tempting, in retrospect, to discern notes of contrapuntal irony in Mercier's euphoric overture. The author himself lived on to experience the buffeting trajectory of the period after '89. The unity of purpose he felt so intensely during the "incomparable year" did not last long. Despite some reservations, the revolutionary militant and journalist welcomed the advent of a republic in 1792 and was elected to its legislature, which also had the mission of drafting a constitution. He found the moderate stance taken by the Girondins on certain key issues-moderate by the standard of the unfolding Revolution, still extreme by the litmus of '89-more congenial than the burgeoning radicalism of the Jacobins rallied by Robespierre. Anticipating the mood of his bicentennial descendants, Mercier voted against the execution of the king, whose guilt, he believed, could more usefully be punished by life detention. Not long after, he was jailed for protesting the purge of the Girondins from the Convention. After Thermidor he returned to the assembly and subsequently served in the legislative body called the Council of 500 during the Directory. Napoleon named him to the Institut, the empire's highest cultural honor. Mercier admired Napoleon's genius, but refused to forgive him for his overweening despotism.

3 General Introduction

The spirit of '89 remained alive for him throughout the epoch, and he remained faithful to its verve and promise. I admire Mercier's enthusiasm for 89, his effort to reconcile a regenerating idealism with a pragmatic liberalism, his capacity to survive. I don't know that I would have followed his precise Revolutionary itinerary. A moralist and a sociologist-voyeur, with a mercilessly penetrating and caustic eye for the human condition at its most exalted and its most abject, Mercier had already served me as a precious guide and companion during my long sojourns in Old Regime Paris. Surely I would have enjoyed his fellowship during the Revolution, and even afterward, when his critical regard became somewhat curmudgeonly and idiosyncratic. As I wrote this book about my '89, I tried to emulate Mercier's self-proclaimed vocation: "I want to stifle the race of stiflers." Mercier's Adieux was meant to immobilize time. It constituted a pledge never to forget the momentous lessons of 1789. The text saluted not the end of the Revolution but the beginning of its sempiternal reign. It is now our turn to bid farewell (in the double sense of the word) to 1989. The agenda is not wholly different, though the stakes are no longer the same and the landscape has decisively changed. (I'd like to squire Mercier from the Pyramide du Louvre to the Arche de la Defense; or from the Centre Pompidou to the Tour Montparnasse; or from the Goutte d'Or to Chinatown in the thirteenth arrondissement.) Mercier used seventeen encomiums to characterize 1789 ("the most illustrious [year] of this century," "peerless in our History") and assorted adjectives, mostly superlatives, ("marvelous," "august," "very glorious"). Nineteen eighty-nine has no purchase on the dithyrambic register. Yet if the bicentennial year was not quite "rare and surprising," surely it was "memorable." It was memorable for the ways in which the French coped with their memory. It was memorable for the bitterness and the passion the commemoration provoked, and for the inertia and indifference that it failed to overcome. It was memorable for the festive energy and imagination it elicited. It was memorable for what it revealed about the French sense of self: certitudes, anxieties, ambitions, conflicts, ambiguities. Farewell, Revolution is an effort to examine 1989 from many of the perspectives that made it memorable. It aspires to be a rigorous historical and ethnographic inquiry. But if it is decidedly not a livre de circonstance, it was born of very particular circumstances, the sort of astronomical convergence that often does not occur even once in a lifetime. The bicentennial effected a

4 Generalln1roduction

rare juncture between my "then" and my "now," both of which have been (trans)planted in French soil. France captivated me thirty years ago for reasons that I am still sorting out. France is always on my mind. I have the hubristic and unsettling sense that, somehow, everything that happens to France happens to me. I live two Frances, one as a professional and the other as an amateur, one in the past and the other in the present-as a sort of industrious jliineur des deux rives. The first France, in which I am legitimately at home, practically a regnicole, is the Old Regime, particularly the eighteenth century. The second is the France of today, of my own time, in which I am alternately a direct and a vicarious participant-observer, depending upon the calendar. I must confess that I am no less interested in Poil:ine's loaf than in the bread of Gonesse, in Laurent Fignon's Tour de France than in Agricol Perdiguier's (or JacquesLouis Menetra's), in the petitsjuges like Pascal and Jean-Pierre than in judicial dynasties of the Seguier and the Joly de Fleury, in Bernard Pivot than in Madame du Deffand, in the hip-hopping subway taggers than in the cemetery convulsionnaires, in the new banlieues than in the old faubourgs. Though I self-consciously try to correct for distortion on both ends, there is no doubt that my eighteenth century is refracted-and, if I am careful, perhaps also nourished-by my reading of the twentieth and vice versa. I have long mused about ways to confront the two epochs and the two identities without forcing the issue. When the bicentennial beckoned with just the requisite intersection of vectors, I ceded to the enticement. The past, the present, and the future were inextricably commingled in the bicentennial experience. The eighteenth century received more public attention (however lacking in depth) than perhaps at any time since the Revolution itscl( France strained to make sense of the Revolution and its legacy. The focus shifted imperceptibly from the event itself to its heritage, from the history to the historiography, from the "then" to the "now." On the one hand, history constrained what followed in myriad ways. On the other, what followed constrained the way in which France surveyed its history. The weight of the present, with its claims and its agenda, counterpoised and contested the weight of the past, with its permanent demands for ransom. The French tried to figure out what they owed to the Revolution, and that for which they wanted to hold it accountable. They found it hard to agree on what the Revolution was and why it came about, matters that briefly at least seemed to have more than merely academic significance.

5 General Introduction

I ventured gingerly into the bicentennial arena with the hope that my combined training as a historian and long immersion in contemporary French life would enable me to see things that evaded other gazes. Since my own intellectual life had long been a dialogue between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, I felt a surge of empathy with the burden that confronted the French as well as a familiarity with the poles of exchange. I wagered that my own experience might equip me to disentangle some of the interlocking threads, to unpack some of the densely bundled baggage, and to work out some of the lived, remembered, and repressed tensions and contradictions. If in some ways I enjoyed privileged entree, in others I remained an outsider. I was after all not a Frenchman; worse, I had the arrogance frequently to forget this handicap. Nor was I a breveted specialist of the Revolution, heavily invested in the debate that had been accelerating for two decades, though I taught the subject year after year and knew quite well a large portion of the literature. This double distance, I hoped, would enhance my ability to apprehend and to decode. While I constantly took stock of my subject situation as I collected data, reflected, and wrote, I consciously avoided interjecting myself overtly into the discussion. I do not pretend to have unmasked the bicentennial sub specie aeternitatis. I have tried to present it from many different angles, even if I have not always been able to sustain a precise symmetry of skepticism. I have sought not to truncate or bowdlerize in unwitting or complicitous mimesis of certain of the characters in the script. I wanted to engage, involve, and arm readers and thus not to foreclose antagonistic readings or myriad forms of subversion. In some instances I have juxtaposed and confronted rival claims, effecting my critique by using the words of the adversaries to problematize their positions and expose what I perceive as their respective weaknesses. In other cases I have subjected a given discourse to more or less unmediated analysis. Such an approach issues not in an implausible judicious neutrality but in a certain number of distinctions and evaluations. While I have not written directly in my voice, few readers will have difficulty in discerning my point of view. My aim is never simply to trancher in the service of a hygienic intellectual robustness; at many junctures, I'm not certain or I don't know. Nor do I propose full-blown alternatives to positions I criticize, sometimes because such scenarios would not be appropriate in the project as I conceived it, and more often because I do not have ready-made solutions.

6 General Introduction

Finally, I must not overlook a central objective of my enterprise: to tell a story, or a set of stories. These stories are not in some pristine sense devoid of my mark. But I have toiled to reconstruct, corroborate and relate them faithfully. Apart from the arguments I make, this study means to inform. It brings together a great deal of rich and disparate material about the many dimensions of bicentennial action. It is the beginning of a gigantic task that will go on for years to come. Much of this work will occur within the framework of the Institut d'histoire du temps present, which has made the bicentennial one of its major research themes. Scores of graduate students will produce monographs on specific aspects of the commemoration. Social scientists and critics of all stripes will venture more complex exegeses. Quite rightly, the IHTP aspires not only to write collectively the comprehensive history of the commemoration and its contextual linkages but to use the "long" and deep bicentennial moment as a window for exploring the problems that preoccupy and the attributes that characterize fin-de-siecle France. It is perhaps inadequate to declare, in nebulous and self-protective terms, that this work does not pretend to be exhaustive. Let me specify a few of the more important things I foreswore. Non-French readers in particular should note that this book is about the bicentennial experience in France. The commemoration outside France was so substantial and enthusiastic, in scale and intensity, that it fed back into the Franco-French commemoration, powerfully reminding inhabitants of all persuasions of the continuing worldhistorical impact of their Revolution. In this sense the international story is arguably a part of the French one. I can merely plead that the domestic French undertaking was sufficiently daunting that I could not address the truly interesting and imaginative celebrations/ commemorations that ranged from Kaplan, Louisiana (where 14 July has always been held sacred) to cities in Yemen, Uruguay, Senegal, Japan, and Russia. This work is about the bicentennial in France, but it is obviously not about everything, every place, and everyone. From the bottom up, there are countless other strains to be incorprated into the saga. Further archival and oralhistory research will doubtless also modify the picture from the center. Historians may rightly be vexed that I paid virtually no attention to the lush yield of scholarly production associated with the bicentennial (well over a thousand books of various sorts and many more articles and essays). Once again, I beg indulgence on grounds of my conception and means. I dealt with the historiographical debate that impinged directly on the public conscious-

7 General Introduction

ness and the commemorative theatre. Surely it would be worth devoting an entire book to a thorough assessment of the areas of significant contribution as well as the zones of disappointment and barrenness. I must call the reader's attention to one convention that I have employed throughout. When Revolution, or any derivative of the word, appears with a capital R, it expressly denotes the French Revolution that began in 1789. Rendered with a small r, revolution refers to generic insurrectionary experiences or ambitions or struggles. When I want to convey the double character of historical specificity and universality, I use the device of the slash: R/revolutionary. Thus a discussion of the R/revolutionary preoccupation with plots points both to a predisposition characteristic of the French Revolution and a propensity that seems common to most revolutionary movements. The reader should also know about certain peculiarities in the nature of my sources. The bulk of them are quite conventional: a great range of published discourse of all manner. A substantial portion of this material is more or less ephemeral literature generated by ad hoc groups specifically for the bicentennial. Some of it was slickly produced; much of it bore the telltale artisanal marks of mimeographing or photocopying. The mode of diffusion varied as much as the format and method of production: some of it was widely available through public sale or subscription while a considerable part was distributed at specific public gatherings (meetings, lectures, festivals, and so on). I have amassed a sizable collection on my own. It is my hope that a very large portion of these publications have found their way to the national, departmental, or municipal archives, either as a result of local strategies of promotion or solicitation of patronage or as a consequence of aggressive entrepreneurship on the part of archivists. I have used only a small fraction of the multifarious documents that constitute the bicentennial archives, in part because of their sprawling enormity and in part because the series was just being classified when I conducted my research. Thanks to the foresight and rigor of Jean-Noel Jeanneney and the skillful collaboration of the staff of the Archives Nationales, a vast quantity of the papers of the Mission du Bicentenaire is now available for public consultation. I was kindly permitted to work in them before they were fully catalogued. Thus in some cases I could not cite specific carton references; in others my citations may refer to provisional carton assignments. In yet other cases I used Mission material directly at the Mission offices, documentation that has presumably been integrated into the archival run. Similarly, in

8 General Introduction

several departmental archives, I used records that had not yet been labeled and classified. I draw frequently on an extensive correspondence that I conducted with various actors on the bicentennial stage, letters that remain for the moment in my possession. Finally, I conducted scores of interviews. The subjects varied enormously in disposition, depending on a host of factors, including the initial impression I made and the patronage that I could invoke, and their calculation of the extent to which I could serve or damage their causes and their interests. In virtually every case, my interlocutors stipulated which part of the conversation was "off the record," for discreet or oblique use as background information, and which sections could be cited and attributed. In almost two dozen instances, the parties I interviewed expressly requested that I not cite them by name or title, in order to spare them embarrassment or even professional sanction. I have scrupulously respected their wishes. I have utilized their "anonymous" testimonies only where I could independently corroborate the assertions they contained or where they were meant to exemplify a more or less notorious point of view. A number of witnesses in delicate positions courageously insisted on assuming public responsibility for their declarations, regardless of the possible consequences. The French edition of this work appeared in 1993 (Paris: Editions Fayard) in a single volume entitled Adieu 89. Like that version, from which it differs somewhat in content and form, the English-language edition is divided into four quasi-autonomous "books" or sections, each built around a central organizing theme. Whereas in French the four sections composed a single volume, here they are presented in two volumes, subtitled respectively Disputed Legacies, France, 178911989, and The Historians' Feud, France, 1789 I 1989. The former contains the first three books dealing with the debate over the commemoration, the organization of the bicentennial itself, and commemorative practices in various parts of the nation. The latter is devoted to the battle among the leading historians. It must be emphasized that this presentation bespeaks merely a cleavage of convenience. While The Historians' Feud can easily be read on its own, it emerges directly from the global strategy and analysis of the whole project. It should not be construed as a free-standing exercise in historiographical criticism. Yet that volume obviously effects a shift in mood as well as in subject. Though it tells a story about the bicentennial, the major intellectual issues at stake both precede and

9 General Introduction

transcend the anniversary of the Revolution. They are issues that will always matter deeply to historians and citizens of all times and places. The Historians' Feud concerns what I view as the most important aspects of the public debate among French historians about the Revolution and its commemoration. It also deals with the concrete roles played by the major actors on the bicentennial stage. The hexagonal Historikerstreit(-manque) has a triangular configuration, with the three corners represented by Pierre Chaunu, Fran~ois Furet, and Michel Vovelle. I did not construe this section as a comprehensive study of all their writings that pertain in some fashion to the Revolution. My purview is delimited largely by the contours of the debate as it unfolded in the bicentennial context, with occasional references to works outside this framework. Certain colleagues accuse me of replicating the "error" of the media by paying an excessive amount of attention to Furet. For reasons that I elaborate in depth, I believe that Furet set the terms of the debate virtually singlehandedly. Given his conquering elan, his position cries out most urgently for analysis. I consider these choices and certain configuring elements of my interpretation in the first chapter, entitled "The French Historikerstreit." Chapter 2 is devoted to Chaunu, a legendary figure in historical circles, who has increasingly placed his scholarly energy directly in the service of his political and spiritual beliefs. Though not a specialist in the history of the Revolution, he deployed his immense knowledge and his mighty institutional and media leverage to become the chief spokesman for the antiR/revolutionary cause. His febrile and hyperbolic discourse habitually belied his self-representation as a man of reason and moderation. This chapter surveys his efforts to decenter and denigrate the Revolution, to portray it as the primordial source of French decadence, and to stigmatize it for its genocidal vocation. I show how Chaunu appropriated Furet, the unwitting midwife to the counterrevolutionary renaissance. I also discuss how Chaunu projected a demonized fantasy of the commemoration, a misrepresentation wrought to justify his relentless assault upon it. The next four chapters deal with Furet. In "Vive le Roi," I rapidly trace his trajectory, with particular attention to his youthful (but not impetuous) entry into the Communist party and his protracted flirtation with social history. A quietly charismatic chefde !Jande, even before he ascended to the presidency of the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, he began to attract the following that later became known as the "galaxy," whose recruitment I

10 General Introduction

consider. The bulk of the chapter treats Furet's public coronation as "king of the bicentennial," an anointment intimately linked to the publication of the Dictionnaire critique (coedited by Mona Ozouf) and La Revolution, 17701880, both of which are probed. I comment at length on one of the rare scholarly efforts to come to grips with Furet's impact on the historiographical debate, and I regret the langue de bois of the official galactic rejoinder, redolent of the sectarianism against which Furet first launched his brand of reVISIOOISm. The subsequent "Furet" chapters address some of the main themes in his (evolving) reading of the French Revolution. They take stock of his conception of doing history in the broadest sense as well as his interpretation of specific moments in history. They show the deep imbrication of the historian, the political commentator, and the ideologue, and the intermingling of shortterm strategical concerns with longer-term conceptual ones. In "Bicentennial Hotline" I analyze Furet's view of the Terror, the connections between 1793 and 1789, and the ways in which his riveting preoccupation with 1917 (and not merely the Other's obsession with it) frames his entire understanding of R/revolutionary causality and denouement, the relationship between ideas and action, and the nature of politics. The following chapter delves into Furet's war against Marxism, and against social history, which imperceptibly acquires the dread status as its cursed offspring. I follow Furet on his political turn, which takes him back to the nineteenth century, philosophical El Dorado and fountain of youth. I contrast his appraisal of the grand oeuvres of those halcyon years with the university production of the twentieth century, an exercise that reveals him to be, in his own way, no less a "declinist" than Chaunu. "The End ofExceptionalism" canvasses Furet's preoccupation with crafting a safe practice of democratic politics. The end-of-the-Revolution is the prerequisite to a genuine institutional, moral and historiographical stabilization. While Furet presents his reasoning as a scientific demarche, others contend that ideology drives his interpretation. I thresh out some of the elements of Furet's liberal vulgate, according an important place to his prolonged American adventure. Chapters 7 and 8 concentrate on Michel Vovelle. Consummate insider, Furet opted to play the commemoration from the outside. Proverbial outsider, Vovelle elected-and in some sense was constrained by his institutional, political, and intellectual situation-to play it from the inside. In the

11 General Introduction

first of these two chapters, I trace the creation of the "scientific" arm of the commemoration, entrusted by the Ministry of Research to Vovelle, who spared no effort to affirm his sense of fairness and his commitment to pluralism. I look at Vovelle's training and early career, his Communist engagement, and his ascension to the Sorbonne, in some ways a return to his roots. Two towering figures in the historical milieu, Ernest Labrousse and Albert Soboul, both of whom died during the period ofbicentennial preparation, loom large in Vovelle's development. I show how Vovelle strained to move beyond the Soboulean Maginot line and to propose grounds for a historiographical new deal while remaining faithful to his evangelical responsibilities in the party and to the social ethic/ ethos of his mentor Labrousse. Chapter 8 explores the different dimensions of Vovelle's relation to the Revolution: affective, scholarly, aesthetic, didactic, political, eschatological. Vovelle took the message of the living R/revolution, the Revolution-thatcould-not-be-over, throughout the hexagon and around the world. He took the counterrevolutionary challenge very seriously and tried to rally a broadbased Jacobino-republican coalition to check its advance. The chief vehicle of Vovelle's bicentennial investment was the world congress, inspired by a Labroussean theme dealing with the myriad images of the Revolution, to be held in Paris the week preceding Bastille Day. I recount the grave difficulties he encountered, and the ways he resolved them. The chapter ends with a look at the ceremonial opening and closing of the congress, its work, and the reception it elicited, including the brutal clash with Furet and its resonance.

The Freneh Historikerstreit

T

he bicentennial provided the occasion for a French rendition of the Historikerstreit, the quarrel that rocked the German historical profession and, beyond it, reached deeply into the public sphere in the 1970s and '80s. The French version both differed from and mimicked the Historikerstreit. The Germans argued over the experience of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust, addressing issues much more recent and more incandescent than those concerning the French Revolution. A substantial part of the extant German population had personal memories (and lapses of memory) of the Hitler period, and the legacy of the war played itself out virtually every day in the lives of individual Germans and in the life of the nation. Though the French Revolution continued to matter in significant ways, it did not intrude into French consciousness with the same visceral intensity and persistence. It did not urgently beckon the citizens of France to a Vergangenheitsbewatigung, or "coming to terms with the past." It did not raise the specter of collective or national guilt, save on the margins of opinion; and it did not consecrate the definition of "Frenchness" in the way that the Nazi period seemed to entail the meaning of "Germanness." 1 In other ways, doped by the commemorative climate, the debate over the French Revolution shared certain traits with the Historikerstreit. It swept rapidly beyond the academic forum into the arena of public opinion. Indeed, both debates were probably more significant in terms of their general fallout than as a function of their direct impact on scholarship. They both attracted 12

13 The French Historikerstreit

immense media coverage, though the German press devoted more space to intellectually substantive and sometimes quite elaborate exchanges. They elicited widespread interest in memory and its workings, though it was keener and more urgent on the German side. While the debate revolved around the corporation of historians, it lured a wide range of other intellectuals who felt implicated by the issues in their professional, civic, and existential capacities. In both places it raised boundary questions about who had license to speak authoritatively, and disciplinary and epistemological questions about what constituted historical inquiry. In broad terms, the French and German debates concerned the related but distinct questions of how to do history (from a more or less professional perspective) and of how to deal with history (from a national and social perspective). The French were more generally (and serenely) prepared to relativize the past in terms of the present than were the Germans, though neither group was willing to concede that such a relativization compromised its claims to objectivity. Historians and commentators in both debates used historical arguments to achieve political purposes. On both sides, there was a quasi-demagogic temptation to simplify and sloganize in the public arena, to use rhetorical devices that would not have been admissible according to academic canons. Questions of supposed equivalence and singularity permeated both quarrels. The left in Germany and in France stressed the factors of uniqueness. The German left insisted on the collective incapacity to overcome the Nazi experience and the Shoah, given their uniqueness, while the Jacobins in France tended to underscore the unique (exceptionalist) nature of the French Revolution and the developmental path that it staked out (as did, with important qualifications, certain parts of the right). The German right tried to relativize the putative uniqueness of their national experience in order to dispose of the ugly memories (to reduce the "radioactivity" of the "nasty object"), while the centrist revisionists in France were inclined to relativize the Revolution according to a Tocquevillean long-run recipe. Like the German conservatives in their domain, certain historians in France encouraged the idea of making a choice, selecting among the remnants of the past. Though they considered that this procedure was legitimate uniquely in the commemorative act rather than in the scholarly task, they found that it was hard to keep the two separate. In both countries, the effort to minimize discussion of (say) racial policy on the one side or of the Terror

14 Farewell, Revolution

on the other (taken here as points of reference rather than of substantive analogy) resulted paradoxically in a reinvigoration of concentration on these topics. Social history played a decisive role in both debates. The waning of social history was much more closely associated in Germany with the end of the intellectual hegemony of the left than in France, where social history had never been confined to a red base. There were French echoes to the German conservative argument that social history was intellectually unsatisfactory because it lacked a global framework that was nonreductionist, because it tended toward chaotic empirical/ positivist fragmentation, and because it failed to acknowledge the centrality of political decision making, as well as to the argument that social history was in some way dangerous either because it gave primacy (and thus succor?) to the class struggle or because it implicitly or expressly espoused social engineering. 2 Like certain French historians, German conservatives tried to play off a "new" intellectual/ cultural history against an allegedly sterile and tendentious social history, and to promote political philosophy as a key to (meta)historical understanding (with incidental but significant political dividends). With a renewed philosophical-historical cachet, the concept of totalitarianism reemerged in both debates, a vehicle of exculpation in the one theatre and of inculpation in the other. Even as certain German social historians obliquely betrayed a sense of malaise as they shifted their fulcrum decisively from Marx to Weber and American social science, so certain French historians made corresponding adjustments in the hope of refurbishing their position.

Belligerents and Fields of Battle The Historians' Feud concerns certain aspects of the debate in France elicited by the bicentennial. It broke out shortly after the international prestige of the French historical "school" (as it was benignly perceived from afar) had peaked. Driven by the Annalistes, French historiography had enjoyed its trente glorieuses, intellectual counterpart to the protracted post-World War II economic boom. Largely but not exclusively social in character, this historical writing had found immense favor among the reading public at home as well as in the universities around the world. Paradoxically, even as historians saturated the culture shows on television and broke records in the bookstores,

15 The French Historikerstreit

history lost ground as a subject studied in school, quantitatively in terms of the hours required, and qualitatively in terms of the understanding and information dispensed and acquired. Certain critics attributed responsibility for the latter pedagogical lapse to the "new history," that (largely) social approach which disdained politics and eschewed chronology in favor of thick description of structures and cycles. This new history was Marxist only on the fringes; and the Jacobina-Marxists who claimed stewardship over the history of the French Revolution were among its most prominent and resentful victims. On the eve of the bicentennial decade, the history of the Revolution occupied an extremely modest place on the French historiographical landscape. Marginalized by the Annates school, the historians around Albert Soboul, heir to the Revolutionary mantle of Albert Mathiez and Georges Lefebvre and commander of the Sorbonne citadel, found themselves besieged a second time far more directly by the revisionist armies-not the expeditionary troops from abroad who had launched the campaign outreManche and outre-Atlantique, but indigenous forces. Nor were they a poorly equipped and hastily trained guerrilla band. On the contrary, they enjoyed powerful sponsorship and brought to bear a host of weapons, conventional and extra-academic, pre- and postmodern, capable of operating in all theatres of battle. In a double sense, intellectually and institutionally, Fran~Yois Furet, leader of the assailants, came from the Annates fold, though he had emphatically taken his distance from it at both levels. Under Soboul's extremely conservative tutelage, the so-called classical school of Revolutionary historiography had stagnated. Unable to find a compelling response to the Annates' decentering of its once pivotal position, it wilted further with the decline in vitality of both Marxist reflection and Marxist politics, the PCF being the common chapel of many of its faithful. The revisionists struck with a perfect sense of timing: their prey was already bleeding from serious wounds, some of them self-inflicted. As the bicentennial opened, the Jacobina-Marxists acquired a new chief, Michel Vovelle, who faced the daunting task of rebuilding while under a stream of incessant fire dramatically intensified by the commemorative mobilization. In addition to facing the revisionists, with whom he had a good deal in common, the new holder of the chair in the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbo nne had to confront a resurgent counterrevolutionary tide within an unfavorable international conjuncture. The following chapters treat the French Historikerstreit in an uneven tri-

16 Farewell, Revolution

angular constellation. The discussion is selective rather than exhaustive. In allocation of space, it is heavily weighted in favor of Fran~;ois Furet. The reason is straightforward: he set the terms of the debate, and dominated the public discussion. Adroitly, he forced his adversaries to address his agenda, as much as a result of his (omni)presence in the media and his resonance with the unfolding political climate at home and abroad as because of the intellectual force of his historical arguments. As one observant historian of the Revolution put it, Pierre Chaunu and Michel Vovelle seem to be standing at the site of an accident in which le bolide Furet can be seen hurtling from some distance. The story focuses on three men, but it is made clear that each operates within som~ sort of network, lobby, or group. Outsiders may be surprised by the insularity of this sociology of the production and transmission of knowledge, by the practices of cultural patronage and brokerage, by the systems of clientage, promotion, and punishment, by the clotted salience of ideology, and by the depths and range of institutional cleavages. Genuine debate, outside the reassuring reciprocities of the "law of Roux-Combaluzier" ("je t'envoie l'ascenseur et tu me le renvoies," or I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine), beyond the practice of settling individual and tribal, cumulative and collateral scores, without regard to matters (apparently) extraneous to the intellectual issues under discussion, did not readily flourish in the French context-perhaps in part because the French were incapable of the naivete required to phrase problems in such an unrealistically pristine fashion. In any event, the French intellectual landscape tended to oscillate between a certain artificial sweetness, indulgence, and/ or indifference on the one hand and a polemical volatility and taste for the jugular on the other. 3 In addition to the three protagonists, numerous others intervened, not all of whom were historians, and not all of whom commanded the same conventionally sanctioned intellectual authority. (One thinks of the outrage that greeted Habermas's strictures in the German Historikerstreit on the grounds that he was not a trained historian. To be sure, in the French debate, the nonhistorians were not all Habermases. Nor were all the historians Marc Blochs.) In fact, one of the salutary aspects of the bicentennial debate was that in light of its central civic dimension, it legitimated encounters that the ordinary sociological lines of force would have inhibited. Unfamiliar voices stepped into the breach to compensate for the surprising silence of many historians and other intellectual and public figures; or in response to their

17 The French Hiswrikerstreit

own deep feelings about the issues. There was occasionally a real disproportion between the level and field of activity of interlocutors, but not always in the sense that titles and chairs would lead one to expect. The debate took place in both scholarly and public spaces, and it seems fitting to accord a place to those who managed to negotiate this divide and address pertinent questions intelligently, regardless of their credentials. The historiographical debate over the French Revolution began before the event itself had completely run its course. It has continued, with varying range and intensity, ever since. The discussion here does not attempt to take the cumulative measure of this two-hundred-year-old debate. In the ethnographic spirit that shapes the whole book, it focuses on the debate specifically in the context of the bicentennial, with occasional reference to earlier work or disputation that bears directly on the experience of the commemorative season. Finally, it ought to be emphasized that the following chapters do not pretend to assess the formidable learning that the commemorative mood generated. Largely outside the debate, the results of a vast amount of research and reflection were published-literally thousands of articles and books. Much new ground was broken in the study of religion, of women, and of the arts during the Revolution. 4 There were even important advances in economic history at a time when, within the confines of the debate, there was a widely shared sentiment that economic history was ossified. Historians who want to take a full and cogent measure of the bicentennial moment in historiography will have to scrutinize not only the works produced in France but

those written to coincide with the commemoration by hundreds of scholars from all over the world.

"Doing" History Beyond the host of specific issues bearing on the different moments and dimensions of the French Revolution, the debate addressed some questions of broader pertinence. For the sake of exposition, we can divide them into two categories: first, those dealing with the itinerary of the historian and with problems of conducting historical research and then those concerning the ways in which the study of the Revolution tends to move beyond the Revolution itself into the contemporary political and moral spheres. The bicenten-

18 Farewell, Revolution

nial debate casts into relief a number of striking features of the experience of being an historian (and a fortiori being an intellectual) in France in the second half of the twentieth century. It is hard to overestimate the significance of the Communist engagementmore or less fleeting, or more or less permanent-of many of the participants in the bicentennial debate. Exit from the party seems to have been at least as important as entry and/ or persistence. Moreover, the actors seem little inclined to subject their common individual histories to close scrutiny. The Communist itinerary intrudes on multiple levels-in terms of tactics, organizing style, and networking as well as in intellectual practice. If 1917 looms so large in the debate, it is directly the result of Communist involvement, not merely the fruit of observation. The Communist experience recasts the genealogy of the Revolution as well as its legacy. It threatens constantly to shift the debate from the Revolution to other issues for which the Revolution has become a trope or pretext; and it threatens to evacuate the Revolution of its own content (and to deprive the Revolutionaries of their own purposes) in favor of surrogate substance and vocation. Communist immersion and/ or repudiation poses starkly the familiar problem of the relation between the exigencies of scholarship and those of ideological and political militancy. It also raises questions of a psychological and intellectual order about processes such as transference. Nor do historians (among other intellectuals), regardless of political persuasion, seem willing to undertake a rigorous self-analysis in order to make better sense of their own point of view, and in order to permit others to understand their manner of reasoning. Such an autoanalysis is painful and difficult, and thus tempting to evade. Most historians tend to have a more or less fixed sense of self-representation, and a propensity to become defensive when questioned. The protagonists in the bicentennial debate shunned the critical gaze, from inside or outside, even more vigorously as they shifted imperceptibly from observers to actors in the commemorative undertaking. Thus, for example, each of our leading historians clung tenaciously to a particular (and comforting) aspect o"f his self-image: Chaunu as inveterately moderate; Furet as dispassionately objective; Vovelle as immutably faithful while resolutely open to the new. Each of them also saw himself as a victim of persecution: Chaunu as an intellectual pariah because he refused to pander to the Communists; Furet as the target of Communist vengeance for his apos-

19

The French Historikerstreit tasy; Vovelle as the scapegoat of tropistic anti-Communism. All three also protrayed themselves in one manner or another as "resisters," eddying against the tide in the direction of Truth. Certainly the debate invites very basic questions about the ways of practicing the historian's craft. Furet's work in particular, given the triumphalist tide that it rode, demands examination. How does he get at the past? Is he really interested in the past? In what past: the historic part of the Revolution or its far-flung diaspora, the historiographical past? Long neglected, historiography merits the careful attention of historians: it is a potential treasury of insights (as well as errors). But it is not the same as history, and there is a real peril in the Furetian demarche of a sort of conflation of the two to their mutual detriment. What happens when one does history in the manner of Furet? This historian profited from the derives, the impasses, and the maladroitness of the Sobouleans to press a very different epistemological, methodological, and ideological agenda. It was an easy rhetorical step from debunking Soboulism to stigmatizing and demonizing social history. But it is one thing to denounce the sterility of an (almost willfully) sclerotic social history and quite another to frame it as generically (and/ or genetically) flawed. This step is a regression, less because it celebrates a self-sufficient and self-satisfied history of ideas than because it groundlessly and irresponsibly maligns a whole range of investigative and analytical practices that enabled historical studies to leave the Dark Ages of idealist illumination generations ago. Nor is this the manifestation of a mere positioning contest among different claimants to the title of king of the historians' mountain (though such matters of mastery and subordination are not trivial). Furet does not have to be forced to tolerate genres of historical inquiry of which he is contemptuous. But he must be asked whether he can attain the objectives he claims as his own using the system he has elaborated. There is an argument to be made for concentrating on the hermeneutic capital, say, of the nineteenth century. It is not at all clear, however, what this will reveal about the historical Revolution, or about any other history outside the nineteenth century. There is also an argument to be made for stripping away all the layers of recoding that separate the historian from the past, precisely in order to reach the targeted historical object. It seems folly not merely to eschew but also to demean the historian's archival odyssey, his (or

20 Farewell, Revolution

her) effort to overcome the welter of ethnocentrisms with which the historiography confronts him, his attempt to free himself at least partially from the social and cultural fetters that constrain him. When Furet does not take his lead from a ninetenth-century sage, he tends to follow eloquent Revolutionary parliamentarians who chart the course of things by filling the power vacuum with their pregnant word-concepts. Sometimes reified, sometimes psychologized, their discourse exists in the historical twilight zone, wrenched from its conditions of production. It achieves autonomy through a kind of ventriloquy that requires spasmodic suspensions of disbelief But when everything is (supposedly) said, is everything done? This high-discursive focus is linked to hyperbolic claims for the primacy of the political, for a self-reliant politics unmoored and segregated from the fields of social action. Wrought in the crucible of abstractions, yet still consonant with certain deep trends inscribed over the long term, this politics frames the next episodes in the age-old struggle between Liberty and Equality played out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "I have no taste for the past as such," Furet declared recently. Preoccupied with "the intelligibility of the present," to justify his protracted excursions into the past he "needed the stimulus of the present. " 5 Of course history will always resonate with the present; a dialogic relation between past and present nourishes the historical project. There is no returning to a positivist biosphere where facts are harvested as they grow naturally and the truth needs only room to coalesce. But the history of the Revolution, like any other history, has the right to a certain autonomy vis-a-vis its future, our present. The Revolution needs to be studied in itself and for itself, not strictly in relation to us (the "us" that is a very particular group in social, cultural, and ideological terms but that pretends to an objective and universal vantage point). The Revolution needs to be understood in terms of the significance of its own unfolding, not immediately and/ or exclusively interpreted as a function of later preoccupations, whatever their significance. We need to reflect critically on the regnant postpositivist piety that the past can only make sense through the prism of the present. Without critical correction, this conceit issues in the forging of a usable and imaginary Revolution rather than in the unmasking of the imaginaire rivolutionnaire and the lived experience of the Revolution. It leads to new teleologies, different from but not necessarily less pernicious than the classical ones that revision quite rightly denounced.

21 The French Historikerstreit

Furet markets his manner of doing history as a luxury product, the foie gras on a drab menu larded with petit sate and bifieck-frites. With its special pedigree, Furet blithely assumes that the history he practices is unproblematic. Spared rough edges, without relief, his history emerges without friction and suffers no wear. It is better suited as a strategy of domination in the service of urgent contemporary concerns than as an instrument for understanding the past-the Old Regime, the Revolution, or even the nineteenth century. Furet reserves his sharp critical eye for alternative approaches, freighted with weaknesses, untrustworthy, futile. Along with the social science matrix from which they spring, he disqualifies them. This scapegoating of "the social" -of social and economic history -does not advance our understanding of the Revolution or of the real costs and benefits of these types of analysis.

Glissando and Displacement A hundred years ago, wrote the very galactic Nouvel Observateur, the Revolution, "was still in the domain of politics. Today, the Revolution is in the domain ofHistory." 6 Nothing could have been further from the truth in the bicentennial Historikerstreit. All sides claimed the corner on scientific rigor, consigning the Other(s) to the rubble heap of ideology and sectarianism. Yet the political concerns of all the protagonists were clamorous. Past, present, and future were characteristically telescoped. The history of the French Revolution became a reflection on the whole experience of France from the eighteenth century to the end of the second millennium. Swollen beyond manageable proportions, the Revolution seemed to engender almost everything that mattered today: for Chaunu, despite his effort to deflate the Revolution by inserting it into thousands of years of history; for Furet (despite his censure of the Marxists for an occlusive fixation on the R/ revolutionary origins of modern France), who held the Revolution accountable for the critical developments of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century; for Vovelle and the Jacobina-Marxists, for whom the Revolution constituted the source of all options and hopes. There was virtually no discontinuity between history and politics in much of the debate. Imperceptibly the argument about the Revolution of the eighteenth century spilled over into a discussion of forms of normative social

22 Farewell, Revolution

organization, values, and practices of democracy. A decisive yet subtle displacement occurred, as the history of the Revolution ceded ground to the history of its political and moral legacy. It was easy to associate one's political (and historiographical) adversaries withJacobins or muscadins or Nazis. One's attitude toward the state became a central framework for viewing the Revolution. One's historical interpretation shaped one's politics, and one's politics molded one's historical regard. Historians argued over the responsibilities of the state to society, whether the left or the right represented a greater peril to liberties, whether liberty and equality could coexist, whether one could feel safe in a revolutionary logic (interpreted by Furet as a voluntaristic determination to change society through the violent usurpation of the state; by Chaunu as a combination of government-sponsored abortion, asphyxiating state regulation, and state manipulation of the media; by Vovelle as the right and capacity of the people to control their own destiny in order to achieve happiness and justice through political and social action). The French historians no less than the Michael Stiirmers, the Klaus Hildebrands, and the Ernst Noltes felt a responsibility to meet today's needs, to adapt their interpretations in order to reinforce stability (Furet), affirm identity (Sturmer), liberate from guilt (Nolte), allocate guilt (Chaunu), accelerate change (Vovelle), and so on. In the charged climate of the bicentennial, it is not clear who would have earnestly subscribed to the contention of Thomas Nipperdey, a moderately conservative German historian, that "the morality of scholarship demands that the arguments of those taking part be tested independently of their origins, motives, and consequences." 7 Put somewhat differently, reasoned epistemological claims and verifiable evidence had increasingly little to do with determining the grounds for preferring one reading of the past to another. Beyond the Franco-French landscape, in the international context of 1989, it was also easy to slip from a concern with historical questions to a preoccupation with world-historical issues. It was hard not to identify the French Revolution, and its deeply ambivalent legacy, with or against the freedom movement in the East. Morally, it seemed much more pressing to worry about the future of the Poles or the Hungarians or the East Germans than to ulcerate over the causes and consequences of the Great Fear, or the relation between the peasant movement and the Terror. Liberty seemed to be battering equality everywhere, and this Tocquevillean revenge accentuated the displacement of focus as well as the temptation to shift from a historical to a

23 The French Historikerstreit

metahistorical mode. The engrossment with the tension between the revolutionary idea and the democratic idea in the late 1980s did more to muddle than to illuminate the problem of the emergence of despotism in the French Revolution. The same displacement encouraged historians to blur the distinction between exceptionalism as lived experience and exceptionalism as an analytical category. The French historians tended to be for or against their Sonderweg, without critically examining the way in which the notion itself constrained the debate. Nor did the penury of sustained comparison with other national trajectories help to clarify the issues. Exceptionalism had little to do with understanding the French Revolution. Rather, it concerned the development of French institutions and ideology since the early nineteenth century, the new Europe on the horizon of 1993, and the implications of the thesisshibboleth that the Revolution was "over." The passion aroused by the question of whether the Revolution was dead or alive further displaced the discussion from the past to the present. Does such a question have any significance for our understanding of the French Revolution-the one that occurred in the late eighteenth century? For Anglo-American scholars, by and large the answer is no. For French scholars, the answer is a resounding yes. Furet artfully tried to maintain that so long as the Revolution was not (declared) over, authentic "history" could not be done. Yet in fact he inadvertently demonstrated how this putative emancipation became a mystifying digression for the history-writing process. The focus on the Revolution's status in the present day might have opened into a serious counterfactual attempt to examine whether the Revolution was in some sense "necessary" or "avoidable" through a searching reexamination of the Old Regime. But, here too, the question was addressed in terms of twentieth-century concerns, not eighteenth-century experience. A veritable historicization of the debate would have significantly enriched both those interested in the question of social change (or resistance to social change) today and those interested in the French Revolution per se. For it would have forced the players to problematize their stereotyped ideas about such issues as the genesis of liberalism during the Old Regime (an agonizingly painful process that posed many of the problems of transition that now affect Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union), the practice of rationalism in the eighteenth century, the organization of "interests" in pre-Revolutionary society, the fabrication of elites, the connections between capitalism and Enlighten-

24 Farewell, Revolution

ment ideology, the struggle over social classification, the effect of economic change (or stagnation) on behavior and mentality, and so on. Moreover, the double tendency toward thematic and chronological glissando, and the welter of strained analogies it generated, did not encourage the participants in the French Historikerstreit to think critically about the question of comparability in the historical demarche. The commemoration occasioned an orgy of comparison, most of it ill-considered, much of it misleading, some of it merely odious in its gratuity and mean-spiritedness. Historians have a grave responsibility to think and justify before they compare because of the enormous influence that comparison can exercise and because of the inherently parlous nature of the enterprise. Why compare? To what end? Compare what to what? On what ground? What "interests," in Habermas' sense, orient comparison? Obviously to control the terms of comparison is to control the parameters of the historical and perhaps also the political debate. In "horizontal" and "vertical" directions, across space and time, the French bicentennial historians compared feverishly, habitually without the necessary preparation and caution. They compared in their discussions of violence, of totalitarianism, of democracy, of sovereignty and representation, of social conflict, of terror, of civil and foreign war, of ideology, of religion, of morality, of law, of means of production and technology. They compared as much to impugn as to enlighten, to preclude discussion as to open it, to indulge prejudice as to combat it. Nor did anyone, save in a self-seeking way, reflect on the role of the media in the stewardship of memory. Did the historians or the media or the larger community decide what needed to be remembered? How did the massive appropriation of "history" and historiography by the media affect the debate? If it is crucial to know how the media used the historians, it is no less important to explore how the historians played the media. The media allowed the scholars to indulge in a sort of double(triple?)speak. It enabled them to cultivate simultaneously different clienteles: colleagues, students, fellow militants, an elite audience of nonspecialized but educated citizens, and the broader public. The historian should have analyzed his or her own relation to the public sphere in terms of the constraints imposed by the media. The historiographical debate did not escape the process of commemorative commodification in which the media were leading packagers.

Credo and Crusade Pierre Chaunu's Revised Revisionism

0

ne of France's most influential and prolific historians, Pierre Chaunu, was the chief ideologue of the counterrevolutionary resurgence. The son of an employee of the national railway company, Chaunu was born in the Meuse in 1923. His early life was deeply scarred by the pall of death: first the passing of his mother shortly after his birth, a constantly present absence for him; then the sudden demise of an uncle who had become more than a father to him; and the ambient mortality of the battlefields of Verdun that he often visited. "In the beginning there was death, in the beginning there was oblivion," he wrote many years later in an autobiographical essay, after having experienced yet another incalculable loss, the premature death of his firstborn son. Death, and the need to resist the impulse to forget, engendered in him "this need" to become a historian. Initially, following his uncle's example, he had aspired to a career in the military. But the cowardly, furtive, and implacable way in which death struck convinced him that "to force it back, more and better was needed than just soldiers." Chaunu's "dialogue" with death was never to end, though he lived it in a multitude of different ways. Through his religion, he tamed it to a considerable extent. Yet it remained for him a metaphor of horror, ramifying into myraid tropes of sociobiological pathology. In the Revolution Chaunu later rediscovered the thick and mephitic presence of death, and it revolted him. It was redolent of the killing fields of

25

26 Farewell, Revolution

Verdun, "this country overwhelmed by the present suffering of a million lives cut to pieces under our very steps." 1

A Dense Career Educated in Metz and briefly in Rouen before he entered the Sorbonne to study history, Chaunu obtained his agregation at the end of the war. His encounter with Fernand Braudel decisively shaped his intellectual trajectory, though he was also marked, like Furet, Vovelle, and a whole generation, by Ernest Labrousse. Braudelian in conception and ambition, his thesis dealt with the trade in precious metals that linked Europe, the Americas, and the Far East in the early modern period. Literally thousands of pages long, the thesis and its apparatus betrayed many of the distinctive marks that would later characterize the entire Chaunuean corpus: the heroic spatial scale (the Atlantic and the Pacific), the bold temporal inflection (privileging the long run, but in permanent dialogue with the short term), the labor-intensive methodology (a primitive but bulimic quantification), and the boundless analytical energy (restless interrogation of sources, all-inclusive extrapolations, imaginative linkages, and a quasi-eschatological fascination with beginnings and ends). Named to the University of Caen in 1959, Chaunu already boasted over five thousand pages of"diverse publications" in addition to the thesis, then in proof. His Gargantuan capacity has always staggered, and sometimes demoralized, fellow historians. He seems to write almost as swiftly as he reads (at the beginning of 1992 the count rose to eighty volumes and thirty-five thousand pages); he has read voraciously, "pen in hand," reviewing hundreds and hundreds of tomes; and he has published scores of books, rarely lean in bulk and not always easy to digest. Under his vigorous aegis, the Centre de recherche d'histoire quantitative, which he founded at Caen, acquired an international reputation. Never lacking in self-assurance, year after year he resisted the call to Paris, until 1970 when he finally accepted election to the University of Paris IV, whose history department was doubly celebrated for its scholarly attainments and its political conservatism. Chaunu's reputation for enormous erudition, open-ended curiosity, and generosity attracted hundreds of students. By 1982 he had directed over four hundred master's theses and participated, astonishingly, in more than four

27 Credo and Crusade

hundred thesis juries ("I prefer to plead for others rather than for myself'). His extensive contacts with students, and his often dominant role on the national councils that governed recruitment and addressed policy matters for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the national university system, enabled him to exercise enormous influence on the evolution of the historical profession. Increasingly drawn to the public sphere by some of the same interests and passions that marked his historical research ("history led me to the present"), above all his work in demography, he was elected to the Academie des sciences morales et politiques in 1983.

The Weekend Chaunu The public sphere welcomed the weekend Chaunu-in his own words the "sometimes ferocious polemicist" on Saturdays and the historian turned philosopher-theologian on Sundays. Though spiritual matters had preoccupied him since his childhood, his conversion to Protestantism in 19 54 marked a turning point in his search for the appropriate forms of relation and expression. Chaunu committed to Christianity the sort of energy and expectation that Furet (till the late 1950s) and Vovelle (still) invested in the Communist party. Chaunu, unlike Furet, never lost his God and, unlike Vovelle, never envisaged the need to modernize his credo ("I do not believe that it [his faith] has need of aggiornamento because it is the Truth"). As he affirmed himself intellectually, spiritual preoccupations came to play an increasingly significant role, in his weekday as well as his weekend activities. "The advancement of the kingdom of God" emerged more and more clearly as the telos of his mission and as the test of the latter's worth. First it became difficult to disentangle the historian from the philosopher-theologian; then it became harder to separate the historian from the polemicist. Chaunu himself cautions against the reader's almost irresistible temptation (born of admiration for the great historian rather than antipathy for the shrill and obsessive controversialist) to discern a caesura or a derapage in his route: "Those who were surprised by the course of my thinking did not fathom me very well. Like time, my life flows without rift or rupture." (And he imputes the scope and violence of the attacks against him to raw ideological bigotry: "It is true that the crime is great to have written for a conservative newspaper, consistent with one's ideas, without having belonged like every good teacher

28 Farewell, Revolution

of political morality to the Communist party at the time of the massacres or to some [other] extremist group.") May 1968 helped to politicize the professor ("politics came to seek me out"). Among other things it taught him "the importance of communication" -the critical role of the media and the problem of disseminating one's message. "A still infinitely bigger shock" than 1968, which led him to take the lead in "the university resistance," was the legalization of abortion ("absolute murder") in the mid-1970s, which impelled him to join the struggle against the crime and its disastrous demographic and ethical consequences "in the name of honor, as others had in the resistance to Nazism, to the Soviet gulag, or at the time of decolonization, in one camp or in the other." Given this momentum, it was not a great leap to the antiSocialist and counterrevolutionary resistance of the 1980s.

The Counterrevolutionary Campaign Though Chaunu's counterrevolutionary campaign was amply justified in terms of civic and moral conscience, was it legitimate from a professional vantage point? Chaunu would never pretend to be a specialist in the history of the Revolution. (Though his coprotagonists Furet and Vovelle spent much of their careers doing other things, each became a Revolutionary expert in his own manner.) Indeed, Chaunu came to French history relatively late, first at the behest of his students, and then to satisfy a deep impulse. His ethnographic remove ("I cast the eye of another world on my country") enabled him to compensate with acuity what he lacked in familiarity. He wrote several synthetic works on Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he sponsored a great deal of research on the social and cultural history of Old Regime France, and he read voraciously in all periods of French history. Though few prudent historians would be eager to face him in a game of Jeopardy devoted to the Revolutionary epoch, it is probably true that he knew less about the Revolution than he himself would have demanded of a scholar who made it one of his major preoccupations for a number of years. Yet given the way Chaunu approached the Revolution from the outset, it is not certain that his uneven mastery of the data really handicapped him. The Revolution as object in the 1980s was not comparable to the transoceanic silver trade as object in the 19 50s. Chaunu was never interested in studying

29 Credo and Crusade

the Revolution per se; from the outset, he wanted and needed to denounce it for its putatively evident evils. In this instance Chaunu the tireless collector of statistics was a bit like Turgot, who suspended his predecessor Terray's massive statistical surveys when he came to power in 1774 because he did not want to be constrained by knowledge that might embarrass his theory. 2 Chaunu spoke against the Revolution in scores of articles, most of which appeared in Le Figaro; in innumerable interviews in all the media, printed and electronic; in prefaces to books he sought to promote; and, finally, in a book-length diatribe called Le Grand Declassement. On the positive side, it can be said that over. the years he had used the media more effectively than any other professional historian to bring a wide range of sometimes highly specialized if not esoteric scholarship to the attention of the public. On the negative side, especially in reference to the eighteenth century, he filtered out a great deal of evidence and argument with which he did not agree and he never appeared to worry about the ways in which the media's selective (doubly partial) appropriation of historical production worked lamentable changes in the conventional criteria for airing and evaluating historical research and interpretation. By and large he rehearsed standard counterrevolutionary themes, privileging those that resonated with his own experience and temperament and endowing them all with the brio of his truculent style and the immense prestige of his position. Chaunu hated the Revolution, and as a patriot, a Christian, and a man, he was "ashamed" of it. It made him want to laugh"to laugh in order to hide the desire to cry, to cry over so many blunders, so much waste, so many lies." It was an orgy of"falsehood, plunder, aggression, violence, and blood." It was either the Chinese Cultural Revolution before its time-"the same hatred of a minority, the same disdain for the past, the same rage to destroy" -or "the Chernobyl of our history." The Revolution was made by "drunkards" and "thieves," not only at the nether sansculottic !Frass roots but in the lofty halls of the Convention. The heroes of the Revolution were sanguinary sadists. Its legacy was permanent civil war and national decadence. Though his emphasis on the apocalyptic balance sheet of the Revolution tends to obfuscate the rest, Chaunu saw the Revolution, like Furet, as "first of all an intellectual phenomenon." He did not elaborate on how malevolent ideas corroded the Old Regime system, though he intimated that one proof of their perversity could be found in their stigmatization of Christianity. While

30 Farewell, Revolution

Chaunu focused on the religious question much less sharply than the integristes, he concurred with them that "the religious persecution commands the entry into the horror." He was outraged by the brutality of the dechristianizers at all levels, institutional as well as human. If he made a fetish of efficiency and bottom-line modernity, his piety nevertheless demanded respect for certain traditions, however uneconomic they may have appeared. Thus his indignation at the suppression of the biblically rooted tithe: "but how can the state justify a diversion of the funds that have been required for God and for his people, and concretely for the good priest, from the time of Moses and the Sinai?"3

Deflating the Revolution While on the one hand Chaunu viewed the Revolution as an incalculable calamity that fatally mortgaged French destiny, on the other hand he insisted that its historical importance had been swelled drastically out of proportion. If the Revolution was "dangerously cancerous," it was, after all, only a "minuscule segment ... of our history." Next to the long, slow course of the peopling of France, the Revolution was merely "a thin scar, the sort that the pustule of a bad pox leaves on the face." (Chaunu's weakness for biophysical metaphors is perhaps a remnant of his adolescent dalliance with a career in medicine.) By denigrating the Revolution, Chaunu toiled to decenter it. The idea of a national memory that pivoted on the Revolution, he found scientifically erroneous and morally repugnant. The Bastille that allegedly liberated France had captured French history and held it hostage ever since. Chaunu wanted to sing its Marseillaise (though he came to hate this chant of hatred), to free it and thereby restitute its proper equilibrium across the whole expanse of the French past. This argument was quite potent and tonic when reasoned in terms of the Braudelian reading of time (and space) and of the asphyxiating intellectual consequences of a historical (and academic) periodization generated by the reification of the Revolution's self-representation. To fathom the causes and outcomes of the Revolution, to understand how institutions really worked and how traditions came into being, to make cogent diagnoses, historians needed to insert it in a comparative, multivariate, long-run context (a sort of Anna/esization ofTocqueville). The long run ventilated and chastened: "The

31 Credo and Crusade

church speaks in millennia, the Revolution in mornings and evenings." It was bad enough that the before-and-after-1789 cleavage, which was institutionalized in university curricula, provincialized and palsied the professional study of French history. It was even worse in its insidious civic effects, diffused through the public school system, which resulted in the widespread belief, further magnified and exploited by the bicentennial commemorators, that French history begins in 1789. IfChaunu had confined his critique to the baleful effects of this "division," this "overinvestment," and this "hexagonal self-centeredness, " he would have elicited broad support (save perhaps for his nostalgia for the old-school Annates contempt for l'histoire evenementielle, which has as strong a claim for a place in Chaunu's wax museum as "the history of the French Revolution ... the beret, the baguette of bread, and the pint of red wine"). The disconcerting thing about Chaunu the polemicist, however, is his self-destructive fascination for the unreasonable and the hyperbolic. Perhaps it was mere puckishness to affirm, under Braudelian auspices, that the fourteenth of July is "less important than 22 November 1675, date of Olaf Romer's discovery of the speed of light." But it was palpably foolish, and unworthy of Chaunu's brilliant historical mind, to affirm that if one reinserted the Revolution into the progression of forty-five thousand years of history "that leaves 44,994 years that merit equally our attention."4 For a highly localized historical cancer, the French Revolution did a staggering amount of damage, metastasizing into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No one enunciated the catastrophe thesis more eloquently than Chaunu. The Revolution issued in economic ruin, demographic disaster, and moral disarray. There is a Braudelian timbre in Chaunu's lament of France's tragic missed opportunity: "We had always been the first, we will henceforth be at best in second place." Chaunu's patriotism and his demographoeconomism rendered him fiercely competitive; he "called" the historical contest for superiority as if it were the World Cup, with the same blend of partisanship and lucidity manifested by French sportscasters. England was ahead, but only slightly. France had a terrific team and wonderful prospects for catching up and even surging ahead. But while England moved smoothly into takeoff, France foundered on a needless revolution that violently disrupted the economy, spoliated the monetary system, decimated the population, amputated the elites, and crippled the systems of public assistance and elementary education.

32 Farewell, Revolution

At the end of the match (1815? perhaps even earlier), "France definitively loses first place and any chance to recapture it." By shattering French demographic patterns, the Revolution irrevocably sealed the nation's declassemen!. "By the rooting out of values, by the contempt of heredity, by the upheaval of centuries-old juridical rules," Chaunu argued, more in Burkean than in Malthusian terms, fertility plummeted and never recovered, crippling France while her neighbors and rivals continued to grow more or less lustily. How important was the demographic match for the world championship? "Without the Revolution, to be sure, the world would speak English because its destiny was played out in America, but there would be at least twenty to thirty million more people of French stock and who knows how many more French-speaking people." The Revolution ruined France in soul as well as in body. Deeper and graver than the economic catastrophe, Chaunu held it responsible for "a dirtying of the soul (a persecuted, wounded, occluded Christianity, suspicious of the new paradigms) and a cracking of the spirit." 5

Between Efficiency and Chaos: An Avoidable Revolution The tragedy of the Revolution is amplified for Chaunu by his conviction that it was perfectly avoidable. Not only was it not "written in the stars" but it had no real causes, it was not made necessary by any insurmountable, antiprogressive rampart. "Everything was being worked out gradually": Chaunu's ardor to fortify the contention that the Revolution was gratuitous impelled him to idealize the Old Regime. The only thing old in the Old Regime was the state. It had suffered-presumably between Louis XIV and Louis XVI-a "a stroke of aging." But the guarantor of dynamic and organic self-renewal was the society, which remained "young and lively and intelligent," "full oflife and malleable," "extremely supple and productive." (One hearkens to the echo of the liberal right's apotheosis of civil society and its symmetrical execration of the state in the debate of the 1980s.) For Chaunu the engine of profound, healthy change is economic rather than political, and its locus is in society where it gathers steam more often despite than because of the will of the government. Beyond pronouncing eighteenth-century France ripe for a reformist solution, as had Mgsr. Freppel, the bishop of Angers, at the centennial ("The

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Revolution did not sweep away a spent and condemnable regime; it took away this reform movement, it diverted the normal course of history toward the worst [ends]"), Chaunu did not scrutinize the Old Regime with great rigor. By and large privileges "fallen into disuse," seigneurial exactions were, euphemistically and somewhat cryptically, "more irritating [and] vexatious than restricting"; the "innocence" of the nobility was secured in advance by their generosity and cultivation. If the state was incipiently senescent, it was nevertheless a "state founded on the rule of law"; in Chaunu's utopian retroscenario, it eschewed arbitrary acts and practiced an evenhanded and equally accessible justice for all. Nor was liberty a new conquest in 1789; it had both sacred and secular strains in the Old Regime experience. Following the standard manichaean view of the eighteenth century widely underwritten by left as well as right, the parlements constituted a unitary party wedded to the obstruction of reform. For a champion of reform, Chaunu had a deeply flawed and unsettled understanding of state and society in Old Regime France. Detester of Jacobinism, the antiparlementarian historian implicitly celebrated the state-dirigiste path, the road of Enlightened Despotism. An avid if anxious liberal, the same observer hailed the innocent and earnest plasticity of eighteenth-century French society, stalemated by a blustery and feckless state, unwilling to repudiate a "fiscal paradise" that benefited primarily men like the magistrates, the monarch's enemies. Chaunu has the parlements implausibly allied with the physiocrats (in fact, only some magistrates in some parlements shared Physiocratic attitudes), whom he implausibly likens to the Jacobins (Chaunu's allergy to sectarian lobbying?) and whom he detests perhaps because they represented the agricultural ·past rather than the industrial future. Chaunu's habitual interest in structural analysis is utterly absent from his rapid survey. His reassuring "no one died of hunger after 1709" obfuscates more ihan it reveals about the still critical subsistence issue. He treats Turgot's reforms casually and anecdotally without any effort to take into account the controller general's theoretical assumptions, his attack on a wide array of entitlements, his critique of the system of social classification, and his understanding of the consumer-people (important actors in-a Freudian slip?-"the famine war"). As for the Enlightenment, he salvages it in what he believes to be its Burkean essence. By a double process of reasonable exegesis and transparent projection, he identifies the party of humanity with the values he cherishes: "Throughout the century, the greatest writers ... are the most moderate, the

34 Farewell, Revolution

most conscious of the fact that one must not rush and jostle, that political life like social life and biological life can only be dealt with by delicate touches." From the admiration that Saint-Just and Marat evinced for Montesquieu, he does not draw the same lesson as from the esteem that Lenin reserved for Robespierre; and he seems to discern no fundamental conflict between the political ideals of Montesquieu and those of Voltaire. 6 Like Montesquieu, Chaunu prized "balance, moderation, frugality"virtues that one could not unreasonably classify as stereotypically Protestant. He envied the English in the manner of Voltaire, whose Anglophilia betrayed a deep-seated jealousy as the complement to a genuine homage. The English understood how to effect change intelligently, economically, discreetly, with a due respect for the legitimation conferred by time and tradition that Chaunu, like Burke, held sacrosanct. Their history was a model of the tranquil and thoughtful evolutionism to which Chaunu fervently subscribed. Panglossians like Chaunu, the English believed that there was "no need to break things, life runs its course, one reflects, one adapts." Thus they were able to achieve modern parliamentary democracy gently, without a bloodbath. Their revolution of 1688 was the only "truly glorious" one because it launched them on their "evolutionary trajectory." Efficiency was the necessary counterpart to evolution, its justification and its catalyst, its guarantee against stagnation or immobility. Chaunu was obsessed with efficiency as a salient if not supreme value. This was the fruit of his intimacy with price curves, his infatuation with economics as a science, his competitive instincts, perhaps his Protestantism, certainly the intensely lived experience of the trente glorieuses -the post-World War II boom years-and the national fetish for growth, growth, growth! For the professor brandishing attache case and cost-benefit calculator, efficiency was both an analytical term and an accolade bearing immense dithyrambic weight, associated with modernity and success but without any (necessary) blemish of materialism or moral decay or secular humanism. Efficiency is both an independent and a dependent variable in Chaunu's universe. Usually it is the cause of significant development ("I find the English process more felicitous and more efficient"). But it sometimes emerges as the result of historically rooted structures ("The British system is intelligently inegalitarian, thus efficient and liberal"). The paradigmatic "succcessful revolution" was the one accomplished by the English: "that of the gentle and thus efficacious transition. " (Chaunu ignored the Prussian

35 Credo and Crusade

model, another avenue to revolutionary modernization without turmoil, perhaps because it lacked the liberal prestige of the English case, perhaps because it was not yet time for the German specter to supplant the English in the imagination that forged Frenchness.) The Revolution deprived France of the capacity to be efficient-to be sufficently efficient. "I find that the process which France followed was neither rapid nor efficient." The French course of development "was not located among the most harmonious and the most efficacious." Concerning the period before the Revolution, Chaunu appeared unable to make up his mind about the relative efficacy of French institutions. In one place he referred to "the efficacious protection of an efficacious statefounded-on law," while in another he exposed a "completely inefficacious state founded-on-law."7 It was easy for Chaunu to imagine a clean, reformist solution to the crisis of the Old Regime because he reduced the crisis to "a demand that was confined to a multitude of adjustments of detail." The bulk of the nation consisted of "people who want for nothing" or, at most, aspire to "a small improvement." Instead of confiding the reformist task to a handful of proven moderates, the Revolution mobilized the ignorant and malleable masses and placed them at the disposition of the inept mediocrities who took charge of public affairs. About the people and their deputies Chaunu had nothing positive to say, and nothing substantive to say that had not already been rehearsed by Gustave Le Bon and Augustin Cochin. The people were simpleminded, gullible, confused, volatile; when commingled with a crowd, "man regresses toward the emotional and the primary drives," his already low intellectual level is further "degraded," and he is swept up in destructive activities. Chaunu made no effort to understand the structure of daily life that predisposed the people to see the world in conspiratorial terms. Nor did the historian of material culture and mentalities seek to make sense of their subsistence obsessions. They were incapable of fathoming or articulating their interests, they were not equipped to think rationally, they were prepolitical (as certain Marxists contended from another perspective), they were capricious and childlike at best, subversive and dangerous at worst. Chaunu disposes of them with a certain disdain, reducing the sense of their attitudes and comportment (he refers once to "this fourteenth-century logic of the crowds") to the following formula: "It is necessary to kill the aristocrats in order to force down the price of grain." Popular culture? No, "mental regression." Chaunu assimilated the leaders generated by the people to animals and

36 Farewell, Revolution

Bolsheviks, "without a soul and without any other quality." Power exercised in the name of the people set in motion-are the words borrowed from Furet?-"an uncontrollable dynamic" that inexorably ushered in the horrors to come. Nor were the leaders from above, in the National Assembly, inclined or equipped to change this fatal course. Those deputies were the "runts of politics," "half failures" irretrievably handicapped by an "irrepressible stupidity" and a "lack of economic education." (Given these horrendous flaws, it is not surprising that they were elected from "from the 5 to 10 percent least religious people in the nation.") Leavening his portrait with derision and hyperbole, Chaunu caricatured what was already the Tocquevillean caricature of these allegedly hapless, incompetent deputies charged with responsibilities radically beyond their reach. They were hapless and incompetent by dint of their socioprofessional origins. Since 70 percent were lawyers or public servants of one kind or another, they were perforce mentally and morally cankered, frustrated in their careers and their lives, psychologically maladjusted ("a majority of embittered men, the scrap heap of civil society, ideologues thirsting after recognition, money, and honor"), estranged from the "realities of civil society." But who was more "removed from the humble realities" of everyday life, the professor or the deputies? They were inexperienced in parliamentary politics, to be sure: there had been few opportunities for apprenticeship. But many of these officials and these lawyers were intimately in touch with the everyday problems of business, of agriculture, of sociability, of marriage, of estate disposition, oflitigation over property and honor, and so on. Far from being divorced from civil society-an anachronistic notion in a world in which the boundaries between public and private were blurred and overlapping-in many ways these deputies were civil society or were very close to it, sensitive to its needs, its strengths, and its vulnerabilities. And however much Tocqueville may have misrepresented this national representation, he nevertheless understood, unlike Chaunu, that a mass of demands for detailed adjustments adds up, when read as a whole, to a revolutionary program. "Reality" is for Chaunu the pendant to efficiency, its ambient fluid and life-support system. The deputies lived in an "unreal atmosphere," they were caught in the "trap of fictional unreality," they worked in "this dreamlike world." But Chaunu projects as a yardstick his own vision of reality, one that

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stigmatizes as unreal hostility to tradition, iconoclasm, loquacity, preoccupation with justice, the desire for deep change. In his essay of "ego-histoire," Chaunu boasts that he remains above all a man of analysis. Yet in his treatment of the Revolutionaries he is above all a man of vilification. Instead of looking concretely at careers, he insults and impugns wantonly. Instead of argument, he offers discredit by vague association and smear. Thus these deputies were "little managers whose ambitions were long frustrated, turned rancid, and were cooked again in a sauce of envy, jealousy, and hatred. Take, for example, Robespierre." These vain, verbose, feckless tyros would be merely risible if they had not taken their mission seriously. They hastened, in a perspective Chaunu borrowed from Furet, to make themselves "little kings," to occupy the sovereign space once held by the monarch, and to set about regenerating the fundamentally recalcitrant nation. Uplifted by his telic vision, Chaunu was already certain that in May 1789, 1793 was in accelerated gestation: he beheld "a new sovereign threatened by a tyrannical temptation. "8

The Franco-French Genocide For Chaunu that temptation found its most abominable expression in the "Franco-French genocide." ("It is I who am the creator of the expression," he boasted.) He defined it as "the greatest carnage perpetrated on the territory of France in fifteen centuries against a peasant population disarmed for ideological reasons by the utopian and thus cruel and bloody power of the most obscurantist of tyrannies, the first modern tyranny-Fran~ois Furet demonstrated this point-which exhausted our people before inspiring virtually all the genocides, the holocausts, and the gulags of the last two centuries." This genocide was enormously important, first, for the unspeakable horrors it wrought, and then for the paradigmatic character it assumed. Tirelessly Chaunu repeated that the Vendee crime was the "model," the "root," the "archetype," the "laboratory," for all the others that came afterward. The chief elements in the model were an innocent and vulnerable civilian population (the civil war is exorcised, the martyrs implicitly denied any active resistance on their own account); mass murder commanded by ideology (ideology being at antipodes from reality, a device or bludgeon of manipulation by a minority, a treasury of alibis for sadism); leadership in the

38 Farewell, Revolution

hands of utopians whose mad schemes of total regeneration required bloodletting, perhaps for symbolic as well as pragmatic reasons, but primarily for no reasons; and, presumably in deference to the term "genocide," the objective of"extirpate the race," the people of the Vendee taking on racial cohesion for this purpose. Despite their progressive veneer, the tyrants embodied the very obscurantism they pretended to locate and exterminate in their enemies. Chaunu steadfastly refused to concede a forward-looking vision to his antagonists. The Burkeans had a lock on the future; the revolutionary deputies, despite their rejection of tradition, were irreversibly "turned toward the past."9 Chaunu felt no apparent self-consciousness about using the word "genocide." Beyond the strategically welcome opprobrium that the Nazi analogy cast on the Revolution, the Vendee massacres constituted a genocide because they were so horrible and because their scale was so substantial. Commenting on the range and efficiency of the extermination process, the quantifying historian readily granted "the Nazi Holocaust" the top spot "on the Richter scale of genocides: ... six million [people dead], 50 percent of the targeted group, 90 to 95 percent of whom were killed in the controlled territories." But he argued for extending the list to include the Armenian genocide (1,200,000 of 2,000,000) and the Cambodian genocide (3,000,000 of 9,000,000) as well as the French genocide (at least 500,000, "preferably women and children," fully one-third of the Vendeen population). (On another occasion Chaunu added the "Russian autogenocide-forty million killed directly, sixty million all told.") If the French numbers seemed relatively low, Chaunu reassuringly noted, "it was not the result of a faltering intention but for lack of the necessary means, with which the young Turks, the German gestapoists, and the Tchekists would be incomparably better supplied." Unrepentant, Chaunu deployed the same heavy-handed irony in rebuttal of fellow historians who sharply criticized him for his use of the term "genocide": "Concerning the Vendee, I spoke of genocide; I concede that it was a small genocide, but its intentions were good, they were pure." 10 The Franco-French genocide aroused Chaunu's indignation not only for its intrinsic horror. To the pain of the atrocity Jacobino-republican historians and state makers added the affront of oblivion. "After having been drowned, mutilated, and cut up (the sadistic imagination of the columns of Turreau equals the SS, the gulag, and the Khmer Rouge), they were forgotten," protested the historian, echoing the deep resentment felt by the whole count-

39 Credo and Cmsade

errevolutionary camp. Though this "ostracism" had already begun to cede to a more sympathetic and rigorous scholarly climate in the 1970s, Chaunu savored the breakthrough as the product of his own orchestration. Thus, on the occasion of Reynald Secher's thesis defense, he jubilated: "On 21 September 1985 the Vendee entered the Sorbonne by the front door." Symbolically, the Vendee was consecrated and legitimated; the mythic Sorbonne (profoundly modified in its organization in the aftermath of May 1968), a traditional blue-Marxist bastion of R/revolutionary studies, would henceforth be sapped from within. 11 Several historians took Chaunu to task for treating the Vendee as an instance of genocide. His contemporary, Fran~Yois Lebrun, chastised him for conflating the crafts of historian and polemist. "The verbal extravagances of a partisan discourse" were not the most effective response to the "embarrassed silence" of historians who enshrouded or evaded the hecatombs of the Vendee. Lebrun attacked Chaunu for his method, his technique of ungrounded comparisons and linkages, "this little game of 'archetypes' and 'roots."' Why not connect the massacres ofParisian workers in 1848 and 1871 with the eradication of the kulaks in the 1930s? If the Convention engendered Pol Pot, then arguably Thiers begot Stalin? "Once on this stride," Lebrun reasoned, "all comparisons are possible in contempt of the specificity of historical contexts." For Lebrun "nothing in the manner in which the war in the Vendee was prosecuted between March and December 1793 justifies the use of the term genocide." The Vendee was above all "an atrocious civil war," and it was civil war that was responsible for the bulk of the deaths, the women and children as well as the men, whose number Chaunu exaggerated. The Vendeens were "a group of political opponents," not a targeted ethnic group or, as Chaunu pretended, a group murdered "for the sole crime of fidelity to the faith of their fathers." Their experience had much more in common with the brutal repression of popular risings in the Old Regime or the devastating campaigns of Louis XIV in the Rhenish Palatinate or against the Camisards. Lebrun concluded: "This Franco-French civil war was atrocious enough that it is not necessary to attempt to accentuate the horror still more by adding a term that is inappropriate as well as weighted down with a terrible symbolic charge and by repeating fanciful numbers concerning casualties." Chaunu reacted with scorn: "I don't answer to ideologues, and I have no lessons to learn from Fran~Yois Lebrun and several others."

40 Farewell, Revolution

A younger historian with parallel interests in religion and in western France, Claude Langlois seconded many of Lebrun's reproaches. The Vendee was primordially a civil war ("with shared initial atrocities") and Chaunu's figures, adopted without critical scrutiny, were substantially inflated (just as Seeber's demographic technique, hailed by Chaunu as "unassailable," was in fact "very hard to defend on scholarly grounds"). To fathom the massacres Langlois was less interested in Lebrun's historicization than in an examination of the specificities of terrorist discourse, but he regarded the genocide label as profoundly misleading. And he incidentally contested Chaunu's claim to having first adopted the genocide designation with respect to the Vendee, showing that it had spontaneously emerged in the reflections of Vendeens on their past in the wake of the Second World War. 12

Rights (and Wrongs) That the Franco-French genocide-an "ideological aggression" -was justified by principles drawn from the Declaration of the Rights of Man made it all the more repugnant for Chaunu. Rather than impugning the immanent worth of the rights in which the Revolution enveloped itself in 1789, he denounced the Revolution for cynically transgressing those rights in its deeds while it hypocritically invoked them in its rhetoric. ("Should one privilege the words or these bloody acts that contradict them so cruelly?") Moreover, it was utterly wrong to attribute the invention of those words, and the concepts they represented, to the Revolution. "These principles, the foundations of democracy," wrote Chaunu, "are the fruit of a long practice of the rule oflaw in Christianity, of a Jewish-pagan-Christian tradition that includes Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Saint Louis under his oak, and the Curia Regis sitting in Parliament." On the one hand, in the spirit of Burke, Chaunu stressed the cumulative process of gradual construction that generated rights. Meaningful rights were rooted in iterative social practice rather than in abstract ideological lucubrations. Had the Declaration been inserted in this capitalized "Tradition," "it might have been a beautiful text" instead of "a text of rupture resting on a lie." On the other hand, Chaunu insisted passionately on the spiritual genesis of these rights, on their transcendental origins and sanction, on their precarious social character, and on their permanently contingent

41 Credo and Crusade

nature in a world dominated by God's presence. Concerning the divine predicate, he was unequivocal: "There can be no rights of man except under the auspices of a personal and transcendent Supreme Being." Chaunu was deeply skeptical of the plausibility of rights that were unmediated by providential action. The Revolutionary trinity was merely a utopian (i.e., unreal and dangerous) ideal outside the Judeo-Christian context. In Chaunu's view, men were not naturally free; genetically and culturally, they were anything but equal; and, far from instinctively loving one another, they "spontaneously" detested each other. "Thus, for me, liberty is because God said: 'I placed before you life and death, good and evil, choose life' (Deuteronomy); equality is because God summons all of us to eternal life; fraternity is because God is our supernatural Father." Transformed into a vehicle for social control, the Judeo-Christian tradition imperceptibly imposes a sort of civic test, and presupposes an unlikely social and cultural homogeneity. At bottom, then, "if you recite the Our Father and if you respect the Ten Commandments, you don't need the Declaration of 1789." When he shifts back from theory to contemporary practice, from a predominantly spiritual to a sociopolitical focus, Chaunu the liberal clearly establishes a hierarchy of rights and the conditions necessary for their practice. Liberty was the central, inviolable value. It was "indissociably" linked to "order," for in disorder there was no liberty but only "constraint." An unspecified modicum of equality was a necessary complement to liberty, but, admonished Chaunu, "equality is one of the cancers of our society," a legacy of the malignant Revolution. The lesson was clear: "In the name of equality one has committed the worst crimes and the worst errors." Presumably, this is social science rather than ideology.l3

Chaunu Deploys Furet As friends of equality, most historians of the Revolution, in Chaunu's judgment, were guilty of errors if not crimes. They deferred to the university's tranquil reign of terror, internalizing and reproducing. the left/ republican ethos in their writings. They wasted time, money, and energy that would have been better invested elsewhere. "The historiography of the Revolution, like the Revolution itself, is a gigantic waste."l4 Much to Chaunu's delight, the recent tide of revisionism had begun to sweep away the Marxist

42 Farewell, Revolution

and Jacobin debris. The most prominent agent m this purge, to whom Chaunu frequently acknowledged his debt, was Fran~ois Furet. Chaunu liked to repeat that Furet "had dismantled the machine." By this he meant not merely that Furet had exposed the myriad errors of the "StalinoRobespierrist" historians of the Revolution but that he had made the critical connection between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, that he had shown how the "Jacobin drift" led directly from the Vendee genocide to the horrors of the gulag and Pol Pot. This was hardly news to any stalwart counterrevolutionary, whose worldview and sensibility corresponded to this bleak interpretative grid. But Chaunu the polemicist, wise in the ways of communication, appreciated that for the purpose of making this case to both professional scholars and the general public, all the counterrevolutionaries of the world were not worth one Furet, given his impeccable scientific credentials and his Communist-leftist political background. When Chaunu commented that "the operation Penser Ia Revolution [Furet's most influential book] [was] a harmonizing of the past and the present," he referred to Furet's past and present as well as the Revolution's. Chaunu detected, not without a certain satisfaction-repentance was never wholly painless, though it was almost always good for business-a twinge of malaise in the bicentennial Furet. His considerable "success" worried him, for it made him the hero of his (old) friends' enemies: "He is probably afraid that he went too far, that he was too influential." Chaunu contributed to Furet's success, and thus to his alleged uneasiness, by using him whenever possible, associating him with interpretations that he would have hesitated to underwrite. In particular, Furet served him as an indispensable warrant ("as Fran~ois Furet admirably showed ... ") for the thesis making the French Revolution the matrix for the "ideological delirium" that spawned the nightmares of the twentieth century. When Chaunu entered (what he knew left-leaning scholars would consider) contested terrain-for example, the recourse to Augustin Cochin and certain traditionally counterrevolutionary arguments that can be traced to Abbe Barruel-he tried to preempt criticism by stating, "I will not be less royalist than Fran~ois Furet, who rediscovered Augustin Cochin."IS Like Furet, Chaunu emphasized the significance of the French-Soviet connection. He esteemed that it was Solzhenitsyn who gave Furet the decisive stimulus not so much to break with the Marxist vulgate but to recognize what he, Chaunu, would call the cancerous nature of the French Revolution.

43 Credo and Crusade

The historical Revolution lived in the penumbra of the Russian Revolution just as the Russian Revolution once basked in the light of the French. Chaunu wanted no one to forget the ignominious moral and political taint of the better-Red-than-right Sorbonne Jacobins: "From Mathiez to Soboul, via Lefebvre, the official historiography will excuse the Terror, as Michelet had dared to justify it. It does so by solidarity with Leninist and Stalinist terrorism. After all, the famine organized to break the Ukraine, at the cost of five million deaths, and the liquidation of the kulak peasant elite ... depend upon, and derive part of their impact, from the Vendee. One justifies the past and the present together, in the same stroke, the present by the past." For Chaunu, the Russian experience squarely framed the bicentennial debate: "Will they lean toward Stalin or Solzhenitsyn?" he asked, apropos of the citizenry as well as the professional commemorators.16

The Bicentennial as Stupidity and Crime Chaunu found solace in the manichaean formulation, one mimicking the psychological disposition of the Jacobins whom he abhorred. It set out the issues starkly, and it discouraged equivocation in the guise of judiciousness. In the bicentennial, good and evil would clash, even as they had in 1789. For the bicentennial was nothing less than a continuation of the Revolution by similar means. As he imagined it-he would have been a wonderful commemorator had he been on the other side-the commemoration was a continuation or resuscitation of the "civic cult" and the "religion of substitution" of the Revolutionary festivals. But like everything else after 1789, the Revolution's deepest impulses had themselves become degraded. The ersatz cult of 1989 was merely a "soft ideology of wide-open permissiveness in all directions" compared to which the rigor that the Revolution demanded of its followers seemed to merit grudging admiration. For Chaunu, the horror of the thing in itself-the Revolution-was drastically amplified by the putatively fulsome celebration of it. The effrontery of celebrating a "crime," which was also a "connerie," a stupidity, prompted his untamable wrath. To underline the gravity of the crime, Chaunu instinctively appealed to the ultimate conventional litmus, Nazi barbarities, whose singularity he implicitly called into question. For if "nothing excuses the apology of crime," then "it is contradictory to organize the Barbie

44 Farewell, Revolution

trial at great expense and to cover with Revolutionary ideological reasons of state" an experience that is even more evidently bloodstained. How could the French bring themselves to celebrate the moral equivalent of the Third Reich? he asked repeatedly. The professor wrote about the bicentennial as if he lived outside his own, unfolding history, outside the very Burkean world of symbolic and experiential accumulation that he adored. In his normative view, it was incomprehensible that "two centuries afterward, when everything is known [about the Revolution], established, and quite widely disseminated, one felt the need to commemorate it, not as an error but as a victory." In the early tumult of 1789, few of the so-called Revolutionaries really acted with full knowledge of the facts. But in 1989 there were no mitigating circumstances for anyone, for Chaunu (and others) had demonstrated that it was scientifically misplaced and morally wrong to celebrate, or even to commemorate.17 The commemorators imitated the Revolution in their "totalitarian" manner of organizing the bicentennial, in particular of manipulating public opinion. The state loomed as a tentacular, intrusive, and Machiavellian agent in Chaunu's overheated mind. The public of 1989 was no less vulnerable and malleable-perhaps, at bottom, no less ignorant about the fundamental stakes-than the people of 1789. By a kind of strong-armed thought control ("intimidation," "bludgeoning") deploying all the cunning of a modern "politico-media system," the state achieved a total "ascendancy" over public opinion. Chaunu was disgusted-in yet another episode of the chronic "nausea" that the Revolution induced-with what he vaguely but persistently called "the excess" of panegyric discourse: "too much is too much." The commemorating state was a swaggering Barnum, falsifying history and truncating memory, and arraying it all in a more or less vulgar package. The martyrs of the Revolution in 1989 were the innocent taxpayers who bore the extravagant cost of this operation of state narcissism. Among the other victims were France's neighbors, who had to suffer, on the eve of the European union of 1993, the offensive, nationalistic exaltation of the Revolutionary "war of aggression" prosecuted against them. IS As in the Revolution itself, these "ideological festivities" were geared to issue in "the consecration of the state," a result that deeply worried Chaunu. While he claimed a Gaullist side that appreciated the need for a strong state in certain domains, he felt most comfortable in a self-denying liberal political climate: "I am viscerally attached to political systems which do not authorize

45 Credo and Crusade

themselves to take charge of my church, my home, the education of my children, which has no need of a secretary of state for my leisure time." For Chaunu, the bicentennial celebrated the voluntaro-constructivist state, the sort of toxic political overinvestment denounced by Furet in the Revolutionary discourse, a veritable despotism. Nor was the politico-ideological symmetry between the Revolution and the bicentennial surprising, for the Jacobins were once again in power. Chaunu was struck by similarities in style and thought between the Socialist party and the Jacobins; in his discussion of genocide, abortion, the abolition of the death penalty, and other public issues, he tended to collapse the regime of the Terror and Mitterrand's France into a single pathological continuum. After all, "Robespierre carried two cards, the Socialist party card, in its Ceres version [the hard-line, Marxizing wing associated with J.-P. Chevenement), and the Communist party card." Chaunu hated, feared, and distrusted the Socialists. In the wake of their ascendancy in 1981, he discerned in their policies, "in the medium term, the greatest menace that has weighed on our liberties for a long time." This was the immutable terroristic left that "with no light heart confessed the Bolshevik error, renounced the bloody repression of the class enemy, and admitted the superiority of the market over the administrative management of an instituted penury." Once the Socialist government, "which has a fondness for drinkers of blood in the present and the past, made the second centennial (of 1989) its affair," the fate of the commemoration was sealed: "In history, as in economy, they can be counted on, these people who bet only on falsehood."l9

Reading Chaunu Chaunu's portrayal of this brave new bicentennial world strains one's credulity, for it fashions a picture of a well-oiled juggernaut (logging in at 9. 9 on Chaunu's Richter scale of efficiency) imposing a stentorian message with heavy-metal ferocity and neo-Stalinist (Seguelian?) methods. It did not matter that the "official" state operation was in fact extremely modest in magnitude and extremely late in starting up, that there was very little democratic centralism either in its design or in its practice, that there was a surprising degree of spontaneity and local initiative untainted by central stimulus or direction, that the tone was rarely strident or clamorous, that the media were

46 Farewell, Revolution

to a large extent hostile or indifferent to the official celebration, and that until almost the last minute there were legitimate fears that the very discretion and dispersion of the commemoration would blemish France's international prestige. It is one thing not to like the commemoration; it is quite another to bloat it into monstrous proportions and invest it with quasi-coercive character. Chaunu fantasized the existence of a celebration which he feared, and which at the same time he desired, in order to confirm his prophecy-analysis. Ironically, his voice was far more shrill than that of the commemorators. zo There was a jolting incongruity between Chaunu's self-representation and his comportment. He portrayed himself by and large as a moderate, with an allergy for excesses. It is not clear: to what extent this self-portrait is sheer humbug, a blend of pathetic self-deception and shrewd discursive strategy, part of a larger project of using academic/ scientific credentials to legitimize and convey arguments rooted in antiscience and prejudice. If there is much to support Chaunu's temperate self-depiction in certain of his historical writings, when he dealt with the Revolution (and also with the issues surrounding French demographic stagnation, especially on the far right's Radio Courtoisie), his language and his claims were characteristically overdrawn and sometimes reckless. Given his relentlessly vituperative and vindictive manner of treating the Revolution and the Revolutionaries, it is stupefying to hear him proclaim that he is "for a pacified management of our past." Armed with an extraordinarily powerful analytical regard, even more than most of us Chaunu seemed utterly unable to direct it on himsel( "I prefer compromise, a fundamental element of social life," he wrote solemnly. Yet everything in his often violent discourse militated against transaction on moral, scientific, political, and psychological grounds. In contradistinction to his adversaries, whose ideological impulsions conditioned and indeed contaminated their historical reflection, Chaunu knew that "the goal of history is to testify to the truth and not to let oneself be carried away by political passions." But if one takes this profession of faith seriously, then one is obliged to read much ofChaunu's bicentennial production as self-parody and/ or self-delusion. He was rigorously unable to admit that he ceded to the same drives as his opponents. If he occasionally overreacted, it was in response to their "provocation." In order to repulse the enemy, on occasion he had to offer himself as a combat point man, to "defend an antithesis" against an official "thesis." If sometimes he went too far, he justified his intemperance in the name of an effusive patriotism that had not

47 Credo and Crusade

always served noble causes. "And if it happens that we get enraged, it is because we love [France] excessively and we want her to be always as beautiful and as pure as the Madonna of our childhood dreams," explained Chaunu, waving the flag in one hand and the Bible in the other. Passionate truth often induced passionate hatred. "I detest only hatred," proclaimed Chaunu, "tolerance comes to me naturally." (In his role on the national panel examining legislation on naturalization, the so-called nationality code, he proved it.) Yet in reference to Abbe Barruel he allowed that "hatred can render one lucid," and in the case of Mathiez he admired "the hatred [that] sustains." Though he censured it as a "principle of action" for the Jacobins, hatred seems to have been the drug that moved Chaunu to spit and to become nauseated in reaction to Carnot and Turreau. "Spontaneously on the side of the oppressed," he saw himself as both an underdog and a victim in the war against official lying and manipulation. The oppression that he felt he suffered for his beliefs-he identified with Furet as a "plague victim" -perhaps justified in his resister's mind the recourse to hatred, despite its doubtful efficacy.21 For the most part, however, Chaunu clung to the high ground of Truth through Science. Rather than the boisterous antithesis deployed to discredit the abominable thesis, he was the irenic synthesis. Implausibly situating himself above the fray, he embodied "modern science," which reminded the extremes of left and right that the Revolution was "neither Angel nor Devil, but Beast." While his antagonists were "Robespierrists," "Stalinists," "Socialists," or some other ideological excrescence, he, Chaunu, was "one of the fathers of quantitative history," a pioneering investigator on the cutting edge of modern research, a purveyor of truth pitted against the vendors of "the official lie." While their evidence was tainted, given his status, who could doubt that "the figures that I furnish in my book are indisputable?" (And in a world enamored of efficiency, who could doubt that quantified evidence was intrinsically closer to the truth than other evidence?) Admittedly, the truth was sometimes "aggressive," but it was the truth, and it had to be told. Chaunu's contribution to civic peace was to assert ("affirm" and "hammer") the truth against "the manichaean falsification of our common history." Once everyone subscribed to this truth, they would know how to "live togther better. " 22 In the end, what was Chaunu's impact on the bicentennial experience and what was its impact on his reputation? Through his columns in Le Figaro, the

48 Farewell, Revolution

host of interviews he gave to all the media, his multiple prefaces, and myriad other spoken or written texts, he probably reached more French men and women than any other bicentennial actor. No one worked harder than he to give voice to the counterrevolutionary position, and no one articulated it with more eloquence, ferocity, and persistence. Favored by his rhetorical talent, his message was enormously reinforced by his intellectual and institutional prestige (that of the Institut, but also of the Sorbo nne, much maligned by Chaunu himself). Chaunu took the traditional counterrevolutionary arguments and gave them a modern cast, drawing on a number of recent works for the illustration of particular points (Aftalion, Sedillot, Bluche, Fayard, etc.) and utilizing Furet to justify broad interpretative and epistemological claims, and to buttress his pretensions to impartiality and scientificity. Chaunu must have powerfully reassured thousands-perhaps tens of thousands-of conservatively inclined readers that the views they held were not mere prejudices or ideological artifacts, that their intuitions about the origins and the processes as well as the long-term outcomes of the Revolution were solidly grounded. Though he doubtless fortified the morale of the scholarly right, he had little to say to them that they did not already know and believe. (It is striking how completely Chaunu eclipsed the major specialists of his own persuasion in the Revolutionary field, such as Jean Tulard, his colleague at the SorbonneParis IV, who was remarkably absent from the public debate, albeit quite present in the bookshops. )2 3 His primary bicentennial clientele was the grand public, especially its more educated and prosperous fractions. He reached out beyond the rearguard, socially declining segments of the traditional right to the more dynamic and often younger members of the new notabilities in business, commerce, and the liberal professions. On the scholarly left and center-left, there were sharp criticisms of Chaunu, but perhaps fewer than one might have expected. Over the years, Chaunu had accumulated a great fund of goodwill. He had friends, admirers, and proteges on the left as well as on the right. Despite deep disagreements with his bicentennial agenda, there was a certain reluctance to attack him directly, one inspired by residual sympathy and discomfort (Chaunu had gone off the deep end) or fear (the snake who bit Chaunu died on the spot) or prudential realism (the bicentennial was a no-win situation).24 Max Gallo assailed him for his vehemently partisan approach, the fruit of ideological projection and refraction rather than the sort of critical inquiry which the professional historical canon demanded-and which Chaunu claimed to em-

49 Credo and Crusade

body. Daniel Bensald deplored the regression of this great respecter of historical complexity to a perspective that was naive, linear, and teleological. He called on Chaunu to problematize, historicize, and then explain the Revolution, not merely to anathematize it. The historian and editor Michel Winock rendered a crucial service to the curiously hushed galaxy by aggressively drawing the line of demarcation between Furet (whose stance he enthusiastically endorsed) and Chaunu. The latter was paranoid, given to fantasy, tendentious, tiresome, all heat and no light. Averting the critical historical questions (e.g., why did the French fail where the English and Americans succeeded?), "he contents himself with ranting and raving against his own genealogical tree, as if he were neither Protestant nor republican nor a partisan of liberal democracy." If Winock hastened to honor Chaunu as a true scholar and pioneer in historical research, it was "in order to grieve even more deeply over his fall: for a number of years the desire for knowledge has often ceded place within him to the excesses of an uncontrolled emotionalism." In what might have been the harshest rebuke, Joel Roman, a professor at an ecole normale and coeditor of Esprit, scoffed at Chaunu, in an effusively Furetian article, for having utterly failed at the most interesting challenge before him: to forge "another memory," a compelling alternative to the Revolutionary tradition. "No one can be made to believe," wrote Roman, "that the alarmed trumpetings of Pierre Chaunu could yield a single idea, even a counterrevolutionary one." 2 5

ViveleRoi

B

The Historian's Past: Furet's Itinerary

orn in 1927, Franyois Furet was the son of a successful banker, the director of a "small bank," the historian emphasized. The latter always viewed himself as belonging to the "moyenne bourgeoisie," but he passed in the university milieu, he noted somewhat resentfully, as a representative of the "haute bourgeoisie." Furet stresses the relatively unusual profile of his family: though unequivocally bourgeois, it was committed to the left, an exponent of the Popular Front, and pro- rather than antiSemitic. He attended Janson-de-Sailly, the chic lycee of one of the capital's most opulent quarters. He remembers "fighting" in the sixth and fifth forms to defend the left positions with which he already identified intellectually and personally (an uncle served for a time as minister of agriculture). Though still quite young, Furet was active in the Resistance ("I fought the end of the war"). The fact that he did not go on to become a normalien-a student at the prestigious school on the rue d'Ulm that recruits a large part of the nation's elite through its competitive entrance examination- still surprises many commentators, in light of Furet's obvious brilliance and combativeness. Instead he enrolled at the Sorbonne where his studies were interrupted by a very long stay in a sanatorium. Though the Furet of the 1960s was not by any means primordially fixed on the Revolution, he depicts himself retrospectively as relentlessly impassioned by the Revolution from 50

51 Vivele Roi

his days at Janson. His master's thesis-then called a diplOme d'itudes superieures-dealt with the social history of Paris during the Revolution. In 1954 Furet obtained his agregation, the usual prelude to a teaching career in the university or the finer lycees. A calling for teaching did not inflame him; he candidly avows that he never liked teaching, which he found both intimidating and exorbitantly expensive in time. His lack of pedagogical appetite may have nourished his alienation from the classical university world, a "cramped milieu" in which he never felt at home. Furet initially found shelter in the CNRS, France's behemoth research establishment, where he remained until Fernand Braude! sponsored his entry into the Sixth Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes as sous-directeur d'itudes in 1961. Though an institution of higher education that later lobbied for and obtained university status as the EHESS, it always stayed outside the conventional university framework and distanced itself from the regnant university ethos. Promoted to the equivalent of full professor in 1966, he directed the Centre de recherches historiques for a number of years, orienting it frankly in the direction of a lustily quantitative social history. He succeeded the great medievalist Jacques Le Goff as president of the Ecole in 1977, a post he held for eight years. Exchange agreements that he helped engineer enabled him to begin his continuing adventure in the United States, first at Princeton and later at the University of Michigan. A permanent part-time appointment at the University of Chicago ended his vagabond ways, and corresponded to the beginning of a process whereby he affirmed himself more as an individual luminary and less as a representative of an elite French institution. His golden parachute from the presidency of the EHESS consisted of a research center named after Raymond Aron that· was attached to the school but under his stewardship. 1 The "major experience" of his youth, in his own words, was his relatively brief, albeit intense, sojourn in the Communist party. He was hardly the first rich kid to join the party, but it probably constituted his first sustained contact with people drawn from a wide spectrum of French society. Emerging from the maquis, he felt strong sympathy for the Communists, probably less for the intrinsic allure of their ideology than because they were winners, they were the best. Furet's inclination was sincere, but it bespoke a certain elitist fascination with the efficacy of their leadership and their immediate and middle-term prospects. They were tough and resourceful, they knew

52 Farewell, Revolution

how to get things done, and they joined discipline with fervor. Yet"bizarrely," as he put it-he waited four years before joining the party. The postwar nationalist climate and the "surencheres" of the Resistance cooled Furet's militant ardor. He remembers having been troubled, even repelled by the national tendency to "efface" the national disaster "as if by magic." The Communists did not escape this inclination to mythicize politics. Later the historian would appreciate more keenly the perils of living on illusions, especially political ones. Still, Furet could only postpone for so long what "everyone" did. It was a quasi-obligatory passage for his whole generation, though this collective incentive/impulsion does not tell us much about individual thought and action. Even now this adversary of all ecological determinisms offers an externalist account of his entry into the party. "History" required him to choose and, all things considered, the choice at the time was "clear." Today Furet sees Communism as "the most powerful political experience of the twentieth century." It was nothing less than "the experience of religion in politics" -on this point he follows many fellow parishioners-and he recalls having evinced "a very strong belie(" He did not lead a characteristically militant life in the manner of the Kriegels or the Reberioux, except, he admits, during his years in the sanatorium. A number of friends remember that he was an exigent and merciless comrade during that period, as well as a union representative and vice president of an influential student organization; and he himself remarks that missionary engagement was "very useful for advancing the cure." For those who know the post-Communist Furet, the story of his sectarian jubilation upon reading the results of the agregation competition posted in the courtyard of the Sorbonne seems surreal. Surrounded by the comrades, he allegedly exclaimed: "We left a few places for the bourgeois." (This bourgeois-bashing may partly explain the ferocity of his subsequent anti-Communism, which carried a refrain of atonement that was perhaps partially directed toward his family, left in their political sympathies, to be sure, yet unremittingly bourgeois.) Whatever refraction retrospection produces, there is no doubt that Furet's Communist involvement deeply marked his later life, both affective and intellectual, and shaped his evolving view of the French Revolution. His participation in the party meant a firsthand acquaintance with the "political overinvestment" that fascinated and terrified in the Revolution and in other revolutions. Party sociability induced him to forge bonds that became the

53 ViveleRoi

most influential and durable of his life. The party cultivated his capacity and his taste for leadership, and trained him in techniques of organization and internal politicking that would prove priceless in future years. (Militant life also led tohis first skirmishes with Albert Soboul in the ideological arena.) With many others, in reponse to the Hungarian revolt and the Khrushchev report, Furet quit the party in 1956. In retrospect he hastens his departure, dating his "intellectual separation" from 1954-55 if not earlier, once the impact of Stalin's death registered and permitted a more "objective" perspective on his generation's "cryptoreligious" faith. If the intellectual choice to leave seemed as clear as that of joining had once appeared, psychological departure was not easy. More or less thick-skinned, Furet nevertheless was hurt by the harsh, accusatory climate of recrimination. He exited the party "on the left" rather than the right, a course likely to "pose less of a threat." This path took him through a militant phase in the PSU and a vigorous engagement over Algeria, powerful outlets for his activist energies. According to his friends, however, he was already showing signs in the early post-PCF days signs of a burgeonong "pragmatism" that would inexorably estrange him from the left. Given the intensity of the experience and the thickly lingering impact it has had and continues to have on his view of the world, the casual equanimity with which Furet speaks of his exit does not ring true. "I got out in good shape," he affirms, in contrast to others who either remained because of a "weakness of character" or who left, sooner or later, but "understood nothing." Over the course of the years, as new information emerged regarding Stalinist horrors and as Furet observed the impasses of leftist politics in France and elsewhere, he became increasingly intolerant and contemptuous of those who remained captive to the old myths. Thus, for example, the mixture of affection and reprobation he felt for his old mentor Ernest Labrousse, who remained till the end a "crypto-Communist."2 Unlike certain of his eminent colleagues, Fram,:ois Furet has not been forthcoming about his own past. Certainly this reticence does not bespeak a paucity of self-esteem: Furet clearly enjoyed his double rise to prominence, first within the professional microcosm and then in the larger public sphere. It may be the product of an understandable desire to hold the line on privacy, a line that seems to recede implacably as one achieves notoriety. There have been painful moments in his life on which he has no reason to dwell publicly, including his protracted and wearing bout with tuberculosis, his mother's

54 Farewell, Revolution

terribly premature death, his father's illness and tragic end, and a marriage that ended bitterly. Given the celebrity which the bicentennial assured the historian, it is unlikely that some writer is not already drafting a biography which will touch on these and other areas-unless Furet succeeds in confining such a work to a so-called intellectual biography. For it is a matter of doctrine among the Furet coterie-dubbed "the galaxy" -that the gaze beyond the discourse is neither relevant nor legitimate. To evoke the social in reference to historians was as unavailing and mystifying as it was in regard to history. Mona Ozouf, a galactic sentinel on the watch for this sort of intrusion/ aberration, rightly mocked as grotesque the occasional effort to disqualify Furet's views by adducing his (upper-)class origins. But is it fair to equate a sociological regard with a Marxizing one (even as Furet himself tended to conflate a social approach with a Marxizing one)? This was the suggestion of another Furet partisan, the historian and journalist Jacques Julliard, who contrasted two ways of accounting for opinions: a "history of individuals," which somehow excluded an examination of their social origins, and a sterile and culpable Marxist assumption that opinions "reflect the socioeconomic status of persons, in other words, their class situation." Ozouf had no more use for circumstances in explaining Furet's work than Furet had for them in explaining the Terror. Ideas were what mattered, she protested indignantly, and ideas had no need of an external contextual incubator in which to germinate and make sense. But was a sociological query any more "this old tactic of the dodger" than her own appeal to the lordly preeminence and sleek self-sufficiency of ideas? It was wholly gratuitous to intimate that the objective of a "social" question was "never to enter to the heart of an argument but to reconstitute the surroundings or, as they still say, 'the external conditions of production."' But the treacherous they are not all the same, and not the same as they have always been. They don't necessarily take their orders from Moscow, the place du Colonel-Fabien, or even the Sorbonne. Nor do they posit the conditions of production as external (the way Furet treats as externalities virtually everything that is not ideological). "In this case," persevered Ozouf, determined to keep mind and body apart, "thought, deprived of any autonomous agility, lies there, entirely captive to biography, to the moment, to power struggles, to objectives pursued, so shorn, so predictable, finally disarmed."3 All this strident rhetoric was voiced to disallow reflection on growing up a banker's son in the sixteenth arrondissement or on constructing interlocking

55 Vivele Roi

institutional and intellectual networks on the Left Bank. Why such acute anxiety? Why such an impoverishing retreat to an idealist redoubt? Why such stringent rules governing the permissible categories of analysis and debate? Of course Furet is correct to state that "one cannot explain everything by the exterior." But that does not mean that one can explain everything by a socalled interior. Why this refusal to historicize one's own position-that is, in part, to sociologize it? Why reduce sociology to class? Why exclude class? Why refuse to consider the possibility that one's sociocultural origins and trajectory matter? Does sociology, like political voluntarism, lead necessarily to monstrous lies and abuses? Or is it merely normal to resist sociology (as it is to resist psychoanalysis), it being impossible to tolerate the opening of one's social unconscious? Is the notion of habitus so compromising to one's intellectual integrity? Yet it helps powerfully to explain how our apparent sameness is mediated, undercut and transformed.

The Galaxy Though in some ways temperamentally quite solitary, Furet was rarely ever alone. Several of his longtime friends characterize him as a "chef de bande." He thrived in the midst of an entourage of bright and able people, who acknowledged his leadership. Furet himself called it his "team spirit." But he was never simply primus inter pares. He was manager and owner of the team as well as star player. "He has a natural authority that forces everyone to align their projects on his," remarked his friend Georges Kiejman, a lawyer and erstwhile Socialist minister. A blend of "generosity" and "a little authoritarianism" made him irresistible. 4 He was a master clientelist, deploying charisma, power, and patronage to construct a multitiered system of exchange relations that contained elements of feudalism, Jacobinism, and the kula ring. In return for a sort of foi et hommage, Furet accorded favor and protection. The bande was the nucleus of a larger complex that dilated to its fullest size when Furet presided over the EHESS and contracted in terms of actual population and assets, but not in its more diffuse holdings of sociocultural capital, in subsequent years. The bande itself was stratified by age, talent, function, and position. Far from static, it owed its sustained vitality to fresh infusions from below compensated by the graduation of former active members to emeritus rank as

56 Farewell, Revolution

allies rather than vassals. A handful of intimate friends, mostly contemporaries, enjoyed a special status as elders, operating within the bande but largely unconstrained by its hierarchy. Furet's bande prospered not only because of the quality of its recruitment. It benefited immensely from the institutional linkages forged by its leader, as well as from the less formal web of networks that he spun throughout the public sphere. The glare of the bicentennial limelight brought Furet's milieu to the attention of an ever-widening public. Detractors tended to exaggerate its magnitude and influence. Ironically, critics on the left imputed to it the sort of cabalistic efficacy and ubiquity that was more commonly associated with the antimodern prism through which the far right saw things. Yet its admirers also celebrated its putatively cell-like cohesion, tentacular grasp, and burgeoning influence. The already distended Furetian world (bande plus its multiple associates and diverse hinterland inhabitants) swelled into a "galaxy," a christening they probably owed toLe Monde's Pierre Lepape. Without prejudicing its interplanetary connections, the journalist had in mind the collaborators of the Dictionnaire critique, not all of whom were flattered by his denomination. Regis Debray proposed a definition more nearly commensurate with the grandiose label: Furet's "sphere of influence, his friends, his weekly, his school, his publishers, the press." The Nouvel Observateur was the weekly in which Furet had written for years. Once a fervently leftist journal, as the term itself lost meaning, it drifted in the same liberal direction as Furet, manifestly tarrying behind his accelerating rightward evolution but broadly in sympathy with his view. As its editorial director, LaurentJoffrin, put it, the Nouvel Observateur believed that "French society is behind and must catch up with the evolution of the Western democracies." Nor was Furet the only member of the Observateur team to buck to the right. Joffrin's predecessor, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, jumped spectacularly to the conservative, Hersant-run Le Figaro, whose pages he opened to Furet. Furet welcomedJoffrin and Giesbert to his clubby Fondation Saint-Simon along with international businessmen such as Alain Mine who also appeared frequently in the Observateur. The foundation catapulted the historian into an arena where few French intellectuals tread. It made him into a singular broker between thinkers and doers, between very different sorts of marketplaces, each with enormous influence in society. A number of Saint-Simonians contributed to Pierre Nora's weighty bimonthly review of opinion, Le Dibat. After considerable resistance, Furet was able to win the election of Le Debat's

57 Vivele Roi

editor, philosopher Marcel Gauchet, to the Ecole des hautes etudes, where Nora, Furet's former brother-in-law, also professes. The most prestigious house in France, Gallimard is one of a number of publishers with which Furet has connections. Nora presides over much of its social science and historical domain, employing, among others, Jacques Revel, a vigorously independent-minded scholar with extremely close personal ties to Furet.s The galaxy found sympathetic allies on its perimeter with whom it engaged in mutually profitable e~changes. Among them, for instance, were a number of well-placed admirers who practiced a kind of political-science history. They had suffered painfully during the Annates' long reign (of terror?): their kind of work did not command inordinate respect. Through his ascension-conversion, Furet, as philosophical superego, gave them a belated legitimacy and intellectual comfort. Contemporary historians Jean-Pierre Rioux, who often wrote reviews in Le Monde, and Michel Winock, consulting editor of L'Histoire, acquisitions editor in history for the Seuil publishing house, and a contributor to L'Evenement duJeudi, forgot neither their affinity nor their indebtedness. These connections represent only the tip of the iceberg, and bespeak the immense adroitness with which Furet operated. It was meager consolation to remind those who felt excluded or victimized by it that the galaxy, for all its effulgence, did not enjoy a corner on the intellocratic and communications markets. Doubtless some of them held the galaxy partly responsible for what philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called generically "the progressive gangsterization of intellectual life, that is to say, the constitution of a publishing and press nomenklatura that makes all the decisions on the criteria of pure chumship in certain media." Bespeaking the jealousy of the decaying university and the wounded civism of the Jacobino-republicans, the historian and professor Claude Nicolet described a machine-cabal that controlled access to positions of intellectual and sociocultural leverage in the media and the world of research and higher education. With the Ecole des hautes etudes as fulcrum, the system "operates absolutely like the Communist party in Russia," but ideologically "to the benefit of Giscard or French Orleanism. "6 If Furet objected to the idea of having his own galaxy, he articulated his displeasure very sheepishly. He himself defined the galaxy in terms of the scholars who had gravitated toward him, who shared with him a "complicity of the mind." Most of them were part of the Dictionnaire project. "They owe me nothing," he asserted, implausibly-the very demurral suggests the

58 Farewell, Revolution

contrary-"but the question of the origins of democracy impassions all of them." That common preoccupation and the astral "air du temps" -one of Furet's most favored and most feeble concepts-galvanized them as a group. If the Dictionnaire team was representative of the personnel of the larger galaxy, then it is clear that it was less homogeneous and monolithic than is often suggested. Only two collaborators, Patrick Gueniffey and Ran Halevi, were Furet's own students, among the relatively few he trained: the EHESS had not turned into the dominant graduate school that it had the vocation to become. These two and seven others claimed affiliation with the Institut Raymond Aron. Though they constituted the inner circle, two thirds of them had primary ties with other institutions, including the CNRS and the EHESS. Along with Furet, they were collectively responsible for the bulk of the articles. Of the remaining contributors, two, Marcel Gauchet and Keith Baker, are very close to Furet personally and ideologically. David Bien is close personally but not ideologically, and Patrice Higonnet shares an ideological affinity but not a fast friendship. 7 Others had differences with Furet of various sorts. Joseph Goy was a selfdescribed "unconditional friend," but he served in Lionel Jospin's cabinet in the Ministry of National Education and quarreled mightily with many of Furet's political and ideological assumptions. A Socialist, Louis Bergeron was neither a close friend nor a fellow traveler. Nor did long-standing friendship and connivance at the EHESS imply Jacques Revel's endorsement of Furet's worldview as historian or citizen. Bernard Manin, who has since joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, wrote articles on Rousseau and Montesquieu that pleased neither Furet nor his coeditor, Mona Ozouf. Though bound in myriad inextricable ways, Furet and Denis Richet, the author of eight articles, had complicated and often conflictual relations. Richet protested vigorously his reduction to the status ofFuretian satellite. "I never belonged to any 'galaxy,"' he wrote in a piece in the Nouvel Observateur, the paper into which he had long ago introduced his friend and brother-inlaw Furet. As for the burden of responsibility for launching the Gallican branch of the revisionist crusade, Richet invited readers to consult the attribution of authorship of the critical chapters in La Revolution franyaise that he wrote with Furet in the 1960s: "They will see that it was I who led the battle against the Soboulean concepts." A peerless specialist in the history of the sixteenth century, he agreed with Furet on the necessity for a long-run

59 Vive le Roi

framework, which he would have extended considerably further back in time. But Richet reproached him caustically for privileging "the intellectual (rather scorning the diffusion in the schools, children's books, images, albums, etc.) in relation to the sociocultural." "I regret it," he concluded, in words heavy with hurt rather than jealousy or rancor, "and I have no desire to have wrestled with Soboul in order to end up with Daniel Mornet." Richet seemed to be pointing toward the kind of criticism adumbrated by the American historian Lynn Hunt and later developed by the French scholar Roger Chartier. His remarks were too cursory, however, to permit one to situate clearly his line of thought.S From an American perspective, the relegation of Mona Ozoufto the status of bicentennial lady-in-waiting appears astonishing. For television cultural impresario/tastemaker Bernard Pivot, as for the bulk of the popular media, she barely seemed to exist. Scholars, including those noted for their scrupulousness, slipped easily into the habit of referring to Furet's Dictionnaire, reflecting and reinforcing the media spotlight on Furet.9 Those familar with the project know that the Dictionnaire was as much Ozouf's project as Furet's. Nor was it a simple task of transforming congealed galactic sociability into print. The Dictionnaire went through at least three incarnations, and Ozouf participated as decisively as Furet in the conception of each. A global study of the historiography of the bicentennial period would surely consecrate a substantial section to Ozouf in her own voice: while she sang in harmony with Furet, she preserved her own inflections. Such a study might also reveal the longer-term influence that she exercised over Furet's thinking, especially about philosophical issues on which she was an expert, on his increasing interest in abstract ideas, and on his burgeoning metahistorical inclination. On the bicentennial stage of historians, however, Ozouf simply did not play a major autonomous role. Furet expropriated her surplus value; or, rather, she was assimilated to Furet more or less imperceptibly and universally. Arguably, Ozoufhad not played cumulatively nearly as considerable a role as Furet in launching the revisionist current in France. Her first book on the Revolution did not appear until more than a decade after the Furet-Richet text, and she was not intimately involved in the clashes with the Sobouleans. 10 Celebrated as the expert on Revolutionary festival making, and widely esteemed as a cultural/philosophical commentator (publishing regularly in Le Nouvel Observateur and occasionally in Le Debat ), Ozouf exercised substantial influ-

60 Farewell, Revolution

ence in her own name in the protracted debate over the nature of commemoration and the forms it should take. Ozouf (and her historian-husband Jacques) and Furet have been bound for years by unflinching personal and intellectual ties (by an "indestructible reciprocal fidelity," as Mona Ozouf recently put it). Why Furet made so little public effort to grant her her full due remains unclear. Ozouf herself did not actively resist her own relative eclipse: she was as unpretentious in the public arena as she was trenchant in the intellectual forum. She did not maneuver for a crown. Had gender been a serious issue in French public life, this asymmetrical reception could not have occurred-at least not quietly.

Coronation Royal space was even more gratifying than outer space. Characterizing his power as "at once vast and discreet," the Nouvel Observateur proudly crowned Furet "the uncontested king of the bicentennial," and a large part of the press bowed in reverence. In early 1989 L'Evenement duJeudi conducted a poll of seven hundred French intellectuals to find out who was considered the stoutest in their midst. Anthropologist-academician Claude Levi-Strauss shared first place with cultural broker and television personality Bernard Pivot. Furet-"who until the bicentennial swung into view had hardly been a household name," the New York Times remarked in quaintly American terms-captured second (technically, third) place. Le Monde used a sociological and ideological analysis to explain how he became "master of the terrain" and "the unique reference," invoking, among other factors, the perfect timing of his (continued) assault on the Marxist exegesis, the fit with the "new intellectual climate," and the skill of his promotional strategy: "One sees only him, one hears only him, one reads only him, one swears by only him." Furet himself did not fundamentally disagree with this reading. Explaining his stunning bicentennial success, he remarked: "I arrived at the right time and I fathomed things early on." Not content to reach his subjects through the national media, he traversed the country, giving scores of talks before "huge audiences, everyone except the Communists." The latter, and certain of their Jacobin friends in the non-Communist left, regarded Furet as

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a royal tyrant by way of media usurpation, and thus subject to justifiable regicide. 11 Though exalted for his sustained revisionist effort over the years, Furet's crowning bicentennial achievement was the Dictionnaire critique de Ia Revolution franfaise, coedited with Mona Ozouf. Despite its thousand pages of sometimes quite arid and recondite substance, it sold tens of thousands of copies, in French and in rapidly issued translations. It consisted of ninetynine articles, many of them genuine essays rather than capsule reference entries. Twenty-two scholars collaborated with the editors, but between them Furet and Ozouf accounted for almost half of the volume. Denying any E/ encyclopedic pretension, the editors nevertheless identified their work with the dictionary genre of the Enlightenment, which used a key-word repertory and cross-references in order to demarcate "the advancement in scholarship, but probably even more the displacement of the questions asked." Beyond the ritual self-denying clause loomed an ambition far beyond merely asking new questions. The Dictionnaire's deeper kinship with the Enlightenment lay precisely in its determination to transform the very categories and methods of analysis and in so doing to change the way people think about the originary moment in the history of modern France. Their system was at once open and closed. They proclaimed (in their preface and, more significantly, before the cameras of Apostrophes) that they wanted to introduce doubt. The aim of many articles, however, was manifestly to allay it by making a case more or less unequivocally. Even as the information furnished by the articles (re)opened the inquiry, so the message in which it was framed closed it. They stressed a desire to respect the persistently "enigmatic" character of the Revolution and its "strangeness," which both mediated and guaranteed the rigor of their approach. Yet at the same time they promised to demystify, to strip away layers of distortion and untruth, to reclaim potent, albeit forgotten, insights, to excavate toward the core. "Critical" was their slogan and program: "the adjective excludes the dogmatism of the closed system." Unlike the R/revolution about which they wrote, the task of research in which they were engaged was "interminable." The preface that opened the book and riveted the pledge of openness spoke in more moderate and ecumenical tones than characterized either Furet's previous discourse or many of the articles in the Dictionnaire. To the worn thesis of the rising bourgeoisie and the concept of class struggle, the editors ac-

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corded a certain quotient of "pertinence" and "fecundity," though they still viewed class in one-dimensional and purely economic terms, thus guaranteeing that its use in the study of the Revolution would lead "to logical impasses." The governing "critical" premise of the Dictionnaire remained the idea that "what turns on its head between 1787 and 1800 is not the substance of society: it is its principles and its government." This position required, and in a sense resulted from, the rejection of the view of the Revolution-as-bloc, "the last recourse of a Jacobin historiography on the defensive." (In fact, during the bicentennial the right brandished the bloc more than the left; the leading Marxists scrupulously avoided it.) Furet and Ozouf argued that the bloc, a concept borrowed from Revolutionary discourse itself, stultified research and reflection. To close, one had to open; to attain conceptual unityanother sort of bloc-one first had to accommodate pullulating diversity: "Before thinking the Revolution as a unity, one must measure the disparities, the discordances, even the contradictions, and not overlook the chancy or uncertain factors: this is the task of a critical inventory." What seemed to be a willingness to accommodate intractable social reality and "circumstances," however, proved to be little more than a rhetorical flourish. The bloc mentality underlined, in the eyes of the editors, the danger of the commemorative reflex that Furet had decried so effectively in the attack on the "revolutionary catechism in the 1970s." To be sure, they subscribed to the relativist doctrine that it was "the relation of the present to the past which gives its profoundness to all history." (Here there was none of the posturing about neutrality and objectivity that Furet indulged in elsewhere.) But the unavoidable and potentially fructifying exchange (and tension) between present and past must not degenerate into "blackmail of unconditional piety and forced devotion." While the Dictionnaire found itself in a commemorative conjuncture, it would not submit to "this emotional bond" that orchestrated the febrile and joyous gatherings of sons around their mother in 1889 and 1939 and that made of the Revolution not only a heritage to honor "but to relive in order to continue it." The revisionist political analysis explained (or predicted) this Jacobin atavism: inscribed in the behavioral pattern of 1789, whose centrality as the laboratory for the whole Revolution the Dictionnaire restituted, this originary fervor was bound to condition the thinking and feeling of those who continued to identify with the founding moment and

63 Vivele Roi

message. As Furet and Ozouf had tirelessly argued throughout the 1980s, celebration and comprehension were incompatible undertakings. The political framed the Dictionnaire in a broader sense. Its axis was the passion to fathom democracy that had, according to Furet, galvanized the galaxy. With this objective in mind, it was fruitless to attempt to seize the Revolution directly, in a retrospective leap that would take one instantaneously from 1989 to 1789. "The two hundred years that separate us from 1789 involved events that we must now once again traverse in order to approach that year and comprehend it. But it is precisely these events that rendered more urgent certain of our questions concerning the French Revolution," wrote the editors. This displacement of the analytical framework, this insertion of the Revolution into the longrun of its own (posthumous but living) itinerary-patrimony, is one of the most significant dimensions ofFuretian revisionism, the one that distinguishes it most sharply from its AngloAmerican kin. The Revolution could not be estranged from what followed; it was hard to resist the temptation of thinking that it engendered directly or indirectly everything that ensued. The refracting events of the nineteenth century, while they elicited extremely telling commentary from contemporary philosophical observers, paled in importance in comparison to the "novel form of despotism" that emerged early in the next century. Thus Furet and Ozouf gingerly prepared their readers for the enigma of enigmas: the connection between the Enlightenment/Revolution and the gulag. They conceded that democracy does not "necessarily entail a swerving toward totalitarian society." But the very phrasing of the proposition sounded the tocsin and revealed the decisive lesson which drove their own liberalism and which shaped their reading of the Revolution-as matrix of the unthinkable rather than mother of sweet dreams. Put more antiseptically, the experience of the twentieth century "makes us more attentive to the possibilities of a disruption of democratic politics and more alert to its despotic potentialities." Whether in the eighteenth or the twentieth century, contended Furet and Ozouf, there was acute peril in a political system "where the representation of the sovereign people is conceived as indivisible and all-powerful." As political commentators, the editors seemed to be impelled by a mission and a penitential need to exorcize the dangers that still lurked in the legacy. Beyond their own Communist sins, they assumed the existential burden of the horrors of the twentieth century of

64 Farewell, Revolution

which we are all a part. The penitential goad encouraged the slide from history to metahistory: whereas a historical inquiry was unlikely to reveal significant connections between French Revolutionary democracy and twentieth-century totalitarian democracy, the denunciation of a common logic would canonize their kinship. Serenity as well as anguish marked the begetting of the Dictionnaire. If there were worms in the democratic apple from the very beginning, the French variety had finally evolved toward a stable and productive maturity. It had done so precisely to the extent to which the Revolution had receded. Profound transformations in French political culture, reinforced by gradual but massive social restructuring, vigorous economic growth, and changes in the international landscape, had freed the nation from the prison of its own exceptionality. France now enjoyed unity around an institutional consensus that the republican tradition itself could not have tolerated. By forging a monarchical republic, de Gaulle's introduction of a presidency based on direct universal suffrage reconciled the Old Regime and the Revolution. Along with a weakened legislature, an American-style system of judicial review completed the new system of checks and balances, dispersing the power of the sovereign people and thus guaranteeing liberty. This "triple break with the republican orthodoxy" made Furet a demo crate heu-reux! This postexceptionalist vision infused the Dictionnaire, which produced another R/revolutionary history for another time. The entries in the Dictionnaire fell under five broad rubrics. First, "Events," which included quasi-structural reflexes that punctuated the whole period ("revolutionary days") and protracted, complicated episodes (the Terror, the Vendee). Even the ostensibly singular, delimited moments, such as the night of 4 August, cast a long shadow, one that stretched at least as far as 1793 and arguably hovered over the Napoleonic Codes. Second, "Actors," construed as either collective (monarchiens, sansculottes, Thermidoreans) or individual (Condorcet, Danton; Robespierre). They circumscribed the number of individuals, the editors explain in the preface, because it would have been impossible to adhere to a rational principle of selection beyond their "first circle" of protagonists. To Bernard Pivot's television audience Furet explained that there were no "very great men," that it was the event itself of the Revolution that dwarfed everyone-with the exception of Bonaparte, "the only great one," the only person who came close to controlling the Revolution. Third, "Institutions and Creations," chosen either because they

65 Vivele Roi

revealed "the spirit of the Revolution," presumably in both its prefectoral and its Cochinesque inflections (clubs, Revolutionary religion, the Commune de Paris), or because they still constituted the granite blocks of French daily existence (departments, the civil code, suffrage). The last two categories were unquestionably the most important and the most controversial. "Ideas" comprised words used by the Revolution-Furet is comfortable with this anthropomorphism, despite the fact that it suggests a factitious unity-"to name itself and to designate its adversary" (Revolution, . Old Regime and, more incongruously, given their existence-in-life apart from their representation, aristocracy and fiodalite); words used to "define its stakes and its principles" (sovereignty, rights of man, constitution); words used to "acknowledge its debt" (Enlightenment); and words used to "greet its innovations" (regeneration, republic). Furet and Ozouf insisted that by privileging ideas they were not by any means indifferent to lived action: "the ideas with which we are concerned here are not a matter of a purely conceptual debate. They are put to work in institutions and in practices." This defensiveness points directly to one of the signal and pervasive weaknesses of the Dictionnaire. Too frequently it takes refuge in abstraction; it explores practice, appropriation, and reception too rarely and too perfunctorily. Too often it is indifferent to the reality on the ground or, in the archaic manner of the old law-school theses, it extrapolates that reality from various discourses (speeches, prescriptive texts, etc.). "Commentators and Historians" constituted the final category. This may be the most original and the most heuristically valuable section, and the one . in which the editors feel most at home. It consecrates individual essays to the best in French historiography (the giants of the nineteenth century); it relegates the worst (the pygmies of the twentieth century) to a single bulk entry. Aside from a cultural parochialism and a certain deficit of pure intelligence, the latter suffered immune-deficiency problems that left them helplessly submerged in both ideology and the academic scientism of their time. The former were not all of the same titanic stature or influence, but they were all interesting and imaginative in their own ways. Beyond the seventeen "historian" articles, historiography infiltrated virtually all of the entries in the other sections of the book. This common fixation issued from the shared conviction that the majority of the most pertinent and profound questions-to use Furet's languagewere first articulated quite early, beginning with Edmund Burke in 1790; and

66 Farewell, Revolution

that the success1ve "sedimentations," often crystallized by one historian working through the work of his predecessor(s)-until the positivist philistines repudiated the philosophical chain before the turn of the centuryprovided decisive epiphanous moments of insight and exegesis. Furet and Ozouf proposed a historiographical law of relative propinquity: "The constitution of Revolutionary historiography undercuts the received truth according to which the knowledge of an event is all the more 'true' as the event is distant." The itrangete posited as necessary for scholarly penetration today either was not needed then or was not compromised by proximity to the event. Furet's article on university historians will make it clear how much more the galaxy values what the editors call the lyrically "noncumulative" dimension of historical knowledge to the prosaically "cumulative." 12 The architecture and the construction of the Dictionnaire have been subjected to stringent critique, much of it reasonable, some of it curmudgeonly or merely vapidly aggressive. Claude Langlois drew up a bill of indictment with which historians of very different allegiances could have agreed: Absent, then, are the social actors: no nobility, barely an aristocracy; no clergy, no bourgeoisie; neither peasants nor artisans, still fewer women . . . Absent also a history that begins from far back or below, the history of constraints, the weight of men, the condition of roads, the yield of grain . . . Absent also art and science ... Present but marginalized, economic and financial history ... Marginalized also was Revolutionary geography . . . The Revolution itself was marginalized in its stereotypical image: the event, violence that is blind or hard to channel, the little people who pass by: the Revolutionary journees are barely noted.

Langlois insists quite rightly that these choices were for the most part deliberate, though it is obvious that no single volume, whatever its guiding logic, could have encompassed all the elements that plausibly belonged. He reproached the Dictionnaire for its idealist thrust, the predominance of the philosophical over the political in the foundation of the whole enterprise, and more generally, the ahistorical character of much of the discussion. Langlois viewed the text as estranged from (what he called anthropological rather than social or cultural) realities and indifferent to a mass of cumulative knowledge or erudition, French and foreign, which had been especially rich during the

67 Vive le Roi

previous two decades but which reached back to Georges Lefebvre's resuscitation of the peasants. 13 Philippe Gut, from Soboul's shop, reiterated many of Langlois' complaints, despite his very different orientation. He deplored the absence of Marcel Reinhard, Soboul's forgotten predecessor, and a pioneer in the religious and military history of the Revolution, as well as the neglect ofJacques Godechot, a comparatist and Atlanticist, Labrousse, and Soboul. He denounced the lack of peasants, the disdain for economic and social forces, the focus on disincarnate ideas, and the boycott of major figures such as Talleyrand, Gregoire, and Saint-Just (Mona Ozouf recalls ulcerating over the latter's case). Gut is passably cogent until he ventures to explain the choices of the editors in pathetically reductive terms, imputing them to "the social category" to which they belonged and in whose service they were indentured. A new wave Jacobin, who describes herself as a leftist Catholic, more nuanced yet more effectively withering than the Communist militant from the Sorbonne, Elisabeth G. Sledziewski also condemned the idealist/ ideological character of the selection system and the content of the Dictionnaire. Her critique of the treatment of ftodalite, however, transcends the boundaries of any one historiographical school: "Instead of saying: careful, the feudal system is also an idea and not only a concrete base of social relations of production; instead of showing that the political domain and ideology are social reality as much as the famous infrastructures; in a word, instead of showing the inanity of a reductive materialism, the Furetian method consists in saying that feudalism is only an idea, in denying any reality to the agrarian structures that remain intact even after its abolition."14

The Royal Part of the Bicentennial Bible Furet himself wrote twenty-two articles, many of them overlapping and complementary, all of them linked by the same revisionist preoccupations. Methodologically, they share a number of predictable traits. Most are steeped in historiography. For reasons that we will explore later, Furet prefers to deal with history through the prism of historiography. Beyond rendering the task more manageable, this framework permits him to serve as a sort of arbiter, to exercise the critical spirit most economically and trenchantly. In his cost-

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benefit calculus, he regards the price of his estrangement from lived experience as trivial. In pursuit of meaning, he finds that neither positivism nor materialism can serve his needs, for at best they issue in imperfect description rather than interpretation. Faithful to a metahistorical relation with the nineteenth century, Furet's concerns are ultimately philosophical. The Dictionnaire constitutes a critical inventory of what has been thought rather than of what is known or needs to be known about given historical questions. Constant, Stael, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Quinet are as much the protagonists of the entry "Terror" as the actors themselves; and the latter are drawn from a narrow spectrum of the Revolutionary landscape. Furet not only uses the philosopher-historians for conceptual direction and dialogue, he also cites them as witnesses of what passes as history, without concern for their credentials. Furet makes the Michelet national do work for him as a historian that he is not necessarily competent to do, despite the marvel of his prose. Michelet affords him more credibility than, say, Quinet, because he used archival materials and because he largely diverges from the line Furet espouses (though certain of Michelet's positions are patently congenial to Furet, even if he arrives at them for reasons Furet does not share: his celebration of '89, his rejection of a fundamental break between '89 and '93, his ferocious imputation of fanaticism to the Jacobins, his refusal to see popular action in terms of class predestination). Precisely because they do not depend on externalities-onhistory on the ground-Furet's essays on the great nineteenth-century writers, probing and opinionated, are the most impressive part of his contribution. The strength of certain problem pieces, such as "Ancien Regime," resides in Furet's brilliant practice of the classical history of ideas, a practice deeply imbued with the historiographical sensibility. In this essay (as in others, among them the one on the Terror), he is keenly if not chiefly interested in the changing construction of the political imaginary across time. What matters in the stimulating discussion of the Old Regime is not Tocqueville's or Burke's reading of history but the history (and use) ofTocqueville or Burke in French consciousness. A number of essays underline Furet's disproportionate interest in what is said rather than in what is done. In the entry called "Feodalite," Furet concerns himself not with the practice of "feudal" relations in social life but with the conceptual relation between the political and the social in an essentially Tocquevillean grid. He concentrates on representation, as if its referent

69 Vivele Roi

were either transparent or irrelevant. "Everything is said by the beginning of August, with 'the abolition of the feudal regime.'" The tout est dit presumes-gratuitously and unproblematically-the tout est foit. Preoccupied with the rhetorical radicality of the dire, Furet is largely indifferent to the complex and onerous working out of the foire, site of the frictions that constitute social reality. The crucial matter is ideological: the corrosive insinuation of unbridled individualism, symbolized and conveyed by the destruction of the feudal regime, which Furet affirms is tantamount to the destruction of the old social order in its entirety. IS The father of the Dictionnaire rehearses the same theme with the same abstract, philosophical conceit in the entry on the night of 4 August. Exclusively concerned with the concept of radical rupture, Furet evinces no interest in concrete practice and application, despite the promise made in the preface. By proclaiming the utter annihilation of the old society, Furet forecloses a great deal of conflict-that is to say, a great deal of history. The message is that since the show is essentially over by the end of August-at least according to any rational litmus-then the rest of the Revolution is superfluous. But ifFuret is right in reproaching Socialist historiography with having underestimated the significance of 4-5 August, he is certainly equally guilty of the inverse. For the vast majority of French citizens, the August decrees were not a done deal: the guilds, one of the mainstays of the corporate structure, were not abolished, and peasants were mired in a muddy delta of residual constraints that made a mockery of their emancipation as individuals. Many of the other decrees required elaborate negotiations-social as well as juridical, open-air, flesh-and-blood transactions as well as those effected in the eighteenth-century equivalent of smoke-filled rooms. Teleological impatience rather than historicizing scrutiny enables Furet to make metonymic magic, to take the harbinger for the outcome it (contingently) portends. 16 Similarly, in "Jacobinisme" Furet works high off the ground, comforted exclusively by his conceptual net. Michelet leads the way with sweeping generalizations that Furet embraces uncritically (e.g., by 1793 the popular Revolution is over and the people have gone home). There is no meticulous work looking at the operation of the Jacobin system, its network of correspondence, or the methods of communication and the practices of reception (viewed from the periphery toward the center, or from the periphery toward the periphery, rather than merely from the top down). Furet proceeds as if it

70 Farewell, Revolution

is up to the (sometimes exasperatingly recalcitrant) reality to defer to the concept. Extrapolating from Ostrogorski and Cochin, for instance, Furet depicts an implausibly efficient machine, almost flawless in its operation (the specifics of which are overlooked). The insidious smoothness of Jacobin tyranny facilitates the task of demonizing its authors. Michelet provides the decisive label-fanaticism-which Furet uses again and again. Either Furet turns to Michelet for a psychological portrait (e.g., the Jacobin reliance on faith rather than reason), or, in emulation of the procedure for which he denounced the latterday Jacobino-Marxist historians, he takes to be true what a handful of Parisian Jacobins said. Jacobin behavior mattered infinitely less than (a part of) their discourse and the discourse on that discourse. Not surprisingly Furet's article conflates a handful of Jacobin oligarchs with the Revolution in its intractable untidiness, confuses Jacobins and sansculottes, and mixes up state violence with popular violence. 17 Furet confronts the Terror directly in two articles. The first, called "Revolutionary Government," is a circumspect piece in which he retreats from some of the audacious positions he had taken earlier. In the second, "Terror," he reaffirms some of those positions, albeit in much less strident tones. In the first essay, he debunks the thesis of circumstances-Benjamin Constant had already liquidated Mathiez century before the latter wrote-but nevertheless is careful to accord a genuine if quite limited place to their play. He frames much of the discussion with an examination of the various schools of interpretation, identifying with the liberal and (especially) the libertarian strains, implicitly according some merit (for coherence) to the Maistrean line, and expressing distaste for what became the Communist exegesis, in which the hatred for the bourgeoisie and for money went hand in hand with disdain for the formal rights and procedures of democracy. Furet entertains no doubt that means other than those of "revolutionary government"-far less brutal and less costly-could have attained the goal of saving the Revolution from immolation. But he does not argue that the Terror was a necessary product of '89, and he closes on a heuristic rather than a polemical note, emphasizing the richness of the Revolution as a field for reflection on "the ambiguities of modern democracy." It is hard not to read in "Revolutionary Government" hints of the recentrage that Furet's critics charged him with effectuating in order to meet the ideological demands of the bicentennial. IS The vintage (1970s) Furetian themes take on a more vigorous life in "Terror," though here too he self-consciously tempers his voice. Before it

a

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crystallized into a set of repressive institutions, the Terror was "a trait of mentality characteristic of revolutionary activism." It flourished as early as 1789, nourished by the systematic overestimation of the adversary-asconspiracy, a collective neurosis that Furet denounces without naming and whose source he locates "in the new political culture." Here, as in the entry on the Maximum, a Tocquevillean perspective of continuity might have served him better than his fascination with the newness of that culture heralded by the actors themselves. Surely the "roots" of the plot persuasion are deeply planted in the Old Regime, as were the roots of the claims for a right to existence, the social contract of subsistence. The essay begins with this somewhat vague psychologizing about a mentality that opens the path to abominable surencheres. It ends with a more sharply drawn argument about conditions being fully ripe in '89 for the production of the ideology of Terror. A reality independent of circumstances, this ideology consisted of three strains of ideas. First, the need for regeneration in order to overcome the perversions of the past and to furnish the stuff for a religion of revolution. Second, the conviction that "politics can do everything," the source of revolutionary fanaticism and voluntarism (which in Furet's view congealed quickly into a "tradition" and attained its "extreme point" in Babouvisme) and, ultimately the most serious peril to liberal democracy, the link to the gulag, which Furet studiously avoids adducing here. Third, the notion of the people in place of the king, implying the exercise of unchecked power (royal sovereignty having adumbrated popular sovereignty, following the Tocquevillean insight) and supposing a unity of the people that excluded the pluralism of representation. Given the primacy of ideology, present from the very outset, circumstances were of secondary significance. Furet is more categorical in his diminution of their role here than in "Revolutionary Government," though he does not dismiss them out of hand as he appears to do elsewhere. Although it is clearly subordinate to his case for a preexisting logic of terrorism, he ventures a chronological argument in order to demonstrate the fallacy of the appeal to circumstances. He contends that the dire threats had dissipated long before the Terror reached its paroxysm. As we shall observe later, his argument is predicated on an obliviousness to the psychological dimension and to the problem of time lags in lived experience. News was not transmitted by CNN in 1793-94; and, once received, no news was sufficiently certain to allay fears that it could be reversed. The world was not nearly as (objectively)

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serene as Furet wants it to be. He supposes the same sort of ethnocentric rationality here that he deploys in his entry on the Maximum ("this absurd mechanism"). Furet's essay called "Vendee" makes the same case that circumstances cannot absolve the Terror for atrocities that were nothing other than the fruit of Revolutionary ideology. Here as much as anywhere in Furet's Revolutionary landscape, language commanded action, the dire issued ineluctably in the foire: the "rhetoric of extermination" resulted in a harvest of massacres. No one any longer seriously questions the fact that the republic terrorized the Vendee with unwonted brutality; and Furet was right to castigate Jacobin historians for averting or distorting the truth for so long. It remains highly questionable, however, whether historians will be satisfied to neglect all the connections that constituted something approximating the complex business of causality and responsibility in favor of the assertion that the discourse accounted for everything. While acknowledging the value of restoring the religious variable to causal status, they will argue over Furet's flat dismissal of the social: "Everything shows, moreover, that the principal motivating force of the Vendeen revolt is religious, and not social or simply political."l9 Furet is as interested in the Terror after the Terror as he is in the thing in itself. Beyond the rough chronology, his treatment is extraordinarily summary, according to a sort of historiographical Law of22 Prairial. The heritage of the Terror fascinates Furet because it poisoned the political life of nineteenth-century France and decisively shaped the thinking and writing of history. The republicans finally managed to vanquish their own demons as they installed themselves in the last decades of the century, having unequivocally exorcised the guillotine. "One has to await the Bolshevik graft and the development of a Communist extreme left," wrote Furet, with a rare display of the sort of spleen that marked his earlier writings, "in order for the cult of the Terror, associated with that of Robespierre, to install itself in the twentieth century as a matter of revolutionary necessity and to thrive for a half century in the shadow of the Soviet example."20

Furet's Long Revolution Fran~ois Furet enriched the royal bicentennial treasury with a second book for which he was solely responsible. In its first two months, this costly five-

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hundred-page volume is said to have sold an astounding eighty thousand copies, further testimony to Furet's majestic status. It was part of the sumptuously illustrated, prestigious collection published by Hachette under the general title "History of France." Three of France's most distinguished historians, Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Maurice Agulhon, joined Furet in the enterprise, which covered the period from 987 to 1987. Although Hachette renounced the idea of marketing the series this way, initially it was conceived as a self-consciously political history, a collective effort to celebrate the triumphant return of the political to the foreground of historiographical concerns. In this regard, it was a vehicle particularly well-suited for Furet.ZI There were no surprises in the first two words of the title of his volume: "La Revolution." The last two elements of the title, "1770-1880," announced the striking originality of Furet's conception. Emerging from the absolutist-aristocratic Old Regime and containing the vP.nom which poisoned the politics of the nineteenth century as well as the seeds of democratic promise which ultimately flowered, the Revolution could not be confined to the cramped, canonical decade or two normally allotted to it. Long in gestation, the Revolution required a century to work itself out; it was only the victory of the republicans over the monarchists in 1876-79 that finally endowed France with "a regime which hallows in long-lasting fashion the totality of the principles of 1789: not only civil equality but political liberty as well." The short-run view blinded historians to both causes and effects, deep-seated, often tortuous origins as well as detonators and gradually unfolding, nonlinear impacts along with immediate outcomes. A tonic blast of fresh air, Furet's chronology pointed toward a new set of exciting prob1ematics, an open-ended agenda moving both en amont (where Furet himself was headed) and en aval. It struck yet another blow against university inertia in its rejection of the institutionalized and sacrosanct tripartite division into professionally (and therefore intellectually) discontinuous realms of history: "modem" (more or less coterminous with the long Old Regime), "Revolutionary" (the Grand Transition, 1780-1815), and "contemporary" (1815 to the present). 2 2 If Furet's periodization opened things up, his method and his interpretation tended to (fore)close them. As in the Dictionnaire, Furet's abiding preoccupation was with the birth of democracy, which he believed requires what the nineteenth century called a philosophical history and the mid-twentieth a

74 Farewell, Revolution

history of ideas. He himself described his work as the study of "French political rationalism," which came to life in the Enlightenment and tried to come to power in the Revolution. It is a narrative forged from above, at what often seems to be an Olympian distance from the ground. It shares many of the themes and analytical strategies of the Dictionnaire. Furet does not draw heavily on recent research. The underlying assumption seems to be that the story is basically familiar, and has been for a long time. What matters is reconceptualization leading to reinterpretation. The Tocquevilles (and Michelets and Marxes) not only provide decisive conceptual insights; they also testify directly on the history they lived as privileged witnesses, thus dispensing Furet with the need to interrogate less luminous actors. Furet deals with the evolving idea of the state, but not with the concrete ways in which the state implanted itself in society and the ways in which society welcomed or resisted the intrusion. Instead of allowing the political a wide berth, Furet circumscribes the field that it defines. The title he bestows on Part 2, "To Bring the Revolution to an End," could very well have characterized the whole project, beginning with Turgot.23 Furet's chapter on the Old Regime is wholly conventional in terms of its general line and perfectly consistent with his intellectual style. Is the question of the long-term relation of the monarchy and the nobility a richly problematic one? Apparently not. One has merely to turn to Chapter 9 of Book 2 of Tocqueville's Ancien Regime: "everything can be found there." Furet never tells us how we can be sure that Tocqueville got it right, or even that it is useful to imagine subjecting him to a test (he was, after all, one of the "great minds" of the century). The claim that the monarchy of the eighteenth century weakens progressively and irreversibly is affirmed rather than demonstrated. From the perspective of the country rather than the court, however, there is considerable evidence that it is administratively more mature and better implanted than ever before. Furet's reading of the Maupeou "coup," in which Louis XV struck a decisive blow against the parlements at the end of 1770, is consonant with his indifference to circumstances, his proclivity for a mixture of formalism and abstraction, his Parisocentrism, and his. dependence on the philosophical spirit he finds congenial. He pays no attention to the impact of the war that preceded it, the constitutional crisis, the government's radical experiment in liberalism, the acute and protracted subsistence crisis resulting in the most turbulent decade that the century had thus far experienced. For a historian so loath to view the Revolution as a social

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earthquake, it seems extravagant to characterize Maupeou's reforms as "a social revolution." Furet treats Terray's complicated project as if it unfolded in a vacuum. Turgot comes offbetter because he "has only one passion that, of the public good," writes Furet in the mode of histoire sincere. Turgot's modernity has a sixteenth-century cast to it; and his rationalism did not systematically differ from that of many magistrates in the parlements whom Furet insists on viewing in monolithic terms. Furet continues to subscribe to a sorely dated manichaean view of the eighteenth century as a standoffbetween the obstructionist, archaic vestiges of the corporate world wearing black hats on the one side and the modernizing, innovating liberalizers generally linked to the monarch wearing white hats on the other. In this perspective Necker is "pure financial technique"; he can't be a philosophe, because he is hostile to liberalism. The evil parlements seduce "public opinion" -a kind of animist entity-with their demagogy. But why is public opinion so "heedless to the parlementary demagogy," and on what grounds is the parlementary discourse demagogic-other than the fact that it appeals to the public? (Demagogy looms as the Old Regime equivalent of the Revolutionary surenchere so central to Furet's view.) Furet aligns himself with the forces of light, and embraces their individualizing discourse, in very much the same way that the university historians of the twentieth century identify themselves with the Jacobins. 24 On the Revolution proper, Furet sticks with the established script. Seventeen eighty-nine is the decisive caesura. The radical individualism represented by the night of 4 August liquidates the old social order in a stroke. The "democratic" (or "Revolutionary") surenchere rears its ugly head early and repeatedly. Eighty-nine is not '93, "but the political culture that can lead to the Terror is present in the French Revolution from as early as the summer of 1789." The ideology is driven by an unfettered notion of popular sovereignty borrowed from kingship and an irresistible propensity to see the world in terms of heinous plots. The political requires certain formal protocols; or, politics is necessarily high politics. Thus subsistence anxiety or guild interests are not vectors of politics. Furet has little patience for the crowd: he thus reduces the Reveillon rioters to "a crowd of wretched people," when in fact the rising was an extremely complicated affair involving guild tensions, the claims of the faubourg Saint-Antoine to independence from the corporate corset, and the politicization of the world of work. The Montagnards were

76

Farewell, Revolution rabid Gournayites who apparently entertained no serious reservations about laissez-faire practice in all economic spheres. To the Vendeens, Furet restored a certain contingency, which he felt the social interpretation had denied them, as well as an authentically lived faith that the republicans had refused them. zs

Use

M~este:

The Galaxy Strikes Back

Democratic regimes afford monarchs little shelter from propos siditieux. King of the bicentennial, Fran~ois Furet received a great deal of criticism (as well as bountiful praise). The bulk of the criticism was fragmented and ephemeral and/ or inaccessibly savant. The only book written in the midst of the battle and published during the bicentennial year that addressed the historiographical (and metahistorical) issues raised by Furet was Penser l'histoire de Ia Revolution by Olivier Betourne and Aglaia I. Hartig. Neither of the authors was a well-known historian, though they are described on the book jacket as having worked "for many years on the French Revolution." Their title, a pastiche ofFuret's now classical book of 1978, announces the tone and the target. Their essay is a blend of thoughtful and stimulating commentary, markedly uneven analysis, and insolent polemic. It deals widely across the historiographical field, boasting sections on Louis Adolphe Thiers and Auguste Mignet as whiggish '89ers who viewed the class struggle as the motor of change and on Jean Jaures as progenitor of the classical university school rather than heir to the nineteenth-century philosophical approach. But the book is swathed in the penumbra of the galaxy: its central problem is to account for Furet's success in ravaging the field so rapidly and so mercilessly, and its central objective is to put the king and his court on trial: "without prejudices," pledged the authors, for whom "there is no truth that is not worth stating" -with all the due process accorded royalty by the rules of Saint-Just, complained Furet's partisans. 26 It would be wrong to reduce the book to a mere sacking. Harshly critical of Furet in many ways, Betourne and Hartig pay homage to his talent and applaud his role in rehabilitating the political, the central focus of their own passion, though they conceive it differently from him. As a mark of their good faith-proof that the Sorbonne inculcated critical spirit even in Communist hands-they painted a cruel portrait of their own mentor, Albert

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Soboul: a lifelong "petit rentier" of his imposing doctoral dissertation and the squire-commander of an increasingly decrepit citadel from which he rarely emerged, he allowed himself and his students to become intellectually sclerotic and professionally marginalized. The major hero of the book is Michel Vovelle, who is depicted in somewhat idealized terms less as an antiFuret than as distinct from Soboul, moored in reality yet boldly innovative and free of his predecessor's "polemical and partisan spirit."27 Given the feebleness of the adversary, whose intrinsic vulnerability was enhanced by significant shifts in the institutional and ideological landscape, Furet had achieved an inglorious "victory without combat." To flatter his gladitorial reputation, he had exaggerated both the cohesiveness and the influence of the enemy. Betourne and Hartig ascribe Furet's success much less to intellectUal prowess than to political and sociological factors: a highly favorable conjuncture, skillful empire building, adroit networking, and mastery of the new tools of communication [midiatisation]. They hailed Furet's return to philosophy and his restitution of the political to the center of things, though they sharply contested his reading ofTocqueville (through Cochin's parochializing and reductive prism) and Quinet (who tolerated complexity better than his most recent exegete). They praised his assault on "an unimaginatively commemorative and politicized history" that inhibited the advancement of knowledge and understanding. Yet once he had attained a position of decisive leverage, according to the authors, his opportunism superseded his critical appetite. "The criticism merited a debate" but "the scholarly debate, alas, turned out to be very short-lived." Like his equivocal hero Mirabeau, Furet opted for rapid closure. Ending the Revolution was coterminous with ending the debate. "Was not Franc;ois Furet more concerned with adjusting his verdict to the imperatives of the hour than with going more deeply into the questions he was asking?" asked the ex-Sobouleans? "To such an extent that the critique did not beget a historiographical renewal but was content to consecrate a new authority wreathed in iconoclastic virtues." In the last analysis their Furet seemed to differ little from the Soboul who disenchanted them and about whom they wrote: "To intellectual endeavor he seems to prefer the political game; to the risk-taking spirit, turning into one's shell." 28 A protege and collaborator of Furet, Ran Halevi was dispatched to liquidate Penser l'histoire de Ia Revolution, regarded by his clan as offensive and potentially damaging. Clearly Betourne and Hartig's Penser has serious flaws.

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But if it presents much to criticize, it also offers much to debate. Yet HaU:vi accords it absolutely no merit; it failed in all its ambitions. It was "cranky," "superficial," "tendentious," a "bric-a-brac" which arrogated the intolerable pretension that it was possible to penser outside the galactic boundaries. On the bicentennial battlefield, the galaxy was interested only in unconditional surrender, not critical dialogue. They wanted to set the agenda, establish the rules, and act as both judge and party. Halevi's review was a missed opportunity to prove Betourne and Hartig wrong in their characterization of the Furetians as closed-minded. Lacking in nuance, elegance, and wit, it was nothing more than a hatchet job. Halevi rehearses many of the major Furetian assumptions, bedecked as self-evident historiographical axioms. First, the narrow and contemptuous view of so-called erudition. Disconcerting under the auspices of a major historian like Furet, it was properly ludicrous in the hands of his apprentice. Halevi characterizes erudition as a pedestrian and ultimately sterilizing activity. In one of many sophistic antinomies, he opposes it to interpretation, the aristocratic appanage of the galaxy. Hannah Arendt would be astonished to learn that she owed nothing to erudition; and because they are defenders of lively erudition, which they rightly see as a creative intellectual process, Betourne and Hartig are denied access to the realm of interpretation despite the fact that they are thoughtfully preoccupied with the relation between the two. Another dualistic article of faith for the Furetians is the separation between the social and the political. Halevi denounces the authors of Penser for incongruously commingling the two, as if this transgression amounted to anything more than a galactic prejudice. He reproaches them for failing to explore the "Leninist graft." But this graft was not an incontrovertible truth. It was a polemical hypothesis that Furet deployed as much to discredit as to explain. Halevi ignores Betourne and Hartig's reading ofQuinet, presumably viewed as superfluous after Furet's, as a sort of intrusion on galactic politicalphilosophical space, an act of effrontery in its appropriation of Claude Lefort, who is portrayed in some ways as a galactic elder. As for their reading of Tocqueville, the critic haughtily dismisses it, largely on the grounds that it contests the master's version. Halevi accuses Betourne and Hartig of a "resentment" that in fact frames his appraisal of their book. He is angry not only because they engaged Furet on a number of key premises but also because they agreed with him on a

79 Vivele Roi

number of issues (not the least of which was the role of Soboul, which Halci:vi scrupulously neglects), thus clouding the moral and intellectual divide. Above all he is vexed by their failure to accord Furet the place he merits in the bicentennial hit parade. Understandably, he complains of their inclination to reduce the royal tidal wave to a mere "media brooklet." Yet his adamant contention that the making ofFuret is a contraband issue is wholly untenable. Of course it flourishes the virtue of consistency: whether in history or in historiography, the social is beyond the pale. The sociology of institutions and ·Of scholars is crucial for an understanding of intellectual production. Predicated on another spurious antinomy, the galaxy's defensive demand that the arena of inquiry be confined to ideas (in the air) is profoundly antiintellectual. Because Betourne and Hartig are interested "in ambitions, interests, networks," they must perforce be "little accessible to ideas." Comfortably cocooned in his opulent professional rente, Halevi can jeer at those concerned with vulgar questions of "budget" and "institutions." 29

Bieenteuuial Hotline Dial93-89-1917

D

The Proofby '93

espite the official definition of the commemorative object, virtually everyone on the left as well as on the right concurred that it would be impossible to avoid the "proofby '93." "If the left claims a privilege in the Revolutionary heritage," wrote conservative commentator Paul Guilbert, "then it must answer the question, Was the Terror a necessity or a contradiction of the Revolution?" Rejecting this jaundiced formulation of the question, Maurice Agulhon nevertheless readily acknowledged the centrality of the issue from the perspectives both of 1989 and of 1789. "Today no one defends the Terror," he asseverated, certainly overstating the case. "But it is the manner in which one explains it which makes the difference, and which morally allows or prohibits the celebration of the bicentennial." Still rooted in Jacobinizing thought, Elisabeth G. Sledziewski challenged historians and other commentators to recognize the Terror as the very key to "our identity," a problematique that few had the courage to face directly. "From the most finely detailed discussion of the juridical condition of the land to the sweeping questions about revolutionary man and his objectives," she wrote, in a mood redolent of the German Historikerstreit, "everything,· absolutely everything refers back to this obsessive question: How can we be the children of the Terror?" Regis Debray set the agenda in terms strikingly similar to those of Furet: 80

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How does the "despotism of liberty" come about? Why does one encounter outcomes contradictory to expressed intentions? The enigma of the Revolution resided in "the obscure and decisive relation that ties '89 and '93," Debray suggested. Mona Ozouf put it more starkly and tendentiously, using the word "enigma" as a sort of proxy-harbinger for the deviation and errancy known ultimately as the Terror. The intriguing question for Ozouf was how the Revolution, inaugurated so radiantly-but is this premise itself not a radical oversimplification of the situation on the ground in much of the kingdom in the late 1780s?-"so rapidly took such a bad turn." L'Alsace, a regional daily, phrased the issue in two questions accessible to all French women and men: "Was the Terror the price to pay for human rights? Could the French Revolution have done without violence?" 1 Over the course of time the Terror had become more and more important to Franfi:ois Furet as he associated '93 and '89 more and more intimately. Increasingly, in his mind everything was resolved by the fall of '89. "One of the most deceptive legacies of the idea of a 'bourgeois revolution,"' he remarked, "is to have accredited the notion of a moderate, calculating 1789, marked by a spirit of compromise." (Yet Michel Vovelle insisted with equal vehemence on '89 as a year of violent rupture and chided the early Furet for depicting it in more or less rhapsodic terms.) "On the contrary," emphasized Furet, "the first months of the French Revolution give the tone, and the ideas, of what will be its course." Possessed by an ideology that attributed unlimited power to political action-the "political overinvestment" that Furet construed as the leitmotif of French history-the Revolution found itself set on a course toward disaster from the start. The "fanaticism" that Furet indefatigably denounced as part of his stigmatization of the Terror already hovered between latency and rampancy in 1789. It was nothing other than the belief in and practice of "unlimited competence attributed to political action." Derived largely from Rousseau and reified into a "logic" that had equally important cogmuve and institutional dimensions, this inexorable willfulness-moralizing, paranoid, given to abstraction, boundlessly ambitious-drove the Revolution in an ever more radical direction (radicality defined tautologically as the consequence of the logic that spawned and fed on it). This "internal logic" enveloped the Furetian Terror in a fatalistic web that stubbornly begged the historical question of why. The logic was in place early, and it followed the telic denouement dictated by its nature. The

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"all or nothing" idea was in the Revolutionary "air" at least from the first utterances of Sieyes. The working out of the so-called logic seems wholly secondary to Furet-a task both substantively of relatively minor significance and intellectually a task requiring an inferior order of genius. This double conceit pervades Furet's writing and tends to radicalize his own relationship with other forms and practitioners of scholarship. Apparently Furet did not agree that the formulation of ideas-perhaps he meant to restrict his purview to fanatical ideas-guarantees nothing about their reception and their implementation. His "logic" had a sharp edge of linearity, one enormously enhanced by the temptation to extend the field of appreciation into the twentieth century. (Despite vague references to longrun leads-"the Terror may have thus located its origins partly in an egalitarian fanaticism born of an inegalitarian pathology of the old society" -and an expressed intent to move backward in the next leg of his hermeneutic odyssey, Furet is overwhelmingly preoccupied by the aval rather than the amont in his reflection on the Revolution.) Perhaps because it was played out in a very short, intense period of time, the logic of the Terror as a historical proposition did not arouse the sort of skepticism reserved for vaster arenas such as that occupied, for example, by the so-called logic of capitalism.

Furet Assails the Thesis of Circumstances Drawing on Quinet, Furet posits an interiority that has causal and moral primacy-and a premium of intellectual elegance-over the exteriority to which he reduces virtually all contingency. Somehow the whole range of social relations, frictions, confrontations, and so on-later they will be subsumed under the much maligned and painfully distended rubric of "circumstances" -that constituted the Revolution in substantial part are declared exterior to it, along with factors that are literally exogenous. The interiority is the space of incubation of the Terror, unperturbed by accident, shaped by a congeries of constrictive attitudes about the past, about the exercise of sovereignty and the role of representation, and about the fabrication of the citizen. Once set in motion, the logic was virtually impossible to arrest because it articulated goals that were "abstract and, as such, impossible to attain or even define," crushing the Counterrevolution and installing a society of regenerated citizens. As a "political system" with its own principles

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and manner of operation, the Terror had no further need ofhistoricizationof circumstances-in order to exist, "in germ," as early as the summer of 1789, although certain circumstances, Furet conceded, facilitated its dominion. 2 At his most stringent and cavalier Furet dismissed the thesis of circumstances as no less than "mindless." In order to make it clear that indolence lay in the camp of the adversaries, however, he usually made a more studied effort to refute what he called "the lazy interpretation of the Terror by circumstances." Presumably, this indictment had something to do with the putative facility of invoking circumstances and perhaps also with the idea, about which Furet is at once defensive and aggressive, that the effort invested in archival research/ erudition paled next to the demands of finding meaning. Circumstances amounted to a dronish explanation because its exponents did no intellectual excavation in order to unearth its elements: they merely espoused at face value the claims voiced by the Jacobin leaders with whom they continued to identify. This charge seems less telling than when Furet voiced it so brilliantly in his "Catechisme," in large measure because during the past decade he himself has frequently been guilty of the same indulgent relation with the Revolutionary discourse that serves his needs. In the case of the Terror Furet is surely right to be suspicious of the double alibi deployed by the actors to justify their actions: civil war and foreign war. But the fact that they represented the Terror in those terms is not sufficient grounds for dismissing an interpretation that focuses on the same issues. Nor is the metasyllogistic reasoning that because terrorist dictatorships (equated with "Jacobinism") have arisen in situations in which these particular conditions did not obtain, and have not arisen in every instance in which they did obtain, the argument from circumstances is perforce erroneous. This approach dehistoricizes the whole problem, deploying hindsight in order to predict the future according to principles invested with universal validity. Still, Furet's argument against the thesis of circumstances, put more modestly and concretely, raises some telling questions, and not merely because the "logical and chronological incoherence [of that thesis] was exposed, as early as the Thermidorean period, by Benjamin Constant, or in the nineteenth century by republican historians such as Edgar Quinet." Given its egregiously apologetic nature, the terroristic discourse on its own is obviously a tainted source. Yet it is wrong to suppose that there is not independent

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testimony, or that such testimony itself is dubious to the extent that it corroborates the actors' script. Furet is hardly the first to point to troubling chronological inconsistencies. Nor is he the first to pose the problem in a highly overdrawn manner, mimicking the hyperbole of the Montagnards themselves. Thus he writes that the Terror "picks up again more vigorously in the spring, under the personal dictatorship of Robespierre, at a time when there was no longer any threat to the Revolution from the interior and the armies of the republic had resumed the offensive at the frontiers: the Law of Prairial and the Grand Terror then lost any appearance of relation with public safety." Is it really plausible to imagine that the Revolution was no longer in jeopardy? Do tensions as deep and as acute as those which marked public and private life in 1793 dissipate as rapidly as our retrospective objectification might indicate? This seems like a crudely mechanistic view both of psychological and of socioeconomic experience. Furet's underlying assumption is that conditions by the spring were more or less normal, that everyone should have understood the good news, and that a recalcitrant reality could only be the product of the diabolical logic embodied by Robespierre. Yet nothing had been definitively settled in the spring, which witnessed assassination attempts on leaders, treasonous capitulations, and significant military defeats in the north. The battle of Fleurus in late June 1794 marks a decisive turning point only with the benefit of hindsight. Furet concedes that "a sort of generalized social panic" convulsed France, yet he denies it organic roots, and thus both its historical and its moral legitimacy. Rather than the consequence of "the reality of struggles," it was merely an artifact of the "compensatory fantasy" begotten by "the manichaean ideology." Like Cochin, Furet depreciates the psychological, lest it give succor to the social. Thus panic cannot be the authentic product of the trauma of circumstances. In any event, betraying no understanding of the disorganizing effects that panic can generate, Furet classifies it as a quasi aberration, out of congruence with reality-but isn't that the very condition of a truly devastating panic?-a mere condition of the mind (unlike, say, egalitarian ideology). Furet scoffed at so-called external factors of explanation. Had he accorded more emphasis to the Revolution-as-civil war rather than linking circumstances particularly with the foreign threat, he might have been more willing to acknowledge the "reality of struggles" and of proliferat-

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ing panic. In reading his version, one wonders whether it is not Furet as much as the Jacobins who lost contact with on what he calls "the principle of reality." In other historical situations-Furet himself admitted this sort of generic comparison-did the drastic dislocation and terror provoked by war, with its insidious and pervasive multiplier effect, in an age of poor communications and chronic insecurity, end brusquely with one or two victorious battles whose decisiveness might not become clear for quite a while? Or did the chaos unleashed by a grave subsistence crisis, with its forward and backward linkages, end abruptly with the announcement of an ostensibly fine harvest? On Furet's map of the terrain, this vast social dimension with all of its contingencies is missing. What occurs after the "normative" markers imposed by the chronology of battles and declarations is thus strictly due to the "despotic potentiality" of the Jacobin ideology. Regardless of circumstances, the voluntarism and the manichaeanism of the Revolutionary leaders ("The discourse in 1793 is on the lips of all the leaders") were bound to produce a Terror. For Furet circumstances are both cumbersome and gratuitous. To concede that social practice influenced the course of events was to jeopardize the selfsufficiency of the political-culture explanation. At the same time it was to entertain the hypothesis that political culture was not a fixed and autarchical logic but the evolving product of the play between the vecu and the pensi. For Furet believes that the Revolutionary discourse (epitomized by Robespierre) proved by virtue of its (provisional) success that the Revolution could not be conceived and applied any other way. This higher reality was so determinant that it obviates the historian's recourse to the multiple lesser realities that litter the field of observation. For Furet there seems to be nothing problematic about the relationship between ideas and action. Crystallized in the Rousseauian mold, the ideas that drove the Jacobin logic were oblivious to their surroundings. The specific character of the Terror-its concrete manifestations and ramifications-are infinitely less significant and interesting than its ideological necessity, about which there was nothing fortuitous. In this same sense Furet could evoke a nineteenth-century Jacobinism "completely independent of circumstances." To the ordinary historian such a formulation bears the eerie mark of an encounter of the third kind. For the apprentice philosopher, its interest lies precisely in the doctrinal sedimentation, in the procrustean obduracy that enables Jacobinism to exist, autonomously, outside of time and space. 3

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Farewell, Revolution

Implotment In cursory fashion, Furet ventured certain connections between the Terror and daily life. Given his caustic critique of Soboul's narrow and narrowminded view of the Revolution, it seems surprising and ironic how rigorously Furet confines himself to the Revolution from within. Thus, in reflecting on the demand for terror, he invokes the "constant overestimation of the determined character and the incomparable means of the adversary," a brand of paranoia whose source he locates "in the new political culture." Yet this propensity was deeply lodged in the experience of the Old Regime, especially in the subsistence domain, where the famine plot persuasion flourished, but also in the general understanding of how politics worked. That does not mean that social history is richer than the history of ideas; it means, rather, that ideas-the new political culture-are engendered by the interplay of social practice and discursive representation. In order to protect his stock in trade, Furet seems to shut himself off from history. He has no motivation to understand socially rooted fear that is not merely and suddenly the result of ideology crystallized by the Revolution. He prefers to see conspiratorial ideation as a more or less abstract mental property nurtured by age-old religious training rather than as a social fact of life that accounted more or less plausibly for a wide variety of phenomena, including market operation, municipal government, fiscality, patronage, punishment, and so on. Furet is indifferent to the history of the conspiratorial tropism and the ways in which tests of verisimilitude legitimized and perpetuated it. In order to privilege the "punitive obsession," he neglects the other powerful and inveterate obsessions-for survival and for security. Viewed across the medium or long term, the "haunting fear of treason" was not tantamount to a "punitive obsession." Given what we know about behavior and ideation during the Old Regime, is it sufficient to characterize a horrible event such as the September massacres as a "parody of justice"? Did it not plausibly bespeak a desire to redress injustice and allay anxiety by mimicking justice? To pose this question is not in the slightest to diminish the odium of the crime but to contest Furet's insistence that it sprang directly from the germinating internal logic. Is it pointless to think about the traditional relation between king and people, including such notions as the vox dei-vox populi, frequently invoked in the eighteenth century, and the mutual responsibilities of monarch and subjects,

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in order to make sense of the Revolutionary conception of popular sovereignty in which the people replace the king? Is it more useful (as well as nobler?) to get at the idea of popular sovereignty as generative of the Terror through Stael, Constant, or Guizot than it is to do so through the study of the social and political history of the Old Regime? Yet if one follows Hannah Arendt in posing as an axiom of revolutionary degradation that "any attempt to resolve the social question by political means leads to terror," then interest in the analysis of social relations pales next to the exorbitant demands of the "overinvestment" in the political adumbrated by Rousseau. It becomes important not to look at the so-called social question but to note how its very presence on the agenda accelerates the process leading to the negation ofliberal democratic values. Furet hinted that the historian who turned to the social question in retrospect would produce no happier results than the Revolutionaries who treated it in the flesh.4

Revulsion for the Terror During the debate on how to organize the bicentennial, Furet maintained-in a spirit of sansculottic puritanical self-denial?-that excessive affection or animosity interfered with the process of understanding. He was thinking in particular of the Jacobino-Marxist love for the Revolution. But his own revulsion for the Terror may have been a symmetrically crippling impediment. At bottom he shared Qp.inet's disapproval of the Terror, less for its violence than for its lack of meaning (or "superior logic"): "it is a procedure of extermination that functions in the void and has no other finality than the death of individuals sacrificed to the state." On no level did the Terror merit admiration. Furet concurred with Mona Ozouf's response to Claude Mazauric: far from "saving" the Revolution, "on the contrary [it] caused its loss." Furet may have inspired lawyer-academician Jean-Derris Bredin's characterization of killing in the Terror as an orchestration of redemptive purification-borrowed from the Catholic repertory?-required by the people-as-king. Furet despised the Terror above all because it diseased French political life for all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. "The republic had so much trouble anchoring itself in France in the nineteenth century," wrote Furet, "only because it was connected, as it

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were, genetically and in its very act of birth, to the exercise of the Terror, which gave the right very powerful arguments to reject it." Given his overriding preoccupation with explaining French political development, Furet's real interest seems to dwell in the history of the history of the Terror. His concerns, like Goude's themes, were decates. Ultimately he seems less fascinated with the etiology and, especially, the operation of the Terror than with its uses after the fact, its successive interpretations, its enormous impact, its endless amortization. Deeply committed to liberal values after a long voyage through the left in most of its major incarnations, Furet hated the Terror as the shrine of "the cult of the state," celebrated, yesterday and today, by all manner of Jacobins. Though the republic "has shown itself to be since 1880 a system sufficiently consensual and viable that it no longer needed to be linked with 1793," large numbers of republicans, democrats, and Socialists still felt constrained to "shoulder the heritage of the Terror." The Socialist's "Leninist superego" baffled Furet. The Communists, who always confiscated freedom when they took power, justified the Grand Terror in order to "justify 1917 and what followed." But the Socialists, who respected freedom when they ruled, seem obstinately attached to that same tradition, a tradition that was utterly hostile to republican and democratic ideals. "When I place into question the political logic of the Terror," concluded Furet, "I do it precisely in the name of the principles of the Revolution," presumably the Good Revolution, that part of '89 not yet blighted by '93.5

In Defense of Circumstances Furet's disdain for circumstances provoked a torrent of criticism on the left. The issue was adroitly framed to cast the defenders of the thesis of circumstances as the apologists for bloodletting. The problem of his critics was to show not only that Furet was wrong but that their argument ostensibly justifying the Terror was rather a serious and sober effort to fathom it. Virtually all of the critics agreed with Max Gallo that the Terror was replete with "barbarism," though for them it was a violence peculiar neither to the Terror nor to the Revolution, a "barbarism" which could not be contained within a soi-disant ideological logic engendered by a masterthinker and galvanized into life by a true believer. That violence had to be historicized and

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thus relativized, and it could not be understood outside the long- and shortterm context of circumstances. Numerous observers, as we have seen, denounced with Le Monde "the rehash of the controversy over the ideals of 1789 and the horrors of 1793, a controversy singularly revealing of a certain loss of collective memory in a country whose history has never been niggardly in planned terrors, as might recall to mind, for example, the spirits of the Cathars and the phantoms of Saint-Bartholomew." But this understandable irritation with a certain kind of historiographical opportunism did not directly address Furet's position, any more than did the tremulous reflection of the philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye: "There is perhaps a balance sheet to be pondered, although it would be hard to imagine: the twenty-five hundred [sic] executions of the Terror-which I refuse to accept in any event-and the tens, indeed hundreds of millions of Africans drowned in the Atlantic. " 6 The first task was to free the notion of circumstances from the stigma, both moral and intellectual, that had disfigured and shamed it. Vilified by antiand counterrevolutionaries as a license to kill, "circumstances" were also deprecated by certain historians of ideas as an inferior mode of investigation and explanation. For Maurice Agulhon the debate was the occasion to "demarcate the limits of a history of pure ideas, and the necessity of a more global history of historical forces." Specifically targeting Furet's galaxy, he observed that "those who tie 1789 to 1793 insist (and-in our opinioninsist excessively and too exclusively) on the active role of ideas in history." "Everything which was thought," allowed Agulhon, but he also demanded "everything which took place." Regis Debray echoed and extended this appreciation: "To think the French Revolution is not to reduce what took place to what was thought. Following the old professional vice of thinkers, it is to ponder the hiatus between what is thought and what takes place." The essential for the philosopher-"what I call the tragic" -occurred "in between the two," between the idea and the action. For Agulhon, the practitioner of both cultural and political history as well as of a Labroussean social history, ideas no less than actions constituted the fabric of circumstances. "Circumstances, at bottom, are History itself." 7 "If Furet abandons 'circumstances' so readily, it is because he privileges the genealogy of ideas," commented Agulhon. Even as other historians of culture insisted on the problematic questions of the production, circulation, and appropriation of ideas, Furet reverted to a more traditional genre, heavily

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charged with ethical concerns and sweeping filiations while rather oblivious of social practice and causal connection. In particular, Agulhon suggested that Furet derived his core doctrine thesis from the work ofJacob Talmon, an Israeli who published his most influential study while working in England after World War II. Talmon linked the abstract thinking and absolutist proclivities of certain philosophes, especially Rousseau, to the rise of totalitarianism, several strains of which emerged from the Enlightenment and buffeted the world, first in the French Revolution and then even more dramatically in the twentieth century. Talmon, followed by Furet, preferred the empirical, trial-and-error approach to politics that issued in liberalism. Agulhon did not directly show how Furet "derived" from Talmon. Indeed, Talmon's model was more supple than Furet's and seemed to allow for an '89 less freighted with '93. Agulhon's point was, first, to stress the claim rehearsed by many critics that Furet's "thought" was hardly original and, second, to emphasize Furet's kinship with scholars laden with compelling ideological concerns. Furet rejected any bond with Talmon's approach, one he viewed as flawed among other things by associations that he judged anachronistic and/ or unproven and by a simplistic and deformed reading of Rousseau. 8 Though he construed the issue as much more than "a sort of lawyerly argument pleading in favor of indulgence for the accused-the Revolutionindicted for terrorism," Agulhon invoked the claim of "mitigating circumstances." He meant the oppressive and violent nature of the Old Regime, the royalist "conspiracy" against the Revolution, and the relentless and precocious treachery of the Counterrevolution, which did not wait for the Revolution to become a dictatorship before launching its war, as well as the specific situation of '93-'94. Others, including Claude Mazauric, Elisabeth G. Sledziewski, and Max Gallo, worked out the case more aggressively. The circumstances were not merely extenuating; they drastically constrained choices and ultmately explained much of what transpired. Sledziewski recalled the hardiness of the triple menace faced by the Revolution: foreign war, civil war, and "the organized penury." Given the extreme danger faced by the nation, there is no justification for the thesis of "an intentional flight into purifying carnage." Invoking the federalist revolts in the Lyonnais and the Midi as well as the Vendee, the foreign onslaught, and grave social and economic difficulties, Mazauric detected "neither totalitarian deviation of unwholesome spirits nor concession made to exterminat-

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ing passions" but, rather, "a policy of exception for a time of exception." Making Danton's argument his own, as Furet would have expected ("Let us be terrible in order to spare the people the need to be terrible"), Mazauric viewed the Terror as a "rational" strategy meant to limit the sort of blind violence provoked by the Counterrevolution after having been practiced by the Old Regime. In this polemic the Marxists preferred to accentuate the defensive/ patriotic character of the Terror rather than to highlight its social program, the famous "anticipations," which Furet dubbed the "surpassing negation of the liberal individualism of 1789. " 9 Max Gallo, a litteraire who claimed to have his feet firmly on the ground, urged the high-flying Furet to direct his flagship-fetish "concept" back toward earth in order to "return idiotically and in a 'mindless' manner"Furet's expressions-"to chronology and facts." From his galactic estrangement, Furet saw the world in purely abstract terms, privileging a putative "imaginary" because he could not apprehend the prosaic and seminal reality. Through his prism, complained Gallo, "one witnesses the disappearance at once of the causes, of the circumstances, of almost the very notion of historical moment." Wedded to a narrow and partisan "ideological reading," inspired by Cochin and Tocqueville, Furet resembled his conjured protagonists, the Revolutionary ideologues and their Enlightenment heroes whose "literarified" worldview impeded their ability to respond to reality. Yet at the same time, Furet the practitioner of a rarefied history of ideas and self-styled thinker, with a weakness for the same sort of abstractions he considered dangerous in the eighteenth century, was in Gallo's view as allergic to ideology today as he had been in the past: "which is wholly consistent with those who say that we are in a period of the death of ideologies and that it is the downfall of all makers of politics who wish to put a little thought into their enterprise." Whether Furet was an ideologue and/ or anti-ideologue, in his monadic dependence on the "Revolutionary ideology" to account for everything, Gallo recognized Talmon's precursor, Edmund Burke, for whom "everything is a matter of'theory,' of abstraction, of ideological delirium." Was it delirium to take into account the legacy of the Old Regime ("several millennia of submission and barbarism"), the violence against the Revolution in its infant days (ninety-eight deaths before the killing of the governor of the Bastille), the maneuvers of the counterrevolutionaries (the camp of ]ales; the flight of

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the king), the terrible menace of annihilation by the enemy (was the paroxysm of fear triggered by the Brunswick Manifesto threatening the destruction of Paris nothing more than the febrile transport of "Homo ideologicus"?)? 10 Daniel Bensald underscored the depth of this fear, its disorganizing consequences, its plausibility: "Invoke the war on the frontiers and the war inside, eleven armies to direct, the weight of Europe to support, hunger and death everywhere, this climate of apocalypse, outside of which one fathoms nothing, nothing save a furor, a frenzy, a morbid trance, an explosion without object." Fellow philosopher Regis Debray embroidered the same point-that the experience of the Terror ("of France surrounded, invaded, infiltrated"), like that of war or famine, is virtually impossible for us to imagine from our cocoon of peace and affluence. Eschewing any desire "to excuse the inexcusable," he nevertheless summoned "the democrats and the reasonable people that we all are here to a modicum of modesty, a bit of understanding, a dose of intellectual decency in the face of situations in which it is not only the assassins and the neuropaths who resort to extremes in order to cope." Implicitly Debray criticized the centrist Furet for failing to understand that centrist solutions cannot work in dire crises. II

'93 in '89 A denial of circumstances implied obviously a genetic cause inherent to the "revolutionary idea" and the presence of '93 in '89. In its most vehement renditions, this thesis had traditionally been the appanage of the far right. At the end of the nineteenth century Senator de Poriquet declared that "July fourteenth was the beginning of the Terror." Evoking "the festival of murder," Taine suggested much the same thing. In the 1930s, Leon Daudet reminded Maurrasians that "the vile fourteenth ofJuly" was the "veritable start of the terrorist period," a view that became a canon of the Action fran~,:aise. In the bicentennial period, this idea was still very much a leitmotif of the far right. Citing Antoine Rivarol, the Lepeniste daily Present credited Bastille Day with launching "the cycle of useless destructions and atrocious slaughter." "The Terror began in 1789," noted a correspondent of the Anti-89. A kindred journalist in Valeurs actuelles breathlessly discerned the horrors "in embryo" during the ostensibly "happy springtime" of 1789. Thanks largely to Furet's skillful reformulation of the connection between

93 Bicentennial Hotline

'89 and '93, however, the argument took oil a more moderate cast. Bridging the far right and the so-called civilized right, Figaro-Magazine made it the backbone of its bicentennial line: the Terror was an "extension" of '89. In a book contrasting the French and American Revolutions-a comparison that fascinated Furet-Georges Gusdorf embellished the revisionist line that "1789 carried 1793 in embryo." Furet never pressed the argument to its ultimate stage, and this is what distinguished him and the self-styled moderns of the right who followed him Oean-Marie Benoist, even Philippe de Villiers) from their extremist ancestors. Tainted but not utterly cankered, '89 still offered much to praise despite its powerful latent potential for selfsubversion. Given the center /liberal reluctance in France to throw out the baby with the bath water, especially in front of an international audience, it is not surprising that the most extreme expression of the revisionist '89-'93 contamination theory during the bicentennial period came from outside the country. It was all the more striking because it emanated from the pen of an Irish public figure and philosopher reputed for his sobriety, Conor Cruise O'Brien. "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," he wrote, "was in practice a mandate for Terror as long as the French Revolution lasted." 12 For the proliferation and normalization of the '89-'93 argument, his critics blamed Furet, and they challenged him on its historical merits. Maurice Agulhon led the charge. He esteemed, first, that the Revolution was the matrix of liberty rather than of its antithesis and, second, that Furet exaggerated the opposition between liberalism and Jacobinism in the nineteenth century: together they formed a rampart against the authoritarian right, and the bearers of Jacobinism consistently fought to protect liberties in France. "If there is indeed a logical and necessary link between the system of 1789 and the one of 1793," Agulhon wrote, "then one must not honor this 1789 of loathsome consequences." At issue intellectually (apart from the civic implications) was "a problem of historical causality," a debate over the sources of dictatorship. Furet's germinal necessity had superseded the Jacobin's circumstantial brand, but it was no less inexorable. Against Furet's "ideological determinism," Agulhon aligned himself with the "empirical primacy of contingent realities." The dictatorship was not primarily "the effect of a doctrine, totalitarian before its time, originating from The Social Contract"; nor was it the fruit of "a certain systematic theory of popular sovereignty, preexisting and dangerous."

94 Farewell, Revolution

According to Agulhon, '89 endowed France with the tools needed for "the opening of the modern era in politics." The Declaration provided ample counterweight to whatever theoretical peril popular sovereignty may have presented to liberty. Not only was '93 more complex, less gratuitously horrible, and less inescapable than Furet allowed; equally important, there was no question of pollution by kinship, of a backward seepage of the sordid effluent of '93 into the shining seas of '89 .13

Revolutionary Etiology Behind the question of the '89-'93 connection loomed the even larger issue of the causes of the Revolution. In the ears of many, "C'est Ia faute aRousseau" resounded as the bicentennial theme song of the galaxy. 14 Furet tended to evade the question of causality, though he asserted that "how that began" was the central problem for historians. By and large, he was more interested in effects than in causes, and often he appeared satisfied to extrapolate the latter from the former. The extreme radicality of the "fracture" of 1789 fascinated him, though it seems a shame that it is to Burke in 1790 that he feels impelled to turn as a witness rather than to those who lived and in their own way thought the experience themselves. While he pointed to three categories of issues that required exploration (the absolute monarchy, the church and aristocratic society), for the moment he had nothing substantial to say about them. Given the way in which he framed his topic-he intended to examine "why and how that which 1789 called the Old Regime produced the conditions of its most absolute negation" -it is not clear how he could avoid being snared in both teleological and tautological traps of the sort that have always plagued partisans of the "bourgeois Revolution." To the extent that Furet dealt directly with causes, they were overwhelmingly intellectual causes, though the intellectual and the political were in his mind intimately associated. His emblematic figures were Rousseau and Turgot. His reading of Rousseau is a familiar and controversial one. Frequently it seems reductive, but the conflation of sights and voices makes it difficult to sort out Furet's interpretation of Rousseau from Furet's interpretation of Robespierre's interpretation of Rousseau, and from the nineteenth century's readings of Robespierre's Rousseau and Rousseau's Robespierre.

95 Bicentennial Hotline

Turgot operated in the realm of nature and reason, though Furet does not indicate the extent to which he diverged from or emulated Jean-Jacques's conceptions of these two critical notions. Like Rousseau, Turgot is asked to bear a heavy burden. He embodied "French political rationalism" as if there were only one, as if the Enlightenment were monolithic, as if Edgar Faure had gotten it right that Turgot could have spared the whole nasty business had he succeeded. To describe Turgot as having sought to "reconstruct the political and social body on the principles of reason" is merely to beg the question, and to impute to him a liberal nineteenth-century version of the meaning of reason far less problematic than the one over which Turgot battled Necker, Galiani, Linguet, Mably, Diderot, and a host of English and Scotch moral philosophers. Furet does not succeed for some of the same reasons that Turgot failed: because he lost sight of his apprenticeship in the field, because he failed to reflect on the fit between glaring evidence and wan reality, and because he could not resist the very esprit de systeme that he assailed. 15

The Russian Connection: The Proofby 1917 As early as 1982 Furet worried about the possibility of a Red bicentennial, a bicentennial orchestrated by a government including Communist ministers. Such a commemoration would undoubtedly be "very 'unitarian,' around a very unified French Revolution." The nightmarish prospect of a bicentennial driven by "the Communist vulgate" quickened Furet's conviction that the "principal problem" of the French left "is that of the relationship between 1793 et October 1917." Furet's understanding of the Terror and the Revolution more generally was deeply shaped by their putative linkage to the Russian Revolution. He has frequently acknowledged the significance of the connection for him, most memorably in his toast to Solzhenitsyn in Penser Ia Revolution franfaise ("Today the gulag leads [us] to rethink the Terror in accordance with the similarity of the two projects"). He rightly complains that the phrase has often been taken out of context to torment him. But he stands by it ("I am honest") as an expression of moral outrage and an explanation of "the circumstances" of his production. It is interesting that Furet historicizes himself in terms of externalitiescircumstances-of various sorts rather than accounting for his position in terms of an inherent logic that developed tortuously yet implacably within

96 Farewell, Revolution

him. More important is the almost imperceptible glissando by which the French Revolution becomes the Russian Revolution and the Russian merges with the French in his writings. Russian Bolsheviks and French Jacobins became interchangeable pieces on a constructivist chessboard. Nineteen seventeen was as much a part of his 1793 as was 1789. Furet took theJacobinoMarxists at their word: 1917 was indeed the future of 1793, the realization (over time) of what '93 had "anticipated." This fusion/ displacement spared Furet the need to immerse himself deeply in the eighteenth century. What mattered most were outcomes; 1917 and its sequelae revealed them, without the need for Micheletlike resurrection.I6 There are several different levels in Furet's preoccupation with 1917. The first, which will prove either to be the most superficial or the most profound, concerns Furet's personal intellectual and political journey through the Communist party, a journey shared in one way or another by many others of his generation, including such eminent historians as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Alain Besanlj:On. Historian Franlj:ois Dosse, a leftist critic of the galaxy, correctly adverts to "the writing of a metahistory of the gulag," to a reading of the French Revolution "through the prism of disenchantments," and to "a sort of act of exorcism in relation to what one adulated." There is an expiatory tone in Furet's deeply felt execration of the French JacobinoMarxist justification of the Russian by the French Revolution, from Mathiez's early efforts to identify common challenges and responses to Jean Bruhat's shocking whitewash of the Stalinist purges by analogy with the Terror's ideological-patriotic purification. The Franco-Russian revolutionary linkage was an "auspicious myth" in his Communist days, Furet recalled. With a different twist, it remained an "auspicious myth" of his riper years. In his view "the taking over by Communism from Jacobinism" was one of the paramount political developments of the first part of the twentieth century. "Obsessed by the Jacobin 'precedent,"' the Bolsheviks used the French Revolutionary connection to appropriate the western democratic patrimony. And the Soviet experience "was soaked up by French public opinion largely through the history of the French Revolution." As the new trustees of the "revolutionary idea," the Soviets exercised "a sort of political magistere on the whole of the left." By "revolutionary idea" Furet meant "the conception according to which the passage from one society to another, the condition for the regeneration of intellectuals, can and must be accomplished in a short period of time by the violent seizure of the

97 Bicentennial Hotline

state." It seemed astonishing and deplorable to Furet that until recently this revolutionary idea constituted the common objective of Socialists as well as Communists. Party tactics, substantially different to be sure, mattered no more in the contemporary context than circumstances had in the Terror. What counted was the underlying revolutionary ideology, forged by the Franco-Russian revolutionary linkage, to which both camps had subscribed until very recently. Politically, there is no doubt that this Leninist graft was fraught with peril. But what were its implications for an understanding of the history (and not the historiography) of the French Revolution? Why did Furet hold on so tenaciously to the Leninist mortgage well after it had come to term? Why did Furet agree with the Leninists that the French Revolution resembled the Russian instead of merely conceding that the Russian Revolution represented itself as resembling the French? The Leninist graft became Furet's capital as well as his bludgeon. While he denounced the political terms of the amalgamation of the two revolutions, he did not contest the historical basis on which it was allegedly founded. On the contrary, he nourished it. It became the perfect vehicle for conflating history and historiography. The Soviet emulation of'93 seemed to show that the Terror had a dynamic independent of circumstances, a malevolent allure of an ideological character. The linkage became ancillary proof that the underlying logic of the French Revolution was a gory red. Untroubled by anxiety concerning the grounds of comparability, Furet suggested analogies pointing to shared moral ideals and political methods. He slid easily into conclusions about the way in which ideas entailed awful consequences regardless of the context. Imperceptibly, the Jacobin finalities became the same as the Lenino-Stalinist ones. The linkage encouraged the hypothesis of longer-term genetic connections, an outline for the etiology of totalitarianism. "By dint of thinking aloud about Russia," mused philosopher Daniel Bensald, "one ends up by dreaming at night of Russian dolls." In order to punish the left, especially the non-communist left, for its continued vulnerability and gullibility, Furet seemed determined to keep the French Revolution, '93 and parts of'89, under a Soviet penumbra. While the non-Communist left tried to back off, Furet would not let go. He practiced the Leninist graft with more brio than the Bolsheviks; he deployed the same genre of anachronisms for which he excoriated the Jacobino-Marxists. Curiously, Furet ended up making more use-and not just to bash his opponents-of what he called the Soviet "explanatory matrix" than most of

98 Farewell, Revolution

the Jacobino-Marxist historians whose intellectual-ideological vassalage and mimetic rites he decried. He argued in the end that we must see the French Revolution via the Russian-the Leninist trick-because it was, after all, that way in its deepest meaning. The "spectacular" failure of the Bolsheviks vitiated the revolutionary idea as Lenin and then Stalin construed it, but not the authenticity of the debt that they proclaimed to the French model or the intrinsic appropriateness of the French model for the Soviet adventure. The French Revolution was not merely "hit by ricochet" in the wake of the Leninist obsession with the Jacobin precedent, as Furet said in one place. There was nothing accidental about the rendezvous. On the contrary, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Furet's conviction of a "similarity in the project." It is clear that the Soviet experience influenced many historians of the French Revolution, but that is hardly a compelling reason to install the Leninist connection as a central problematic of the history (as opposed to the historiography) of the Revolution. The issue of the relation between 1793 and 1917 may indeed have been the central problem for the French left in recent times, but it is not the central problem for the historian of the French Revolution today, and it is not evident that it was as predominant a fixation yesterday as Furet suggests. No one can quarrel with Furet's hatred of the gulag. But one can wonder whether the gulag has not poisoned the history of the Revolution as much as the Terror envenomed the politics of the nineteenth century.I7

Front the Soeial to the Politieal via the Nineteenth Century

F

ran~ois Furet execrated the Marxist line for many reasons, some more overtly avowed than others. One is unlikely ever to be able to measure the tenacious, subterranean influence of his membership in the party, the capital of guilt that this experience generated, and its conversion into a crusading, expiatory energy of anger and refutation. He combined the vindictive ardor of the emancipated intellectual exposing and deriding the monumental errors of Communism along with the missionary intensity of the deprogrammer toiling patiently and didactically to free minds from sectarian possession. The revelations of the gulag quickened his resolve; the growing evidence of Communist gangrene at home and abroad seemed to confirm his analysis. As nominal Communism declined and the worldwide liberal tide crested, Furet widened his aim to combat the considerable sway that Marxist thought continued to exert on the non-Communist left. The French Revolution was the obvious target of his assault as a historian, for it was the object of the marxists' heaviest institutional and symbolic investment. Furet's brilliant attack on the Revolutionary catechism was geared not only to destroy a deeply flawed yet immensely powerful historical interpretation but also to undermine the school that had generat.ed and continued to nourish it. As we shall see, Furet carried the battle against the Marxist university back into the past in order to subvert the university's very foundations. He expressed his ultimate contempt for Marxist historiography by trying to demonstrate that it had failed to engage Marx rigorously, that its 99

100 Farewell, Revolution

Marxism was at best "dully, repetitively Jacobin." Lacking any critical spirit ("its laziness") and imagination, "it is a historiography without a capacity for discovery." Furet's offensive did not lessen his sense of generic persecution: after all, that was the party specialty, especially with apostates. For the preceding twenty years he claimed to have suffered their "inquisitorial gaze." "I don't even hold a grudge against them," he averred, unconvincingly. In a way, however, he was indebted to the Communists both for his extraordinarily high degree of motivation and concentration and for his commercial success. 1

From the War on Marxism to the Onslaught against the Social With the Revolution as its primary locus, Furet's onslaught against Marxism swelled imperceptibly into a war against social history. 2 In many ways it was a most unlikely engagement. At the time that he coauthored the book on the Revolution with Denis Richet-a commissioned work undertaken at the initiative of a publisher speculating on market share and written in the interstices of a busy scholarly program-Furet was known as one of the rising stars of the new (post-Braudelian) generation of social historians.3 A student ofLabrousse and a collaborator with another of his students, Adeline Daumard, on a pioneering study of eighteenth-century Parisian social structure based on notarial records, he preached, sometimes stridently, the virtues of quantification. Still, he construed social history in broad and supple terms, in the spirit of the early Annalistes, as "the unlocking of the discipline, its roaming on all terrains." Once embarked on the bitter polemic with the Marxists over the Revolution, however, Furet distanced himself increasingly from social history-not specifically, not even primarily, the social history of Annaliste inspiration, now inclined to reverrouillage in its imperialistic phase, but any social history, any historiography that accorded primacy in some way or another to the social. Like a powerful detergent in hot water, the polemic with the Marxists caused Furet's conception of the social to shrink. It regressed to its preAnnalistes, pre-Durkheimian habitus. Conflated with Socialism, it reverted to the "social question," it became a mere proxy for historical materialism, it was defined by the arena of the class struggle. At least insofar as it pertained to the French Revolution, social history implied doing it the wrong way, more

101 From the Social to the Political

or less in servitude, deliberate or unconscious, to the so-called classical school. 4 Furet criticized the historians of the social with the same acerbity with which he assailed Revolutionaries who wanted to remake society. The two enterprises, that of revolutionary protagonists and that of the social historians, seemed to merge into a single diabolical cause. Social analysis led to error just as surely as the Jacobin effort to resolve the social question by political means had led to Terror. As the debate drew him further and further into contact with philosophy and the history of ideas, he became increasingly indifferent to the tools and methods of social historians, and increasingly suspicious of their allegedly underconceptualized projects and their unarticulated agendas. His career shift liquidated whatever residual guilt or frustration he might have felt over abandoning his grand doctoral thesis, originally consecrated to the study of social structures. Outside the Revolutionary bailiwick, he profited from the growing mutiny, within the Annates tradition itself, against the clumsy and som~times stifling hegemony of social history, from the movement to rehabilitate the event and to relegitimate political history in its wake; and from the dramatic revitalization of intellectual history driven by innovative work in linguistics, anthropology, semiology, and literary criticism. Furet benefited incidentally from what irate leftist politicians plaintively dubbed the "social deficit" in the government's action, from what Jean-Denis Bredin called the collective dislike for looking at the social that marked the bicentennial citizenry, and from what Fran'Yois Ewald styled the end of the social in an age of bodefully accumulating "ends." Though Furet the cosmopolitan intellectual knew full well that these sea changes were the fruit of multiple (and not fully convergent) forces, Furet the anti-Marxist polemist reduced them on occasion to caricature. Projecting his own obsession, he thus told Le Monde that the best students now flocked to political and intellectual history, "the PC no longer being what it once was, either in society or in the university. " 5 In the shorthand imposed by Furet's polemic, a social approach became synonymous with a universal explanation predicated on economic factors and the social relations they engendered. More pointedly in the context of '89, it was construed as the cipher for the once triumphant argument that the Revolution was quintessentially a bourgeois revolution. Furet rightly denounced this claim as reductionist: a great deal of evidence had placed it in

102 Farewell, Revolution

jeopardy on many levels. But his reading of that "bourgeois" interpretationthe Revolution as the product of a strategy of a social class-was itself reductionist, especially in the light of important qualifications that Marxist and non-Marxist scholars have recently introduced. And his inclination to regard any social grid as tantamount to a "bourgeois" exegesis was even more reductionist, beyond the reasonable limits of polemical bonne guerre. Furet was surely correct in maintaining that "what characterizes the French Revolution is not first of all the victory of one class over another; rather, it is the radical affirmation of a global remaking of the old society." But this very perspective invites rather than precludes a social approach: an examination of the play between the old structures and the newly articulated one, a study of the reception as well as the representation of the new taxonomy, a survey of the concrete prospects for atomizing the corporate world and its Great Chain of Being into a universe of discrete, putatively autonomous individuals. For all the authority it (once) imparted, Marxism did not create the social project in historiography; nor did its Chernobyl permanently contaminate the entire social field. The class struggle did not need to be refracted by the prism of historical fatality. One could apprehend social strife as wholly contingent, and consider social conflict as the product of cultural as much as economic forces. Nor was a social approach perforce a pro-Revolutionary posture, a so-called progressive stance, a necessarily populist framework. Michelet no less than Marx circumscribed the range of interpretive latitude. A compelling social history of the Revolution would insist both on the Revolution as emancipation of the people in certain ways and on the revolt of the people against the Revolution in others. Far from indifferent to discourse analysis, it would venture to confront the discourses with the practices they prescribed or described (even as a journalist of the late 1980s might have found Gorbachev's discourse on privatization intriguing, while not overlooking the fact he privatized nothing). It is certainly arguable, as Furet asserts, that "the offer of novel ideas is what is most important to understand and to analyze" in late eighteenth-century France. But is political philosophy a sufficiently robust and versatile tool for the task? Is a supply-side approach that pays virtually no attention to the social and cultural conditions of production viable? Is a supply-side approach, estranged from both demand and reception, sustainable?6 Furet associated social history with a sterile conception of people "immersed in an opacity." In its place he advocated "a history of the explicit,"

103 From the Social to the Polltical

which he construed as a "history of politics." Beyond its cryptic nature, this formulation is premised on an antagonism that seems both gratuitous and perverse. Doesn't the explicit, whatever its boundaries, exist in the throbbing medium of real life, that is to say, within an environment of opacity? The opaque in Furet's "true historical reality" appears to occupy the same marginal (and obstructive) position as circumstances do in the Terror. Isn't the past a dialectic between light and dark, explicit and unavowed, overt and covert? Conceived in Furet's terms, isn't the explicit merely the tip of the icebergand if this constitutes politics, isn't it the reason that politics was so long reviled by the school of Bloch and Febvre? Isn't the history of the explicit another way of committing the crippling vice of Furet's adversaries-taking the discourse of the actors (who are apparently limited to the "intelligent participants and profound observers") for "at its face value" and presuming that their expressed intentions tell us all we need to know? Why foreclose the large domain of research into that part of the discursive which is not explicit? More broadly, it remains highly doubtful whether the discursive can be so brutally estranged from the social. In so doing Furet becomes one ofTocqueville's abstract thinkers, unable to navigate in the real world. Thus, for instance, Furet is interested in the people-as-concept for the role they playin legitimizing the Revolution and filling the political vacuum. But he is indifferent to the people-as-people. The true people are those who inhabit the collective imaginary. Language crowds out its referent-or the referent is absorbed by the concept. The notion of the people matters, not their comportment. The conceptual "reality" takes precedence over its social counterpart, whose existence is without significance in the sense that it resides outside Furet's semiotic circuit. The discordance between the Revolution-as-people brandished by the leaders (and appropriated by the galactic historians) and the Revolution as lived by the people is neither pertinent nor profound. And as long as he defines his demarche as conceptual rather than commemorative, Furet can comfortably march to the drumbeat of the Revolutionary protagonists. For him the Revolution has a life of its own outside the social, a discursive autonomy and a sort of anthropomorphic existence. Thus he can write a metahistorical phrase such as the following: "If, as I believe, the French Revolution was really what it set out to be ... "7 Given his conceptual and ideological concerns, then, it is not surprising that the historian so preoccupied with the play of interests as guarantor of

104 Farewell, Revolution sound democratic practice should be unwilling to acknowledge that interests were at play even as une volonte une began to cast its portentous shadow. Furet does not allow interests to emerge until the second revolution, Thermidor, liberates them. This is his version of the bourgeois revolution, the "revenge of the social on ideology." The social can savor its revenge only after most of the decisive questions that will constitute the Revolutionary legacy have been addressed. There is a great deal of evidence in the Old Regime as well as the Revolution that social conflict was unrelenting, that it took many forms, and that it impinged on discourse and decision making in many ways. The Revolution was not a bourgeois revolution in the canonical sense, but the strife between groups that could be called bourgeois and elements from the nobility critically shaped the outcome of the so-called pre-Revolution, even as it did the evolution of the state during the eighteenth century. Throughout the time and space of the Old Regime, social relations were highly conflictual-even when those conflicts do not fit patterns dogmatically imposed on them in retrospect. The contentions involving the peasantry and the urban laboring poor similarly help account for the way in which power was represented and used. Ideology was not an autonomous driving force: it was as much the product of social interests as their engine. Nor did ideology characteristically precede politics: certainly the leftward movement of many deputies of the Third Estate in response to the new opportunities and to the resistance of the nobility illustrates this point. Differences in politics were deeply rooted in social reality. 8 In one ofhis sweeping broadsides against social history-intellectually less noble, less conceptual, less hermeneutic than intellectual history-Furet affirmed that it is "in retreat vis-a-vis the questions posed by the historians of the nineteenth century." But in retreat according to what criteria? Thefinalites furetiennes-aesthetic, moral, epistemological, ideological, or other? Do they demarcate the entire universe of interesting and useful inquiry? Is it really fruitful to frame the debate in terms of sapient Ancients and stunted Moderns? Furet suggested that the social interpretation of the Revolution belonged in a museum, surrounded in today's context by the recently razed statues of Lenin, Dzerjinsky, and Company, if they are saved from counterrevolutionary (or is it revolutionary?) vandalism. Yet there is an anachronistic cast to large parts of Furet's critique, which have almost as cogent claims on mummification. For there has been considerable evolution on the social side, even among certain Marxists.

105 From the Social to the Political

There was a unity of animadversion in Furet's attitude to purveyors of the social. Under the same rubric of antipathy he seemed to amalgamate Socialists, social historians, and the social-Revolutionary actors. It was as if the social historians were responsible for (since they were presumed to be sympathetic with) the political voluntarism that powered the lethal Revolutionary drive for social transformation. The same "discredit" that stained the PS for its ambition "to treat social problems from above, using legislative or administrative means, instead of facilitating gradually the solution by leaving more freedom for the initiatives of the interested parties" fell on the social historians of the Revolution whose protagonists had first ventured this sort of metamorphosis. When Antoine Barnave renounced "the ambition to reconstruct the social on the basis of reason," Furet approved (even as he must have when Prime Minister Rocard declared dryly that the question of pensions was "an affair of society, not of the government"). Babeuf signaled "the extreme point of Revolutionary belief that the political will could do everything." In Furet's eyes, nothing jeopardized liberty more directly than this idea of investing the political domain with the "exorbitant power of changing society." If the French Communists battled "with this fierceness on the history of the Revolution," it was because they discovered in it the link between '93 and 1917, "which is the belief in extreme political willfulness, the regeneration of man by the state."

The Political Turn This was the pernicious "illusion of the political" against which Furet struggled. The political was what mattered to Furet, in part because it was through it that the social became an issue and a peril. According to the liberal ethos of the early Revolution, the social should have been a terrain of exchange and negotiation where individuals worked out their problems among themselves and onto which the state ventured only to set very general rules of the game. When the social succeeded in absorbing the political, or when the political allowed itself to be seduced (or suborned) by the social-when the two categories became conflated-the results were characteristically baleful. When dreamers and engineers avid to reinvent the social seized the political, the Revolution hurtled into agonistic doom. 9 "The problem of the men of 1789 is above all political," the Furetian

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galaxy proclaimed indefatigably. From the point of view of the Revolutionary leaders, the political was constantly menaced by the social. But despite the costly eruptions of the "popular forces" on the scene, it was clear to Furet in retrospect that "the French Revolution did not fundamentally change society." Much of what appeared to be social change was purely nominal, fictions crafted for theatrical, therapeutic, and demagogic reasons; rather hypocritically, the Revolution practiced "the politics of appellation sociale." The result was largely old wine in new or refurbished bottles. Despite the dialectical relation between the political and the social that Furet himself had adumbrated, he sealed these categories as hermetically as possible, especially when he addressed what he considered to be the overriding vocation of the Revolution. The Revolution "founded not new economic relations but new political principles and new modes of governance." While the elite put "the people in the place of the king" in the new theory of legitimacy, Furet, like Quinet, excluded the people, and all expressions of spontaneity, from "the properly political field." The people could not fathom the objective nature of their condition, they failed to relativize their misery (in the spirit of Burke or even of Tocqueville), and they were incapable of engaging in the rational politics that was the idiom of universal and monumental political change. Despite the vagaries of the following years, and the profound upheavals of'93, the real social issues had virtually all been resolved by the night of 4 August 1789. The subsequent struggles were vain and counterproductive. And in any event, the working out of the enormously complex and ambiguous commitments of that August night, Furet seemed to regard as de Ia petite histoire, points of detail that paled in significance to the issues concerning sovereignty, representation, and the elaboration of institutions, none of which impinged on or was critically influenced by the social.lO The ambiguities and the aporias in Furet's conceptions of the political, on the one hand, and the economic, habitually fused with the social, on the other, crystallize in his piece on the Maximum, an article in the Dictionnaire critique that might have been composed by an epigone of Friedrich von Hayek or, more appropriately in Furet's case, of Frederic Bastiat. By the end of 1791 the assignats had lost approximately a third of their value, hard currency fled, prices mounted, and the Varennes crisis intensified anxiety over supplies. "As early as this period," wrote Furet, "the problem is what it will never cease being, more political than economic: the price rise, that old sign of popular misery, is less a function of a catastrophe of the harvest than of a collective

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anticipation of tragic events to come." In the next breath he characterized the price-fixing riots of the spring of 1792 as "agitations of the economic type." These formulations and classifications betray a lack of understanding of the institutions, attitudes and practices that characterized the domain of les subsistances in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The political, the economic, and the psychological were deeply imbricated. The economic cannot be reduced to the harvest, which was in any case one of the supreme political events of each year. The problems of distribution and consumption were both economic and political every step of the way, from the fields to the bakeshops passing through the mills (necessarily) and the markets (erratically). Economic relations, governed primordially by social considerations, were inherently political in nature. Furet reproved the nostalgia for the old social contract linking governors and governed in a pact of solidarity that was embodied in the Maximum. Or, rather, he denied the existence of any cognitive continuity between the behavior of Revolutionary consumers and the reflexes of the Old Regime. The imperative of the tabula rasa apparently required the people and the authorities to act as if they consciously remembered nothing, as if the king's sovereignty had not been in practice conditional on his guarantee of certain social rights. So the popular discontent, Furet wrote, "feeds also, sans le savoir, on the memory of monarchical regulation." Or, "the men of 1793 encounter sans le savoir, as Edgar Quinet clearly noticed, a recurrent argument of the jurists of the absolute monarchy, the argument in behalf of public safety/well-being [salut public]." Yet the pamphlets, ordinances, and administrative correspondence of the Revolution are replete with references to the monarchical system, albeit frequently embarrassed or oblique ones. The Revolutionaries who worried about the subsistence question quite self-consciously thought about the Old Regime, as did many of the consumers who rioted for bread of good quality at accessible prices. Furet, like Soboul, embraced the explanations and rationalizations of the leading actors. Playing the dirigiste/ paternalist card may have required what passed for surencheres ideologiques in the Assembly, but on the local level where it mattered most, it was hardly unfamiliar and it did not need to be disguised as a newly conquered right instituted to protect the poor or as a newly legitimized vengeance to be wreaked against the rich. In his willingness to see the recourse to the Maximum primordially as a crusade "to extend the principle of equality," Furet merely echoed the voices of certain Montag-

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nards along with that of their most vigorous historian, Albert Mathiez. The episode of the Maximum arguably "opens the path to a Socialist interpretation ofRobespierrism," but by fixing on this path Furet occluded the route to other plausible interpretations. Mingling politics and economics amounted to mixing the unmixable. It contravened the sacred boundaries charted by the liberal individualism of '89. In Furet's terms, shaped by the RAT assumptions (those of rational action theory) that have given liberalism its most recent scientific cachet, deleterious "politics" lamentably won out over "economic rationality." (Im)pure abstraction, introduced as a superior and unerring logic despite its utter lack of relevance to the conditions of the time, structural and conjunctural, this rationality spoke once again in the voice of the ideological rather than the analytical imperative. Borrowed from the oratorical arsenal of the Montagnards' antagonists, the statement that "the spirit of the 'maximum' is not economic rationality but Terror" is another example of Furet imitating the very commemorative mimesis that he had so mordantly and effectively denounced in Soboul. Had politics stayed out of it, the Invisible Hand would presumably have activated the timeless and universal principle of maximizing rationality that Marshall Sahlins-living proof that all "Chicago boys" do not think alike-long ago exposed as a sociocentric conceit. Furet's treatment of "this absurd arrangement" deploys derision, hindsight, and teleology in a way that hardly advances one's understanding of what the Revolutionaries attempted or what they thought they were attempting. 11

Contesting Furet's Concept of the Political It was less Furet's claim for the primacy of the political than his assertion of its supercilious autonomy that provoked resistance. Bensai:d dismissed it as an imposture, a falsely profound idea, a frivolous concept incommensurate with its object of scrutiny. Sledziewski railed at its effete, elitist, rarefied nature, which enabled political rationalism-bon chic bon genre -to conceal the canaille in its struggle against oppression and the feudal system in its multiple incarnations. Focused on a narrow range of issues, in Furet's politics "there is no question of complementarity with a social history from which there was apparently nothing to gain, if not some reasons for not being

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Marxist." For leftist geographer-sociologist Jacques Levy, Furet's notion of the political was deracinated and decontextualized, cut off from the society and the economy, and thus of feeble analytical power. As a lifelong non-Marxist, Jean-Noel Jeanneney was inclined to regard "a reflection on the autonomy of 'the political'" as "a liberation of thought," a necessary restitution of the event, and a heuristically fruitful complexification of the issues. But under Furet's aegis, he felt that the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction and that the neglect of "economic and social forces" undermined the credibility of this conception of the political. Michel Vovelle and Claude Nicolet contended, in quite similar terms, that the political necessarily implied and issued in and from the social. As the former put it: "The Revolution is fundamentally a revolution of the depths whose principal result is the dismantling of the social system and the whole structure that was the Old Regime, [which established] the foundation of liberal or modern bourgeois society. It is this social revolution that is realized through an affirmation of the political. "12 From the staunch right and the perfervid left, historians Jean Tulard and Antoine Casanova may have agreed on little else, but they both deplored Furet's narrow political compass and his flight from the social. For Tulard class remained a crucial variable and social struggles were at the center of much of the Revolutionary experience. For Casanova, political philosophy begged the decisive question of the origin of the mutations it catalogued to which only a social analysis could restitute the roots, the density, and the significance. In the spirit of Labrousse ("Social history? Do you know of a history that is not social?"), Madeleine Reberioux accused Furet of a sort of Berlusconization of history. Still mesmerized by the muse of totalizing history, she resisted the idea that history could be cut into slices, that the political could be separated from the social. Maurice Agulhon argued that the social no longer had anything to do with one's political options and that it covered the entire landscape, not just that of the workers. In Max Gallo's view, one's politics had a great deal to do with how one regarded the social. The retreat to the nineteenth century and the withdrawal into the chrysalis of ideas "can be explained by the fact that in today's society in 1989 there is no longer a discourse or even an understanding of social movements and of the economy." Gallo agreed that the excess of Marxist scholastics had led to "a forgetting that there is an autonomy of the political." The symmetrical excesses of anti-Marxism, however, led to even

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greater aberration and regression in the historiography of a Revolution eviscerated of its social and economic core. 13 Cultural historian Roger Chartier, Furet's colleague at the EHESS and one of his successors as director of its Centre de recherches historiques, who was known for his firmly rooted yet fundamentally moderate leftist views, fashioned one of the most searching and suggestive critiques of the political interpretation, considered as "the most all-embracing level of the organization of societies" and premised on the preeminence of "the conscious action of individuals" and the play of clear ideas. At the same time he challenged certain premises of Michel Vovelle-Vovelle the historian of mentalities rather than the steward of the Soboulean succession. "To postulate the primacy of the political," wrote Chartier, "is this not in a sense to reenact one of the strong illusions of the men of the Revolution: to wit, their belief in the omnipotence of the new law and of the will of the state, without regard for the diversity of social interests?" But this overinvestment in political action and this ideological voluntarism on their own could never suffice to level the differences that cut across the social world. The history of the Revolution is at once the history of "a founding intention" voiced in universal categories and the history of myriad conflicts and contradictions that constantly threatened to revive the faults and cleavages of the social. "To desire to give to the event a strictly philosophical and political reading is thus to subordinate ... historical intelligibility to the conscience of contemporaries," warned Chartier. "That the revolutionaries believed in the absolute efficacity of the political-capable, according to them, of reforging the social body even as it regenerated the individual, does not imply that the historian must adopt their illusion." Moreover, the critic questions the coherence of placing "a history that wants to be based on a philosophy of the free subject and the clear conscience" under the patronage of Tocqueville and Cochin, both of whom demonstrated, each in his own way, "that individuals do precisely the contrary of what they say they do." This examination leads Chartier to ask two questions. First, must the return of the political take the exclusive and necessary form "of a history of conceptual innovations, oblivious to the collective determinations that, nevertheless, regulate ... the intellectual constructions and political decisions of subjects?" Second, does the social interpretation depend exclusively and necessarily on the ponderous tools of Marxizing class and class-struggle analysis? He answers categorically no. The social history of the Revolution

111 From the Social to the Political

need not be imprisoned within "the poor concept" of the bourgeois revolution or reduced to the passage from one mode of production to another. It seemed to him much more impoverishing to craft a history of ideas radically separated from a history of interests, a history of the staking out of political or philosophical positions absolutely detached from the antagonistic positions occupied in the social space. In place of Furet's approach Chartier proposed another, one that aimed at articulating the divisions of the social world, which do not necessarily follow "the economic logic of classes," and the contradictory modes of construction of social reality, "which are the matrices where conceptual elaborations and political actions take root." This implied amicrohistorical focus on groups capable of showing how mental representations were at once "produced " by the incorporation of the social divisions themselves in the subject and productive, by way of the discourses and practices they engendered, of new divisions and patterns. If this strategy amounted to a return to the founding inspiration of Durkheim and Mauss, as Chartier indicated, it also reflected the more recent influence of Foucault, Bourdieu, and Elias. For a renewal of the political dimension so long stigmatized by the Annales did not imply a preferential alliance with political philosophy as opposed to the (other) social sciences. For Chartier the history of cultural practices constituted the most promising arena of inquiry, one largely neglected by the Dictionnaire critique, · itself indifferent to modes of transmission and reappropriation of ideas, systems of regulation, and outbursts of violence. Chartier wanted to focus on the encounter between representations of the social world and those of the political order, "at the intersection of the tendering of ideas, the supply side, and the differentiated intellectual and affective tools that, taking hold of these ideas, give them plural and rival meanings." Nor was this to embrace a Vovellean-style history of mentalities which in some ways foreclosed for Chartier the autonomy of cultural practice as much as the social interpretation occluded the autonomy of the political for Furet. Too confined in a Labroussean logic, reading the cultural across a socioeconomic grid, Chartier believed that the mentalities approach accounted less cogently for political choices and cultural distinctions than did other principles of differentiation, including gender, generation, community solidarities, and educational capital. At stake in the debate galvanized by the bicentennial were questions that concerned larger issues of historiographical research and interpretation beyond the clash over the Revolution. "What is at stake here,"

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concluded Chartier, "is the way in which the historian must articulate voluntary actions and free thoughts with the collective determinations that govern them." 14

Ideas in the Air and Their Logic Furet treated the sociogenesis of ideas with an insouciance-his epithet in analogous situations was "laziness" [paresse ]-that he would never have tolerated in his militant social-history phase. The practice is far older, but it is fitting that the test to which Furet repeatedly reverted was formulated in 1951 by Jacob Ta1mon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, a book rife with rootless abstractions and unhistoricized assumptions, and chronically indifferent to the relation between the enunciation of ideas and their life in society: their diffusion, application, amendment, transformation, and so on. For Talmon, "there is such a thing as a climate of ideas, as ideas in the air." Pious assertion sufficed; the vulgar matter of proof never insinuated itself No serious cultural historian today could conscientiously use this formula contrived for begging questions on the pretext of putative transparency. With like-minded neoidealist serenity, Furet accounted for important phenomena in the same fashion. Thus Necker's project for political representation "has no need of precise antecedents, so much was it in the air of the time [dans /'air du temps]." Barnave's reaction to the efforts to exploit the murder ofFoulon and Bertier ("was this blood, then, so pure?") was "an idea that is in many heads." On the eve of the rising of 10 August 1792, political extremism "constitutes the air du temps." The youthful Michelet succumbed to the revolutionary "air du temps." Catholic-Socialist historian Philippe Buchez was "possessed by everything that crosses the air du temps." Quinet encountered the connection between religion and politics in Hegel, "but he also found it in the air du temps under the July Monarchy." The postwar air du temps, whose felon winds had not yet blown, wafted Furet's generation toward Communism. He located the consolidation of his galaxy in the "air du temps that brought us together from the end of the 1970s." On the eve of the bicentennial, "probably because the air du temps swung to the right," his work was used in an effort to place in question the whole revolutionary process. The air performed yeoman service for the historian in his section of La Republique du centre. On page sixteen he rendered

113 From the Social to the Political

intelligible Mitterrand's anticipation of the centrist cocktail of social protec~ tion and the free market by pointing out that "something had been dans /'air for a long while." On page twenty-nine, Furet wrote that "the left extricates itself by complementing the national idea with the idea of human rights, following the air du temps." On page fifty-two he explained how "/'air du temps ," through the critique of totalitarianism, "led intellectuals to question administrative intervention in society."IS When enough air mass congealed, it formed what Furet called a logic. A logic resembles a complex system of apprehension, representation, interpretation, organization, and action. Like /'air du temps, it quickly takes on a life of its own whose muscular vitality obscures its origins and the process by which it works. The relation between logic and subject is never clear. Is the subject the author of the logic or merely its agent? A shortcut for integrated analysis, the notion of logic is also a euphemism for fatality or necessity, a radical circumscription of choices, a procrustean web generated in the mind without any dialectical relationship with the world outside that it infiltrates. Furet fails to deconstruct the mechahism of the logic and to accord it its full historicity by purging the telic tinge and inserting it in lived experience. One finds the veiled determinism throughout Furet's work, most prominently, as we have seen, in his consideraton ofthe relationship between '89 and '93, between liberty and its antithesis, between popular sovereignty and despotism. Thus it was an inexorable logic that drove Robespierre from one surenchere ideologique to the next: "But the Revolution possesses from the beginning a political logic that he was also one of the first to understand and use." One discovers a similar logic at work, for example, in the recourse to the system of the Maximum. "The logic of the inaugurated system was that of requisition and Terror, plus that of regulation," wrote Furet. Yet it must have been rooted in the past, for later he evokes "this immense program that transfigures the old administrative logic of the monarchy through the language of equality." But the originary logic was obscured by the discursive/ operative logic: the system of the maximum "did not cease to depend on the logic that had established it," which was apparently the logic of the "egalitarian surenchere." Presumably this was "the political logic which had won out over economic rationality," the only logic that corresponded in Furet's eyes to the requirements of production and allocation. Neither markedly anticlerical nor antireligious, the men of '89, in their policy toward the church, "are drawn into a logic whose constraints they did

114

Farewell, Revolution not perhaps foresee." On the eve of the purge of the Gironde, the development of the policy of "revolutionary government," Furet contends, "is inscribed in the logic of Montagnard policy," which needed the support of the sansculottes. In some instances Furet seems to have uncovered the logic by using the same practice he censured in the Jacobino-Marxists (commemorative "laziness"): drawing answers from the discourse of the Revolutionary actors themselves (notably Sieyes, Mirabeau, Barnave, and Robespierre) or from their nineteenth-century successors in the business of Revolutionary exegesis, beginning with Constant.16

Le Retour aux Sources: The Nineteenth Century How does one account for Furet's overinvestment in the nineteenth century? His exodus from Marxism diminished neither his interest in theory (though it did shift his focus from the grand to the middle range) nor his need for mentors. For various reasons, the Annales universe failed him on both accounts. Once he was riveted by the Revolution, Furet understood very quickly that the nineteenth century was in many ways an extension of the Revolution. The Revolution submerged the nineteenth century politically, morally, and intellectually, and shaped its agenda in virtually every domain. The French Revolution interested him primordially because it seemed to hold the key to an understanding of modern democracy and of contemporary French politics, matters that had always fascinated him and afforded him a natural bridge between his scientific and civic concerns. As quasiparticipant, interpreter, and transmitter of the Revolution, the nineteenth century increasingly struck Furet as the critical piece in the puzzle, and the piece happened to be largely published and easily accessibleP Certainly he would not go to the archives to study the Revolution, or anything else for that matter. As was the case for numerous other accomplished historians, most of whom concentrated on ideas, the joy of archival research never really enlisted him. At some juncture he seems to have developed the prejudice-perhaps it was a mere defense mechanism-that archival research demanded a less penetrating sort of intelligence than textual analysis, a view predicated on the assumption that the research task itself required neither imagination nor judgment and that the collection of unpublished data somehow dispensed one from the business of pondering their significance. IS

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In any event, the nineteenth century offered him a way into the Revolution that was intellectually compelling in terms of his purview, convenient and clean in terms of its investigatory requirements, and consonant with his rekindled interest in philosophy and philosophers, whose company he had begun to keep more assiduously than before. The more he scrutinized it, the more pristine and attractive the nineteenth century loomed. To his astonishment, the vast amount of commentary on the Revolution that it generated had been largely ignored by twentieth-century historians, a dereliction for which he would never forgive them. ("The same people who in the twentieth century pride themselves on a fastidious erudition blithely ignore fundamental texts on the subject of their research.") Its decisive advantage was precisely its insulation from the contamination of the Russian Revolution and the monstrous marriage of Leninism and Jacobinism, which appeared to transform the Revolution from "the matrix of French politics, the Red thread of our national history," into the matrix for modern totalitarianism. Marxism before Lenin was much more interesting and considerably less dangerous than it would later become. Though the nineteenth century lived with incandescent memories of the Revolution's political illusion, fortified by Marx's speculative conviction that this illusion constituted the leitmotif of French history, it was not transfixed by the mystifying power and the terrifying ambitions and scale of the Soviet plan for state-driven social regeneration. Thus it salvaged its lucidity. It was also spared the contamination and concomitant destabilization of erudition-the cascades of "scientific" research that would splinter and extend the field of inquiry indefinitely at the cost of compromising the capacity for a global regard and interpretation. Unburdened by either the ideological or the positivist terror of the twentieth century, the nineteenth century, in the context of its own passionate and sometimes bloody struggles, reflected more fruitfully on the past and future of the Revolution (as a revolution) than its successors. There was a "hierarchy" of questions, Furet believed; some were manifestly more profound than others. He turned to the nineteenth century because, as actor-analyst-analysand, it asked more probing and germane questions than the so-called classical school of the next century. Furet put it plainly to an American audience at the end of 1989: "I consider such authors as Hegel and Marx, Constant and Stael, Tocqueville and Quinet much more fundamental for the understanding of the French Revolution than all the academic historians of the twentieth century, because scholarship, though indispensable to the historian's work, is not an end in

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itself and must address pertinent or even profound issues." What Furet does not divulge is that the criteria for pertinence and profundity are value-laden and ultimately quite arbitrary. They respond to litmuses that are ideological, aesthetic, moral, or perhaps simply idiosyncratic. In Furet's case, the selection process is framed by a fairly straightforward teleology. He gazes back from an ideal-type liberal democracy at the end of the second millennium that serves as an unspoken referent and prism for his reflections. He strains to forge a usable history, one that can both account for and justify the normative ambitions that he has fixed for modern politics. If one grants that the nineteenth century had better judgment on the pertinence-profundity scale, the issue remains: how does one answer the pertinent and profound questions raised by Furet's philosophical Sanhedrin? Part of the answer seems to be: Remember, above all, these nineteenthcentury figures are thinkers rather than historians in our diminished sense of the term. Don't subject them to the tests of abject positivism. Don't become overly preoccupied with verifying or corroborating their (incidental) historical claims. Rather, draw on their metahistorical insights inspired by what Furet called "philosophical spirit." Philosophical spirit meant the capacity to transcend erudition in order to attain general ideas. It implied a conceptual perspective predicated on taking one's distance, on an estrangement vis-a-vis the object scrutinized (in a mood antithetical to celebration). Finally it supposed a break with the explanations and recitations of intentions supplied by the discourse of the actors. The measure for the validity of the philosophical interpretation was not positivistic fit (e.g., the application of evidentiary rules in the examination of hypotheses) but verisimilitude for the small picture in the short run and functional coherence for the big picture in the long run. 19

Jules, Alexis, Edgar, and 1he Others Besides being ideologically and aesthetically congenial and, at bottom, more intelligent, the nineteenth century drew Furet, in a quasi-evangelical way ("The task of my generation") because it afforded the surest path to the most urgent objective, "to rehabilitate political history, at once at the level of practices [and] of the relations between the rulers and society at this time (this is a domain where there are hardly any studies but those of the AngloSaxons) and at the level of the symbolic representation of the political."

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Furet's method was to cross the major thinkers-those he considered the most perspicacious. Thus, for example, Tocqueville and Michelet charted out the core of his agenda. Tocqueville focused on the overrunning of the social space by the administrative apparatus of the state, surveying a process that linked Old Regime and Revolution and anticipating in his own fashion Marx's illusion of the political. Michelet located the very meaning of the Revolution in the displacement of the monarch by the sovereign people. While Michelet moved his readers in myriad ways, Tocqueville, herotheorist of the triumphant vengeance of liberalism, was guru to the whole galaxy, to Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Manent, among others. Bridging the Atlantic, traversing the long run, preoccupied with every sphere of social activity, Tocqueville commanded such deference because he seemed to provide the keys to understanding the nature of democracy. It is important to remember that although Tocqueville had flourished in the United States in the immediate postwar period, and even earlier, he did not command widespread attention in France until the 1960s, despite the valiant promotional efforts of Raymond Aron. In its early phases, the republication of Tocqueville's works was a quasi-confidential event in France. Furet unabashedly styled himself "Tocquevillean," and on occasion he seemed to take himself for Tocqueville. He used Tocqueville to buttress his claims as a sort of proxy for proo£ His sympathy led him to read Tocqueville with the sort of critical indulgence he would not accord Buchez, Blanc, or Marx. For instance, instead of exposing Tocqueville's patently erroneous portrait of a medieval El Dorado ofliberty, he gently remarked that the vision was "a bit idyllic." He hailed Tocqueville's glib and abstract analysis of the drift into abstraction through the "literarification" of politics as "brilliant," without worrying whether it was correct. Yet there is an immense amount of evidence showing that eighteenth-century intellectuals were deeply involved in public and practical affairs, knowledgeable and experienced in many ways. Fully adequate as an explanation of the Enlightenment-in-the-public-sphere, Tocqueville's argument only failed Furet because it did not account for the sociological germination of "revolutionary consciousness" (thus defining the limit of Tocqueville's utility and creating an opening for Cochin's reinvention). On other issues Furet equivocated. He taxed Tocqueville for failing to portray the nobility in socially differential terms, and thereby account for simultaneous stagnation and efflorescence. Yet he generally endorsed the

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long-term picture of an anomie nobility dispossessed of power and influence in the center as well as on the periphery. He reproached Tocqueville for exaggerating royal centralization, yet at the same time he sympathized with and premised several crucial arguments on the idea of tentacular monarchical penetration. Whatever its historical infirmities, Tocqueville's vision was philosophically immune from criticism, for he espoused "a true liberty," which all right-thinking readers were summoned to respect. Furet accorded Tocqueville a priori the sort of authenticity that Soboul granted to Robespierre. Furet celebrates as merits Tocqueville's defects, in particular his lack of interest in the strategy of social groups-the robe as much as the socalled bourgeoisie.2o Because he privileged "the question of liberty and of political power," Quinet reinforced Tocqueville for Furet at certain critical junctures. Furet identified with Qp.inet whose interest was not so much in the history of the Revolution properly speaking but in "its philosophical filiation, and its capacity to renew in modern man, heir to the Christian message, the sense of his destiny." Both Quinet and Tocqueville sought out the connections between the revolutionary phenomenon and state despotism, before and after 1789. Quinet echoed Tocqueville's preoccupation with the state in his view of the Terror as the resurgence of the absolutist tradition. Like Furet and Tocqueville, he believed that "hatred of the nobility misled the historians of the bourgeoisie: in the name of the class struggle they forgot liberty." The two nineteenth-century commentators were both captivated by the American case, and they both took seriously the role of religion in shaping political thought and practice. Furet did not subject Quinet's view of the Old Regime to any more searching critical examination than he had Tocqueville's. And as with Tocqueville, the voices of Furet and Quinet often became conflated in their historical and ideological appreciations. 21 Clearly Furet was at home in the nineteenth century; he resonated to its vibrations and he ran on its energy. His critics, however, suggested that he fell into the very trap that he commended his Anglo-American adulator Simon Schama for avoiding in his book on Dutch civilization: "the great cliche words of the nineteenth century." The mass of those cliches constituted the historiographical grid through which Furet read the Revolution. Daniel Bensald described Furet as a sort of intellectual regrattier: "He patches. He retrieves. His intelligence resides in his understanding that a school of thought at the end of its vitality could only renew itself through a recourse to

119 From the Social to the Political

the old." In Furet's nineteenth-century shibboleths the bicentennial Condorcet, Fran~ois Ewald, discerned "essentially secondhand work, the interpretation of interpretations, with the pretension of pronouncing the truth on everything." While Joel Roman, a galactic ally writing in Esprit, hailed the enriching fusion of history and historiography which taught us to "reread the event at the same time as the interpretations of the event," the Marxist historian Jacques Guilhaumou, a pioneer in certain forms of linguistic and discursive analysis, complained acerbically that the revolutionary event "has disappeared under the interpretive layers." Mired in Furet's historiographical sediment, "to a certain extent we have lost the memory of the simple inscription of what was said in the course of the events themselves." Whereas Furet contended that the historiography had permitted him to give meaning to the Revolutionary experience, Guilhaumou argued that it had estranged him from apprehending that experience, let alone pondering its significance. Instead of submerging the event in a metadiscourse larded with unexamined and anachronistic assumptions, Guilhaumou aspired to allow the reflexivity of the event itself to emerge. "Is it not time," he asked, "to relegate the sacrosanct Histories ofthe French Revolution to a corner of our library and to study at last our revolutionary past in its own reality?" 2 2

A Pox on the University School of Historians Furet's scathing contempt for university historiography stemmed in large measure from its failure to honor the nineteenth century. The republicanscientific historians of the turn of the last century imitated the Revolutionaries of 1789 in their violent break with their own past. They, too, declared a sort of tabula rasa, refusing to anchor their entreprise intellectually in the rich-to them Gothic?-tradition that stretched from Constant to Taine. Time and again Furet rehearsed the catastrophic trade-off that resulted from this passive vandalism: what they gained in erudition, a word that occasionally took on a pejorative intonation in Furet's vocabulary, they lost a thousand times "in profundity." A double "fanaticism," embodied in the stylized martyrdom of their erudition (a series of endless and tiresome surencheres) and in the missionary exaltation of their ideology (whether decorous pink or lurid crimson), corseted them in "a narrow interpretation" which varied slightly

120 Farewell, Revolution

from one historian to the next in emphasis but which cumulatively impoverished the enterprise. In his piece entitled "The University History of the Revolution" in the Dictionnaire critique, Furet subjected Aulard, Mathiez, and Lefebvre to the sort of crisp sociology that the galaxy stridently denounced when it was applied to him. A compound of tragedy, farce, and moralizing homily, the story requires for its denouement a free-thinking historian on horseback riding a steed called Concept. Decadence set in at the very beginning of the process of professionalization when "history broke with philosophy." The repudiation of philosophy became the criminal leitmotif of the tale. When Aulard ventured to redo Q!.Iinet, "history expelled philosophy." Enshrined in the Sorbonne with Aulard, "the positivist method relegated these 'philosophical' histories [Blanc, Michelet, Quinet, Tocqueville] to the closet of outdated goods." In exchange for a vulgar improvement in factual precision, "university historical science developed from the end of the nineteenth century as the negation of philosophy." Despite-or because of-its own metaphysical origins, the Marxist-Leninist inflection of university historiography did not rectify the situation: "more than ever cut off from what made the philosophical and historical richness of the great debates of the nineteenth century, it encloses the French Revolution in a rigid and indigent system of interpretation." In the broadest sense, an absence of philosophy bespoke a paucity of culture, curiosity, and cunning. More specifically, it signified a lack of ideas, a "conceptual deficit." Now, Furet was never willing to admit that one person's concept was another's ideology. Aulard 's only ideas consisted of the political credo of a militant republican, and this ideology could not deliver Aulard from an interpretative impasse. "For lack of concepts, the historian is seized by the retrospective analogy, from which the Revolution emerges flattened, tamed, domesticated by the Third Republic." Nourished by Jaures and then (briefly) intoxicated by Lenin, Mathiez gave the republican exegesis a social turn. But the constant blend of anachronism, teleology and hagiography {the latter allying "moralizing naivete ... to partisan fanaticism") invested his work with a pervasive "intellectual weakness." Ideologically kindred spirits, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Mathiez also shared "a kinship in bias and in narrow-mindedness," a parochial disdain for history not undertaken precisely as they prescribed, and an intellectual xenophobia (though subsequently Furet accorded Lefebvre a drop more objectivity and less political partisanship).

121 From the Social to the Political

Enterprising, Jansenizing archival grubbers, neither Mathiez nor Lefebvre, however, was able to compensate his philosophical-hermeneutic sterility with a lode of new information. (Scholars unable to think took refuge in the archives, a sort of day-care center for developmentally handicapped historians.) Furet's vignette of Lefebvre was also a telling self-portrait, cast in a chiaroscuro of ambition and anxiety: "A great specialist, highly erudite, Georges Lefebvre remains a cramped historian, unbeatable on an archival reference but a stranger to the great texts that demarcate his realm of research." If "philosophy" leads to this sort of self-serving and cynical judgment, then Furet will have been the one to furnish the strongest argument against his own case. 23 In the bicentennial year, the Sorbonne, incarnating the university, was the Bastille that Furet wanted to take. Not the real Sorbonne of his mature years: he esteemed that he had already routed it in the 1970s. That was one reason why he felt no need to discuss Albert Soboul, whom he had buried before he died-or the real university, still conservative in its decrepitude, against and outside of which he had nurtured other structures, though by aggravating its agony he hoped to dislodge it further from the grip ofJacobino-Marxism. To complete his revision and avenge the nineteenth century, Furet attacked the Sorbonne-as-shrine-and-citadel in order to organize the auto-da-fe of the founding fathers of the university's historiography of the Revolution. In their ashes lay the remains of (the second) positivism along with the debris of (Marxist-Leninist) ideology. Ostensibly this signaled the triumph of critical historiography, grounded in philosophy, conceptually fecund, focused on the Big Questions. Numerous lesser questions concerning the practice of studying history remained shrouded in uncertainty. What were the implications of Furet's critique for the constitution of scientific knowledge? Did it not point to more fundamental epistemological questions that a wistfulness for philosophy alone could not resolve? Did it not reveal a profound crisis in the profession that could not be addressed in casually irenic terms (such as Mona Ozouf's mi-figue mi-raisin "why not the archive and history ?"). Was it not profoundly manichaean in its approach? In the end was it not flawed by the same sort of narrow-mindedness and corporatism that it reproved in the old gods? 24

The End of Exeeptionalis~n

F

uret was manifestly relieved to be able to announce that "the Revolution is over." Aside from the phenomenal attention that this lapidary and ambiguous phrase won him, it was clear that as a citizen and a historian he felt deeply that the Revolution was not a good thing for his country, or for his planet. To be sure, once the formula achieved notoriety, as a function of time and audience, Furet gave it several different constructions, with varying degrees of scholarly and ideological inflection, ranging from a rather modest statement concerning the end of French exceptionalism to a more sweeping and triumphalist declaration suggesting the futility of all violent transformations of state and society. But for all these different spins, his abiding and intimate conviction was that the Revolution had not been, and would probably never be, the "great prophet" depicted by Michelet, having been, rather, an untrustworthy and often a frankly evil prophet. Of course the reason that the phrase had such enormous resonance in France had little to do with Furet's research. It prevailed because an increasingly large share of French public opinion yearned to hear it. Like Furet, they appeared ready to pay whatever costs in terms of amour-propre and identity the loss of part of their melancholic and burdensome (if not malevolent) specificity would entail. ("I am willing to pay a slightly excessive price for its disappearance," Furet told Die Zeit.)! 122

123 The End ofExceptionalism

Ending the Revolution and Practicing Safe Politics The conservative climate throughout the highly developed part of the world encouraged this irenic mood; the sense that their institutions were working and the fact that successive crises had not obliterated the cumulative gains of the trente glorieuses induced the French to take pride in their maturity, which they now saw as the surest guarantee of future progress, and which would be considered progress only if it were orderly. It is doubtful whether many French women and men had a vivid sense of a heritage consisting of two hundred years of civil war. Yet there is little question that most of them coveted some form of right-thinking tranquillity. Even as they prepared to commemorate the bicentennial, the French had no nostalgia for the high-risk category: they wanted to practice safe politics of the conventional democratic sort. For those who were interested, given the protean nature of Furet's phrase, it would still be possible to retain a good portion of the prestige that accrued, in the eyes of much of the world, to the (very early) Revolution. To pronounce the Revolution over is, of course, to insert oneself in the framework of the Revolutionary discourse itself. From the very beginning of the Revolution the problem confronted by successive leaders was that of finding a way to end it, or to stop it from being ended until it was completed. It was hardly easier to define the terms of the first proposition than it was those of the second. Furet suggests that the two poles of reference, for the Revolutionaries themselves, were '89 and '93-'93 before the fact as a trope before it became a chronological marker. He occludes the wide range of options-visions as well as policies-explored in the interval between the two fatidic years in order to accentuate the claim that the problem has been literally the same since the very outset. At the core of his analysis is the idea that the Revolution could not be stopped-at least not according to the protocols of rational politics-once the ideological dynamic that came to dominate it slithered out of the Pandora's wish-box of '89. (Despite its futility, Furet empathizes with Mirabeau's effort: "But this project remains capital to the extent that it is the earliest and most coherent expression of the dream of'halting the Revolution' which will haunt all its leaders as they faced the indefinite drift of authority.") Since the two philosophical camps within the revolutionary tradition-the counterrevolutionaries are another story-coalesced rapidly and passionately, the Revolution could not be terminated during the next century either.

124 Farewell, Revolution

The revolutionary explosions of the early twentieth century deepened the abyss between '89ers and '93ers by enhancing the apocalyptic sense of urgency on each side. The time had come, in Furet's view, to extricate France from this needless torment. Even as the Socialists of 1981 talked perfervidly of making "political" France finally coincide with "sociological" France, so Furet wanted to allow historico-historiographical France to coincide with institutional France. z For Furet it was no longer really a problem of "ending" the Revolution; it was, rather, a matter of demonstrating objectively that it was indeed over. France had changed dramatically, and the old ideological prism that refracted perceptions had imprisoned the French in an anachronistic selfrepresentation, he maintained. "The French are in agreement on the institutions," in particular on two that "no republican would have accepted a century ago, even two decades ago." They were an American-style supreme court to evaluate the constitutionality of legislation and the election of the chief of the executive branch by universal suffrage, a system in conformity with the American paradigm of political modernity but that also "reintroduces something of the monarchical principle in the sovereignty of the people," in belated reparation for the Rousseauian excesses of olden times and to the delight of the Mitterrandian royalists. Two deep changes in the political-cultural landscape reinforced the trend toward a large consensus. First, the long and bitter conflict between the Catholic church and political democracy "is coming to an end." Furet concurred with many deeply disappointed traditionalists, and astounded many militants of laicity, when he remarked soberly that "the Catholics are no longer reactionaries." There was no longer either "a Revolutionary party" or a "counterrevolutionary party" on the landscape of French Catholicism. (To which Msgr. Dagens, coadjutor bishop of Poitiers, responded: on the contrary, Catholics have internalized both, and the tension between them continues to mark their spiritual and their civic life.) In part because of the Catholic evolution "the Revolution no longer admitted of absolutely clear political stakes in French politics separating right and left." After 1945 Furet detected nothing "that can separate right and left in the heritage of 1789." Second, the Communists, self-proclaimed stewards of Revolutionary messianism, no longer counted. Far from signaling the marginalization of the masses, for Furet "the spectacular decline" of the PCF heralded "the end of worker exile in French democracy."

125 The End ofExceptionalism

With the "two great democratic families" in some sense returned to the fold, Faurean reconciliation was now plausible and even necessary. The French people had wisely disinvested in the perilous dream of political voluntarism. Swept up in the liberal tide of good sense and correct doctrine, the French no longer believe "that the state or the regime must be changed in order to institute the happiness of the people." The result was a France that was more, not less, democratic for having renounced the quixotic quest for equality in favor of the virile practice ofliberty. Following Tocqueville, Furet carefully distinguished the "democratic idea" -the American model-from the "revolutionary idea" -the French (and later the Franco-Soviet) model. At bottom, the Revolution was about "the birth of the democratic phenomenon," an offspring that its parent had constantly threatened to devour, until relatively recent times. Given this problematic, a long-run approach (Tocquevillean rather than Braudelian) was required, mounting and descending two hundred years on either side of'89. And that was one of the major grounds on which Furet's approach to the Revolution differed from that of the vast majority of specialists.3 Nothing during the bicentennial season showed more starkly the incompatibility of the democratic and the revolutionary ideas than the "counterrevolutionary revolutions" of Eastern Europe. "The French Revolution was so often brandished as a property deed by the Bolsheviks," advanced Furet, "that no one last fall [1989] laid claim to the heritage in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw." (Doubtless that was true if Furet confined his encounters to the likes ofYuri Afanasiev, Ledzek Kolakowski, and Gaspar Tamas.) Democratic universalist rather than cocorico revolutionary, Furet took some pleasure in the ironic twist by which "Jacobinism" cost the French Revolution "its ancestral place in the recent reunion of Europe with liberty." The failure of many French Socialists to understand that the eclipse of the revolutionary idea was tantamount to the victory not of so-called reaction but of fundamental democratic ideas only enhanced Furet's contempt for their analytical impoverishment. "The result, he wrote, "is that those among the French Socialists who are distressed by the decline of revolutionary passions are strangely blind to that which causes 'the other Europe' to make progress in the direction they desire." Their "Leninist superego" blinded them to the true significance of the disintegration of the Communist world. Perversely, they preferred "a thousand times the idea of a 'revision' of Communism to that of a break with Communism."

126 Farewell, Revolution

The Socialist capacity for mystification and error staggered Furet. He could not pardon them for their obtuse reluctance to acknowledge the bankruptcy and peril of Marxism. The Mitterrandists wrongly believed that they had surfed to power on a revolutionary tidal wave. Without even invoking the allegedly Robespierrist rhetoric of the PS congress at Valence, Furet described the early Mitterrand regime as a kind of attenuated Terror.4 To have nationalized at 100 percent even as the Soviet model revealed the spectacular failure of the planned economy bespoke, in Furet's mind, a colossal ideological benightedness. The attempt to integrate the private (largely Catholic) schools into the state apparatus was plausibly interpreted by millions as a violation of their liberty. Furet sympathized with their revolt against the bloated and doped political will: "Society means to make its choices itself rather than abandon them to the care of the state." This he construed as evidence of the Socialists' suicidal need to "shoulder the heritage of the Terror." Even their belated conversion to human-rights doctrine-imposed by the failure of "the revolutionary solution" -was marred by their refusal to understand that the rights of man meant the blossoming of the unfettered individual and the withering of the grasping state rather than the elaborate construction of something called social justice. Even as they celebrated '89, the Socialists still dreamed of '93. Their utopian notion of equality imperiled liberty, the sine qua non of democratic practice. According to Furet's analysis, equality had to be redefined as an expression of liberty and confined to the contingent status that Marxists had always· denounced as egregiously inadequate-what better proof that it was the correct status? The tragedy of the Socialists was that they remained prisoners "of a historical design that history has the impertinence to contradict." A minimal grasp of reality ought to have convinced them that their very rise to power was made possible by the desiccation of the revolutionary tradition. In light of the real triumph in France of the democratic idea-the solid and workable ideals of '89-the Socialists were among the last of their nation to comprehend that recourse to revolution was wholly superfluous and dangerous. While Furet pitied the Socialists for their inability to break out of their ideological cocoon, he passed off his own ideological lucubration-culled from and sanctified by Tocqueville-as a sociological law: democracy "favors in a thousand ways a certain conservatism." Why can't the sophisticated French leftists acquire the maturity of those

127 The End ofExceptionalism

grands enfonts the Americans? "When you tell an American that the American Revolution is over," Furet explained to a German interviewer, "you won't stun anyone." Jolted by changes on the world scene, in their own microcosm it was understandably difficult for the Socialists to admit, in the wake of the end of the R/revolution, that Mitterrand, Rocard, and Chirac were more or less the same in the centrist republic. Politics continued to be extremely competitive and even acrimonious in the absence of ideological differences precisely because all energy was focused on "very sharp battles for power." But the end of "the French-style Revolution" did not mean the end of revolution everywhere, Furet allowed. The revolutionary tradition was both "dead and alive." The idea of revolution was inseparable from a democratic philosophy: tyrannical regimes could not be spared from the threat of overthrow by means including violence. But the recent revolutionary experience has issued in such horrific results-new despotisms substituting for the deposed ones-that it remained unclear in Furet's eyes whether revolution had a real future. The best course would be to avoid violent change: "it would be better off for history to evolve without revolution." If it had absolutely to occur, it should be as short-lived as possible. For Furet "the whole problem of revolutions is to know how to bring them to a close." This theme dominated the French Revolution beginning in 1789, and imbued the Soviet case with its ever-deepening pathology. s

Reactions to Furet's Slogan-Axiom Furet's tenet of termination elicited extensive support, concentrated on the right and in the center, and considerable hostility, located on the left and far left. Typical of a wide range of middling opinion was an editorial in Le Point in July 1989 that rehearsed all the Furetian themes: it proclaimed that "the revolutionary dream of a change of society is abandoned," referring to "the celebration of a pacified, banalized republic, shorn of its passions" and to "the signs of a new maturity ... of an authentic stability." Following Furet, Le Point argued that Mitterrand completed and fortified the operation of consolidation and consensus building. Considerably further to the right, Gerard Spiteri in Le Quotidien de Paris endorsed Furet's analysis: "France has digested this period, overcome the debates that accompanied it, defused the discourses that referred to it." Echoing the historian, the journalist esteemed

128 Farewell, Revolution

that now that the management of government by left and right had become "approximately similar to the differences that separated fifteen years ago a militant of the gauche pro!etarienne from a Mao spontaniiste -the Revolution no longer appears as a necessity." While Franz-Olivier Giesbert in Le Figaro and Guy Sorman in Figaro-Magazine criticized the subversive/regressive tendencies in the Mitterrandian system that threatened to undermine and/ or corrupt this recentering, neither questioned Furet's basic argument. 6 Among rightist historians heavily invested in the notion of permanent cleavage as a sort of counterpart to the Trotskyite concept of permanent revolution, there emerged an ambivalent response. On the one hand, there was delight in the blow struck against the left-its illusions and pretensions. On the other, there was a feeling, best expressed by Jean Tulard of the University of Paris-IV and the Fourth Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes (from whose reluctant womb the EHESS ultimately came to life), that Furet was out of touch with the feelings of Ia France profonde. While certain critics reproached Furet for his Olympian estrangement from reality, more concretely Tulard complained that "Furet sees that from Chicago," which apparently meant much the same thing. For Tulard "the country [was] still cut in two." Rather than blunting the divisions, the wartime experience of the Occupation and the Resistance enhanced them. The Revolution engendered and sustained "a permanent civil war."7 On the left the Communist reaction was predictably the most vociferous; it is addressed in the companion volume to this study. The non-Communist left, both moderate and extreme, protested along similar lines, and often with considerable passion. The major theme was that the Revolution-one inextricably entangled with the idea of on-going revolution-could not be over because it was still needed. The Socialist historian and Elysee counselor Claude Manceron worried in plain language about "wounds and bruises ... still keenly etched in our flesh." Speaking for the left wing of the PS, sometime minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement deplored the loss of identity and dynamism implicit in "the end of exceptionalism" and "the liberal normalization." More lyrically, speaking in the millennial voice of the Revolution, Trotskyite philosopher Daniel Bensai:d asked: "How do you expect me to consider myself finished? ... I still have things to do." Without "her [the Revolution]," he darkly foresaw "the triumph of the permanent counterrevolution, a triumph infinitely more costly and murderous, without derogations, without any exceptions, than all revolutions put together." The bicentennial Condorcet

129 The End ofExceptionalism

deplored the stifling of an ethical as well as a political vocation. Behind a mask of scientific objectification, Furet presented a perspective that was "purely negative" and "wholly conservative." It summoned "no transformation, no change, it opens on no future." The post-Revolutionary Furet relegated any form of "struggle" -the essence of ethical existence-to the past. 8 As a historian of twentieth-century politics, and not merely as the official spokesman of the bicentennial, Jean-Noel Jeanneney contested Furet's affirmation of closure. Like Tulard, ·Jeanneney felt that "he exaggerated the intensity of the accord of the French on the Revolution." Inclined to agree with Furet before he assumed his commemorative functions, a year of close contact with his fellow citizens throughout the land revealed to him "the virulence of an opposition to the Revolution and its heritage that corresponds to a deeply rooted hostile current." The church remained for Jeanneney a bastion of resistance. He cited the attitude of Pope John Paul's "minister of culture," Msgr. Poupard, who "castigated the 'pseudoliberating ideology' of the Revolution, which he blamed for 'inventing the scaffold of execution."' Nor was Cardinal Lustiger very far removed from the doctrine "that traces the barbarities of our century to the Enlightenment." While the bulk of opinion lurched toward consensus, "an important fraction of opinion," in Jeanneney's thinking, clung to "the obstinate rejection of a society politically founded solely on the principles of human reason and prepared to advance on this basis." Fellow historian Maurice Agulhon concurred: France was still "profoundly divided." Furet's belief in "the end of ideologies" was nothing more than another ideological position. Claude Nicolet, a historian of republicanism, viewed Furet's closure as merely another attempt to bury the Revolution and deny the (positive) relevance of its heritage: "it's a little bit of Chaunu, though less violent and more American." Furet failed to fathom that the French political experience differed profoundly from the American, and that the republic could only have been born of the Revolution and remained inseparable, unthinkable, apart from it. 9

Staking Out the Scientific IIigh Ground Flawed politically, Furet's idea suffered also from an intellectual defect to which Jeanneney the historian was especially sensitive: "the positivist illu-

130 Farewell, Revolution

sion" that he was sufficiently detached in the post-Revolutionary climate to "write at last the true history of the Revolution." Fran~ois Ewald rightly saw this conceit as an integral part ofFuret's strategy. "As long as the Revolution is not over, as long as we are still in it, it would not be possible to to undertake its history with objectivity, with the suitable detachment." One would be liable to the charge of defending a cause instead of analyzing the facts. "To decree the Revolution over," Condorcet reasoned, "is to institute oneself as the person who is finally going to be able to tell us what it is." He scoffed at the Tartuffery of the historian who claimed that it was possible "to write an objective history of something like the Revolution which, on principle, is not a fact but the interminable interpretation of a fact."IO Furet quite consciously blurred the distinction between fact and interpretation, notably when he addressed the general public. While he prided himself on engaging in interpretation, which he construed as a nobler and more difficult enterprise than mere fact collection, he insisted that his interpretation was founded incontrovertibly on factual ground. Unlike the others, who devoted themselves to ritualized guignol, he, Furet, practiced scholarship. Refusing the "theatre" of animadversion, where Tweedledee (Gallo, Marat, "the Marxist left") and Tweedledum (Chaunu, Charlotte Corday, "the counterrevolutionary right") rehearsed a symmetrically warped and abortive scenario, Furet claimed control of the sober and productive arena of Science. From this position of strength, in tones that others considered bellicose as well as triumphalist, Furet declared historiographical peace. After two hundred years of"ideological civil war," the objective conditions for peace finally obtained. It was time to "cool off the object [called the] French Revolution," to "make of the Revolution a less impassioned object of research." Proclaiming the end of the Revolution was Furet's way of treating it "at last like an object of science."ll That Furet cast himself as something of a savior who rescued the debate from "partisan polemics" as a result of his "impartial" attitude and his lack of "prejudices" is hardly surprising. Rather more startling is that he was so readily believed. Obviously his message contained what the French needed to hear; they comforted themselves and legitimized Furet by agreeing that he was right first for scientific reasons and only incidentally for ideological ones. One might expect a militant conservative such as Georges Suffert (who, like many other talented rightists, had a leftist past) to lend credence to this image of an intellectual liberator above the fray. His praise for Furet's "meticulous

131 The End ofExceptionalism

archival work," unintentionally ironic, suggests that he must have read only the conclusions. But one would have hoped that the chief of the book-review section of Le Monde would have sustained a modicum of critical distance instead of taking Furet at his word as a "neutral observer" for whom "the Revolution ceases being a battle of memory and becomes finally a historical problem." As cavalier as Suffert is about situating Furet ("in the wake of the Annates school"), Pierre Billard of the centrist Le Point hailed "the civil peace born of the gigantic effort of clarification imposed by FranfYois Furet." On this landscape of complacency, one can hardly fault the right-liberal Express for its description of "a rereading of the Revolution without prejudices." Furet appealed to Sud-Ouest because he was "far from the dogmas," "less ideological" and committed to a "noninvolved manner of studying the Revolution."l2 Foreign observers were, if anything, even more indulgent. In the curiously redundant phrase of Richard Bernstein of the Paris bureau of the New York Times, Furet embodied "apolitical neutrality and moderation." For Conor Cruise O'Brien Furet was a reborn Rankean interested in "how things really were," a historian free of "partisanship" with no "axe to grind." Despite her own bias, one can empathize with Elisabeth G. Sledziewski's marvel and frustration: "How have those who can speak of the Revolution only in terms of reprobation and who never evoke its classical historiography without formulating accusations and condemnations, how have these professionals of ideological warfare, experts in anathematization, succeeded in campaigning on the grounds of serenity? By what genius have they been able to impose an image of moderation and kindness, even as they exercise an inexorable pressure on the information devoted to the bicentennial in order to appear as the only serious specialists and to harm their adversaries by any means?" 13

Unmasking Ideology L'Alsace was one of the few newspapers to recognize Furet's work for what it was: "la pensee du milieu" -the perhaps unintended double entendre calling attention to the galactic machine as well as the centrist line. (La Revue generate of Belgium referred to Furet as the "leader" of the "centrists.") Furet's impact was not merely a matter of flimflam (on his part) or mindlessness (on the part of his adulators). Furet was different, at least in the tradi-

132 Farewell, Revolution

tional French context. He asked (re)fresh(ed) questions. He proposed new approaches and emphases. He exploited optimally the abysmal failure of Communism and the vacuity of many sectors of Marxist thought. What was implausible in the panegyric geyser was the notion of Furet's neutrality in political and ideological terms. Furet was right to denounce as "puerile" the "little game" of stigmatizing and disqualifying his analyses of the Revolution's great paradoxes as "rightist." But it was no less irresponsible to accord them an immunity, a sort of critical dispensation, an a priori status of purity. The man who called for "a critical inventory of the French tradition" was not a deus ex machina or an Usbek or a Micromegas. He was an intellectual who himself fit into that tradition in numerous ways even as he combatted parts of it. Could the scholar who identified himself so intimately with the giants of the nineteenth century (Hegel, Constant, Stael, Tocqueville, Michelet, Taine) forget how deeply and passionately his heroes were engaged in ideological and political ways-and how that engagement was not foreign to the probing insight he ascribed to them? Could the historian who showed brilliantly in his study ofQuinet how the historical demarche was profoundly shaped by present politics imagine that somehow he could escape that conditioning? Furet's description of Michelet's situation in 1845 could have applied to the bicentennial Furet: "His teaching changed in character; less erudite, it became part of the current political scene." It seemed odd to call for the end of French exceptionalism and in the same breath to take refuge in one's own exceptionalism. The limit of Furet's "third way," as historian Daniel Roche mordantly put it, was "perhaps to believe that in conceptualizing one escapes ideology." 14 Furet is the first to admit that his youthful passage in the PCF marked him deeply and in some ways indelibly. Reflecting on his bonds with fellow historians and ex-party comrades Alain Besan.yon, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Ozouf and Denis Richet twenty-five years later, he wondered," if our belated adolescence in the ranks of the Communist party did not play a greater role than our activity as historians in the framework of the Ecole des hautes etudes. For, of the first, we kept not only a treasury of more or less guilty memories but also a whole range of intellectual and political references that mark the existence and the date of a common political vaccination." Serene in his conviction that he handled his exit from the party with aplomb, Furet has never had any incentive to scrutinize critically the

133 The End ofExceptionalism

impact of that vaccination on his immune system. Claude Nicolet was one of many adversaries on the left who were exasperated that Furet "shows no signs of ceasing to settle scores with his Communist past." But Edgar Morin formulated the problem in a much more fecund way. Furet's revisionist contribution was extremely important, observed the sociologist-philosopher, "but I think that what is perhaps lacking in Frans;ois Furet is [the will] to historicize himself [s'auto-historiciser lui-meme] in this history." Historians reconstitute the past as a function not only of their knowledge of the past but of their own insertion in historical time. They "make their political experience operate retroactively [ritroagir]" especially when they deal with matters so fundamental to national and political identity as the Revolution. Morin rightly supposed "that if Furet had not passed through the phase of Stalinist Communism, he would not have had his critique retroactively act on the French Revolution, in the same way that Wajda, when he speaks of Danton, at bottom is talking about Poland or Russia." Morin asked Furet to analyze himself, to reveal and examine his assumptions: "he ought to have clarified the slice of historical time (the de-Stalinization begun by Khrushchev) and the slice of hexagonal time in which he thought out the French Revolution." Morin was sure that "a centrist France dominated by a consensual ideology" necessarily had a different impact on his work than the post-Stalinist period. Furet exposed "the retroactive effects of Socialism and Bolshevism" on the classical-school interpretation from Mathiez through Soboul. Now that we had passed into a completely different phase "in which it is the exit from the totalitarian universe that guides our reading of the past," Morin wanted Furet to project the same sort of penetrating light on himself. Perhaps that is too much to ask of any intellectual. 15 In the end it may not be fair to reproach an author for failing to reveal his (true?) colors. Posturing and positioning are part of his business. It is far more reprehensible for the critics to take his press releases as evaluative gospel. Frans;ois Furet's work was driven by a particular vision of political, social, and economic life that ought to have been examined, even in the media. His preference for liberty over equality, his belief in the indissociability of capitalism and democracy, his antipathy to certain kinds of state intervention in social life, his ample (although not absolute) confidence in market arbitration, his skepticism of notions of general interest articulated in opposition to the play of partial and private interests, his horror of the tabula rasa, his concep-

134 Farewell, Revolution

tion of the relation of religious/ spiritual to political life, his TocquevilloAmericanization-all these factors inform his understanding of the past and demand critical scrutiny.l6

Furet's Liberal Vulgate Furet's version ofPC-political correctness-was a "liberal vulgate" considerably more nuanced than his antagonists allowed yet far more conservative than Furet was willing to admit. Its rigidities stemmed in part from its founding spirit: it was erected against the Marxo-Revolutionary system. The Other defined and delimited the agenda for Furet, at least in the beginning. In his own way, he was as much an unadulterated hardliner as his adversary. He became the (mythical) Mitterrand of historiography, the liquidator not of the PCF but of the "Communist idea" in the various arenas he frequented. Leftist sympathizers such as Elisabeth G. Sledziewski saw Furet's campaign as a purge of the sort that he might have mounted himself in his party days ("the man cannot finish settling scores with the Stalinism of his youth"). Wrenching the French Revolution from Communist hands ("careful, you think you are reading the adventures of the sansculottes and you are reading those of the Bolsheviks") and more broadly contesting the Communist hold on critical sectors of the University and of intellectual life were enterprises replete with political significanceP If Solzhenitsyn's Gulag intensified Furet's focus on the Red peril, his encounter with America enriched his perspective and extended his field of comparison. Tocqueville, the fetishistic guide of American historians and sociologists, helped to frame Furet's liberal convictions as well as his view of the origins of the Revolution. It was probably Tocqueville who brought Furet to Raymond Aron rather than vice versa. Arguably it was also Tocqueville who rekindled Furet's interest in Marx-in Marx as sociologist, historian and philosopher rather than proto-Leninist prophet, and in Marx as early theorist of individualism (in the wake of Adam Smith) as much as in Marx the purveyor of totalizing materialism. Reread from a post-Marxist vantage point, Marx intrigued Furet, and helped to persuade him that the nineteenth century constituted an extraordinarily rich and poorly utilized arena of thought. 18

135 The End ofExceptionalism

Furet's liberalism derives from the American strain in the French Revolution that privileged the rights of individuals against the claims of the community or the state, that preferred by and large the private to the public, that distrusted untrammeled popular will and unmediated majority rule, and that savored the sorts of checks and balances, social as well as political, associated with Montesquieu. Although it, too, promised to foster the emancipation of the individual, the Rousseauian alternative stressed a more radical version of democracy that cut the ground from under the rational politics which Furet believed was the only method of reconciling the collectivity and its members without compromising freedom. IfFuret did not espouse a beatific vision of the underlying harmony of interests, he did believe that interests constituted the nerve center of the body politic and that they required the largest latitude possible in order to sustain systemic health. If he did not dismiss equality as a mere chimera, he nevertheless identified its extension with a centralizing and leveling process that led ineluctably to the infringement if not the asphyxiation of individual rights. In the revisionist's view liberty was a safer, wiser, and ultimately more generous guide on the treacherous road of community life. The American experience was an allegory for the course of this liberty. Furet was not oblivious to its sometimes wildly uneven nature, but he was deeply impressed by its monumental capacity for self-correction. Nor did he see this gyroscopic talent as the simple craft of the Invisible Hand. While the market mentality socialized Americans in decisive ways, American liberty was nourished by values that did not all stem from a logic of self-aggrandizement. Exceptionalism was the long and costly detour that the French took in part because their Revolution failed to ground itself spiritually and historically in the manner of the American (and the English, which together constituted for Furet the Anglo-Saxon model, despite the considerable differences that estranged them). "The two revolutions, the English and the American," wrote Furet, "conserve both the Christian religious linkage (rediscovering an original order willed by God) and the anchoring in immemorial historical continuity ... whence the extraordinary consensual power of this revolutionary syncretism." Breaking simultaneously with the Catholic church and the monarchy, the French Revolution renounced religion and history. "It wants to found society, the new man, but on what basis?" asked Furet. Unable to fix itself in time and in inner space, the French Revolution accelerated as it fragmented: "No point of reference in the past, no institution

136 Farewell, Revolution

in the present, just a future imminently possible but always deferred." Unlike the American and the English Revolutions, "which were conceived as a reunion with the past," the French demonized the newly baptized "Old Regime" and never found a durable handle for the reinstitution of their society. Heralded in the late summer of 89, the tabula rasa cast France adrift in an "abstract universalism," an endless, dizzying, and depleting voyage, a long and painful national odyssey. Furet's interest in organic rootedness sprang in part from something resembling a precocious postmodern strain in his thought. However much America, past and present, altered Furet, it did not fully succeed in imbuing him with its tropistic optimism. Like Cardinal Lustiger, he was buffeted by what he called "the failure of the Enlightenment," the consequences of which he still lived with every day. The generation just before his, molded by the Resistance, still had an optimistic belief in recovery, in linear progress marked out toward a better future. "My generation saw that life was more complex; we saw the failure of too systematic visions of the world." (It is hard not to discern here a partial echo of Talmon's linkage from Rousseau to modern totalitarianism-in the form of Stalin if not Hitler.} That systematic vision, vilified by Burke, found expression in much that the Revolutionaries said and did, first in '89 and then in '93. It was viciously corrosive of the past, which cumulatively provided the only check against its juggernaut-advance. Even if one concedes that such a systematic vision was present in eighteenth-century thought, it remains open to discussion whether it was fully coterminous with what is conventionally called the Enlightenment, a term that can no longer boast the transparency that we once attributed to it. This "radical negation of all rootedness" -the joint repudiation of Maistre and Burke-crippled the French Revolutionary culture. It led to "the tendency to substitute the political for the religious, and to conflate the problem of the organization of society here and now with the final ends of humanity." Tocqueville characterized this tendency as dangerous because it invested the struggle over power with a metaphysical meaning that clouded the issue and its stakes. Quinet, later echoed by Solzhenitsyn, regarded it as a dire impasse because politics could never permanently take the place of religion. For Quinet the Americans guaranteed their vitality and their freedom by preserving their sense of transcendence, and the English assured their stability by transforming their religious principles into political ones. Furet seemed to share Tocqueville's conviction that without a religious faith

137 The End ofExceptionalism

a nation had difficulty in sustaining full political liberty (even as he sympathized with Mirabeau's contention that to safeguard liberty, one had to reconcile the Revolution with royalty). "In· the American tradition," Furet observed, in an enormous oversimplification, "there is no conflict between democracy and religion." 19 Like Voltaire in England, Furet in America was deeply impressed by the multiplicity of Christian religions that cohabited from the outset and made tolerance an integral part of the American way of life (the frequent and violent local and regional exceptions to this integrationist rule do not interest him). "The tragedy of France in this domain was the expulsion of the Protestants at the end of the seventeenth century." In the wake of numerous nineteenthand twentieth-century commentators, there is the hint in Furet of a lament that France managed to escape a thoroughgoing Reformation. The result was a Catholic religion intimately tied to the absolute/ divine monarchy that retained exclusive control of the spiritual domain (whose intensive and extensive social mooring Furet tends to overlook) and paid an exorbitant price for its intolerance during the Revolution. Every step of the Revolution's regenerative itinerary bespoke the rejection of the graft, the failure of the absorption of the religious by the political. Robespierre's poignant but maladroit efforts to recover a spiritual dynamic merely reinforced the point. In the short run, the Counterrevolution profited from it. In the long run, laicity, once again in crisis during the bicentennial season, revealed itself incommensurate with the demands of surrogacy. "A disaffected religious sentiment cuts across the entire history of our democracy," Furet grieved. In the last analysis, for Furetfoi and roi, in some concrete and/ or symbolic forms, were not incompatible with modern democracy. On the contrary, by offering it a soil of traditional authority in which to take root, they favored its regular, hardy, and peaceful growth.20 Furet's American association, lived and thought, has aroused the usual hexagonal suspicions, which draw on a fund of anti-Americanism that belongs exclusively neither to the left nor to the right. There is no reason to interpret long sojourns and joint appointments as quintessentially ideological statements: scholars of all stripes would concur that there are many base and' many lofty reasons for such relationships that have little to do with value systems or with politics. It happens that Furet is passionately interested in politics, but that has nothing intrinsically to do with the United States. He is a keen observer of the American scene, though he is not a good judge of

138 Farewell, Revolution

things in the heat of the action and often falls back on cliches that dilute his interpretive potency. In the Tocquevillean manner, he is a surer observer of long-term political trends. Still, his American vantage point has significantly deepened his insight into French and European politics. While stereotypes about the Chicago boys-Furet holds a part-time appointment on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago-resonate better in the sixth arrondissement than in Hyde Park, it is true that Furet is in sympathy with the neoconservative movement in the United States. (Its votaries-Allan Bloom, Norman Podhoretz, Samuel Huntington, Irving Kristol, among others-are known as "neocons," a term that has a fatefully unflattering ring in French.) For his adversaries, Furet's engagement is epitomized by his status as recipient of almost a half-million dollars from the Olin Foundation, a conservative institution interested in promoting free-market economics and liberal-libertarian politics, in his capacity as director of the John M. Olin Program in the History of Political Culture at the University of Chicago. "Furet was a Communist in his youth," noted the leftist periodical the Nation; "as an old political infighter, he now brings his zeal and strategic sense as a former party member to fight the academic left." (America remains one of the last bastions of admiration for the strategic gifts of the Communists.) Furet would define his neoconservatism, rather, in terms of his sustained grasp on reality. Socialists and "neoliberals," at least in the French case, suffered from a symmetrical and withering "neglect of reality." Others, however, would contest Furet's understanding of reality (his sanguine portrayal, for example, of the United States as "a gigantic welfare state").21

An Exceptional Strategist French critics of Furet found ample evidence of his rightward drift without having to look abroad. Roughing out the edges, they detected a fairly straight line between his collaboration with Edgar Faure at the end of the 1960s and his recent flirtation with Raymond Barre. Ensconced in the Institut Raymond Aron and the Fondation Saint-Simon, the historian was a "bearer of the attache case of liberalism," as leftist philosopher Daniel Bensaid put it. This trajectory seemed wholly congruent with and even helped explain Furet's treatment of the Revolution, "a reading of the Revolution," as

139 The End ofExceptionalism

Madeleine Reberioux put it, "marked by ambient individualism, the rehabilitation of the private to the detriment of public life, and the hopes of centrist consensus." Historiographical critic Frans;ois Dosse believed he captured Furet's essence in two quotations: "I feel quite close to the most enlightened representatives ofliberal thought" and "I mean that there are no longer any commitments in the twentieth century that are not dubious."22 Taxed for ideologizing, Frans;ois Furet was also criticized for a certain opportunism in his itinerary, an opportunism driven by allegedly "strategic" imperatives. Michel Vovelle noted Furet's genius for strategic readjustment. His "particularly flexible thought" enabled him to position and reposition himself as meteorological conditions altered. In concrete bicentennial terms, this meant that after having failed to sabotage the commemoration, Furet feared that he might become the victim of his own campaign of Revolutionary decentering. He was "induced to soften his critical position vis-a-vis the Revolution," charged Vovelle, "even to discover in it a positive dimension." Elisabeth G. Sledziewski cast Furet's strategy in a thicker context. Furet understood the disparate nature of his audience; on the eve of the bicentennial, he paid special attention to its most fragile component, "the French of the center left, or the recentered left" -many of whom would situate themselves frankly on the left and would find the centrist epithet pejorative-a group "globally favorable to the Revolution [and] persuaded that it was a decisive and positive moment." The "Nouvel Obs left" did not spit on the name ofCarnot and the "Libeleft" did not view the agitation of the little men of '89 as burlesque. Furet had to treat this public deftly: "one had to detach it from its reference to the-Revolution-source-of-all-humanism, but not by presenting it as the work of Satan." Sledziewski identified two major tactics in Furet's demarche. First, he dampened enthusiasm for the Revolution by arguing that many of the ills that currently beset France issued from it. Second, he invented "a veritable myth, that of the lie of Revolutionary historiography, with its guilty parties (Leninist-Jacobin professors) and its victims (unwarned readers and schoolchildren)." Not merely antiuniversity, Furet was more broadly "antiprof," taking advantage of the climate of disenchantment with the "shipwreck of educational and university institutions. " 23 Madeleine Reberioux pleaded a similar case. Furet and his acolytes "realized that their way of posing problems concerning the French Revolution led to undesirable reactions on the far right-1 mean, I don't think that Frans;ois

140 Farewell, Revolution

Furet went to spit at the Lycee Carnot every morning, or even that he detested Carnot. These are not Chaunus, much less fundamentalist Catholics." Like Sledziewski, Reberioux linked his recentering to his ardent desire to position himself in "the field of the moderate left," which obliged him to distance himself from the "sorcerer's apprentices" of the far right, whom he could not control. Echoing Claude Mazauric's reproach that Furet shifted concepts with the governing winds, Daniel Bensai:d recognized in Furet a career "weathervane" who demonstrated his lack of fixed principles well before the bicentennial first cast its shadow: "Stalinist during the Cold War, revisionist in the '60s in the name of long-run shifts, antitotalitarian under Carter and the new philosophes, Arono-Saint-Simonian under [Mitterrand's] first administration, Rocardo-Barrist under the banner of political 'opening' ... 'Recentered,' in the end, in conformity with the laws of universal ideological gravitation. "24 Franfi:ois Dosse drew an increasingly familiar historiographical picture of a triple Furet that reflected the thinking of much of the Jacobin left. Dosse inserted Furet I (in tandem with Denis Richet) within the classical liberal framework that construed the century between 1750 and 1850 as "a continuous progression of liberties." Relativized, the Revolution occupied only part of the stage, absorbed in a long-run process of transformation accelerated by the elitist union between enlightened bourgeoisie and liberal aristocracy in 1789. "At the limit the Revolution was already accomplished before the taking of the Bastille." But the good Revolution soon foundered, suffering a derapage provoked in part by the massive entry of the masses into the fray in the context of war at home and abroad. Dosse severely upbraided "the very persons who contest a teleological vision of history" for reinstituting surreptitiously the notion of derapage, "which imputes a sense, a preestablished direction to the Revolutionary events." Furet I already wanted to end the Revolution, siding successively with the Monarchiens, the Feuillants, and the Girondins in their efforts to arrest its course. The little people reverted to archaic tropisms of violence, canalized in part by the state, which instituted Terror-a terrible aberration-largely in response to the circumstances. The dictatorship "is thus engendered by an element foreign to the internal logic of these French Revolutionary events." 2 5 Furet II decisively rejects the contingent and exceptional-derapage -in favor of a derive thesis: "Seventeen eighty-nine opens a period of derive de I'histoire." The subsequent horrors are inscribed "in the very idea of revolu-

141 The End ofExceptionalism

tion." Furet II is transfixed by the gulag, which impels him "to read 1789 with the grid of the unfolding of the Revolution of 1917, [which] causes him to repeat the denounced error of a Marxist historiography that accorded an exorbitant privilege to the destiny of Russia in its approach to the French Revolution." As the long run recedes behind the brusque and monumental rupture of'89, so Robespierre swells into "the obligatory embodiment of the totalitarian outcome." Dosse reproches Furet with misreading Rousseau, to whom he ascribes the ideological paternity of the Terror, and he chastises him for exhuming two antagonists of the Revolution, Tocqueville and Cochin, to furnish his key concepts. The discourse of Furet III is "tightly politicized," fashioned to meet the needs of the "republican consensus" that results from the end of French exceptionalism. Like Sledziewski and Reberioux, Dosse saw a Furet frightened by his own success: "Furet was overrun on his right and was almost buried under the waves of hemoglobin." Furet II had opened the door to the white crusaders; reassured that the derive began in '89, "the whole of counterrevolutionary thought, in bad straits since 1945, could then unrestrainedly flower." So Furet rectified his aim; the Revolution was no less over now than before, but a "softer" version enabled him to emphasize its positive points even as he celebrated the end of its tyranny over French political life. The Civil Code as well as the Terror emerged from '89. If the Terror remains consubstantial with the revolutionary idea, the Revolutionary rupture engendered its antithesis, the democratic idea, which ultimately triumphed in the republic of the center. Positive heroes such as Condorcet, Gregoire, and Sieyes counterbalance the bloodstained protagonists of the traditional accounts. Rejecting the prejudices and blind spots along with the social and economic interpretations of the classical/university exegetes, Furet III projected himself as "the veritable organizer of the rise of the scientific history of the Revolution." With Furet III shaping the commemorative voice in the public sphere, "it is not an anniversary that we are preparing to celebrate in 1989, but a burial."26

The Bicentennial Furet The bicentennial Furet was no less contentious than the earlier versions, but he had no interest in arguing over old chestnuts, even if they bore his

142 Farewell, Revolution

label. Toward the end of 1988 he confided to the rightist-bourgeois readers of Valeurs actuelles that "as far as I'm concerned, this book [the 1965 survey written with Richet and not expected to go anywhere] was not revisionist enough. We separated too hermetically the two periods, and we remained excessively influenced by the classical interpretations." Less than a year later, upon Richet's death, Furet distanced himself further from a chestnut that was apparently never really his: "Denis Richet wrote the part that was the most novel at the time: the analysis of what we labeled the derapage of the terrorist dictatorship of 1793."27 Certainly Penser Ia Revolution franraise ( 1978) was far more negative and pessimistic about the Revolution than the 1965 book had been. It may be that Furet was tempted-by a sort of intellectual and ideological brinksmanship-to see just how far he could go in his revisionism. His hardline posture of the early 1980s, specifically during the epoch of the Common Program and the Communist participation in the government, generated the suspicion that he was a virtual anathematist. Incidentally, vis-a-vis the right and the far right, he played a game that in its own way was as parlous as the one Mitterrand played vis-a-vis the Front national. His disdain for commemoration, which he construed as a high-minded point of view, was easily misinterpreted. While his position on the ambivalence of '89 did not significantly change between 1978 and the onset of the bicentennial season, it is clear that Furet became increasingly worried about how his views were being represented, appropriated, and perceived. To demarcate himself unequivocally from perfervid counterrevolutionaries, he reassured Le Nouvel Observateur in early 1986, with a rare token of (muted) cocorico, that "I am a great admirer of 1789; I think that it is a magnificent event and I don't like the historians who try to belittle its dimension, one of the rare grand universal events of history, which happens to be a French event." In the spring of 1989 his tone was increasingly apologetic and defensive. He explained to the Mitterrandian royalists that he was misunderstood when he pronounced the death of the revolutionary idea ("the idea that one must turn to violence, to political violence") and the concomitant demise of the Counterrevolution ("there is almost no more counterrevolutionary thought or party"). "When I say this, many people on the left believe that I am disparaging the Revolution. That is not the case," Furet protested. The left governs today because it is no longer revolutionary. "In other words, what is extinguished in the Revolution are its modalities, and what remains extraor-

143 The End ofExceptionalism

dinarily alive are its ideas: the idea of rights, of the sovereignty of the people, of the universality of the law.... it seems to me, moreover, that it is these ideas that we are going to celebrate." "Furet was welcomed too eagerly by the Right and the nonmilitant leftand now claims he has been misquoted and misunderstood," wrote the Guardian. "It's true I revolted against the revolutionary catechism and that suited the ideological climate," Furet told the British paper. "But I still say the Revolution is the great universal event in the history of France. It is the beginning of individualism and modern liberty, the foundation of the principles and the common values by which we still live." What Furet liked most about the Revolution was perhaps its heuristic dimension: a mammoth laboratory of political science, "the French Revolution said just about everything there is to say about democracy." To his most sensitive audience in the inaugural issue of Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, Furet made no effort to conceal his critical attitude. If he admired "the sunrise" of '89, he was even more fascinated by its aboriginal potential for subverting the very liberty it proclaimed. While he tried to dampen the impression that there was absolute necessity in the derive from '89 to '93, he clearly expounded his view that "the counterrevolution is not by itself responsible" for the Terror. More willing than Burke to acknowledge the incubus of aristocratic/ absolutist society, Furet was no less transfixed than Burke by "the brutality of the wrenching of aristocratic society, the monarchy, the church. "28

Managing the ••Jiistorieal"

I

Bieenteuuial Michel Vovelle as Insider and Outsider

n the historiographical war not detonated but framed by the bicentennial, Michel Vovelle represented what was commonly called the classical left position. (Replete with traps, ambiguities, and stifled nuances, this taxonomical shorthand itself requires exegesis.) Vovelle received the title officially before he earned it organically. Internationally renowned as a modernist focusing on the sociocultural history of the Old Regime rather than on the Revolution, and installed far from the seats of intellocratic and political power, at Aix-en-Provence, Vovelle was nevertheless invited early in 1982 by the then minister of research, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, "to conduct an exploratory inquiry regarding the participation of [the Ministry of] Research in the celebration of the bicentennial." Holder of the prestigious chair in the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne (University of Paris-I), Albert Soboul was still the most prominent university specialist in the field. Though afflicted with a serious malady, and given to dire predictions about his longevity-in fact, he was to die before the end of the year- he was still quite active. Fran~ois Furet relates that Soboul was "furious" over the enormous slight implicit in the selection of Vovelle, substantially his junior and by no means his anointed dauphin, with whom he did not entertain uniformly warm relations despite many shared perspectives. Torn between old and new loyalties, Soboul's own disciples disagree on whether the choice of Vovelle truly vexed him. (Beyond this specific issue, in retrospect, many of them felt that Soboul was shamefully

144

145 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

neglected during the bicentennial; on 6 July 1991 they met at the Sorbonne for a discussion of his pedagogical and intellectual impact in a day of commemoration that betrayed an expiatory note.)!

The Minister Summons Michel Vovelle Made on the recommendation of a member of Chevenement's cabinet, a former Maoist who was quite familiar with the historical milieu, the choice of Vovelle was interesting for several reasons. The minister himself embodied one of the durable Socialist bridges to the Communist party and to Marxist ideology. Deeply imbued with the R/revolutionary mystique, he took the governmental initiative perhaps for fear that his colleagues would move too slowly or with too little zeal. (In retrospect, after the onset of the Gulf crisis, he remarked with melancholy that it was "not easy in these years of the bicentennial to be an advanced republican in France.") Chevenement was inclined to name a collaborator with pronounced Jacobin roots, but one who would be palatable to the moderate left as well as to Marxists of diverse political affiliations. z Although a faithful member of the PCF, Vovelle was a less vociferous militant than Soboul. In terms of his intellectual and professional trajectory, he had a much broader range of projects and networks. Soboul was brusque and often brutal, though many of his adversaries found him quite sympathetic off the playing field. Vovelle began with an entirely different profile. Frequently aloof and elliptical, he projected a more supple nature. He seemed in every way less angular and thus better equipped to operate the sort of opening that the minister of research had in mind. In any event, Chevenement's nomination proved to be premonitory, for even as Vovelle's preliminary bicentennial soundings turned into a full-fledged organizational enterprise, he also prepared for his election to the Department of History of the University of Paris-I, the Sorbonne. His succession to Soboul's chair-Vovelle might prefer it to be characterized as Aulard's chair-facilitated his task, for it enhanced his politicoacademic legitimacy and leverage and made it easier to deal with the complex logistics of his task. Based on two hundred questionnaire-letters and scores of individual and collective meetings with experts of various sorts, in addition to his own

146 Farewell, Revolution

reflection and experience, the one-hundred-page report that Vovelle submitted to Chevenement did not confine itself to the ways in which his own ministry could participate in the bicentennial. It raised larger issues ofR/ revolutionary commemoration and proposed a strategy that could have broad political and civic as well as intellectual implications. The centennial, which had spawned the Eiffel Tower and myriad scholarly activities associated with the creation of the chair in the History of the Revolution that he now occupied, served as Vovelle's primary point of reference. Eighteen eighty-nine marked a heroic moment of both conquest and consolidation on several fronts, but the second centennial should not issue in "a liturgy of repetition or of remembrance." Conditions, political and cultural, were vastly different. The republic had achieved institutional stability. The Revolution had outgrown the hexagon as an object of investigation: the space of its inscription was now wholly international, and the commemoration had to reflect this cosmopolitan attribute. Time had to be as elastic as space. Vovelle could not imagine a commemoration that focused narrowly on the Revolution, let alone on its inaugural year. He framed it in terms of backward and forward linkages: its social, economic, and cultural origins rooted in the long and medium term on the one side and the "extension" of its "idee-force" into the future on the other. Vovelle did not want the latter goal to be perceived as an ideological razzia. He intended not the "annexation" of all future revolutions but much more modestly the examination of the continuing impact of the R/revolutionary legacy. Acutely aware of the perils of partisanship, Vovelle repeatedly stressed the urgent need for a thoroughly pluralistic approach to the Revolution, its causes, and its outcomes. According to Vovelle's subsequent testimony, his preoccupations from the very start were shaped by Furet's portentous oracle: The affirmation of Franfi:ois Furet, "the Revolution is over," did not leave me indifferent. I wondered how we could reawaken the cold object [called] "Revolution." I was conscious of the shrinking of the French Revolution in the collective memory, of its decline in the content of the teaching curriculum and the knowledge transmitted. [I was] equally conscious of the crisis of the historiography of the Revolution in France, which made of the Institut d'etudes de Ia Revolution [attached to the Sorbonne chair] a besieged fortress.

147 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

There seemed to be a quasi-dialectical relation between changes in the larger public sphere and changes in the microcosm of the historical corporation. Revisionism fed on the erosion of the R/revolutionary sentiment even as it accelerated that process. The rejuvenation of liberalism and the failures of Communism and socialism in various places throughout the world were obvious factors of paramount importance that Vovelle could not hope to influence. The affirmation of regional identity in France fostered a climate hostile to what was commonly called Jacobinism, apart from the more generic ideological onslaught against state intervention. While book sales suggested a thriving historical culture in France in the 1970s and early '80s, the discipline occupied a declining place in the school curriculum. As a result far less of revisionism than of the "new history" with which Vovelle sympathized, the Revolution was "very far along the road to extinction." Mutilated in the secondary schools, where the "battalions" of laic schoolteachers had lost much of the zeal that had imbued Vovelle's own parents, the "institutional position" of the Revolution was equally compromised in the university. The local associations of erudition-the legion of learned societies-were less active in propagating the old republican faith through the study of the Revolution at the grass roots. This pessimistic appraisal persuaded Vovelle that new ways had to be found to broadcast the news that the Revolution was still pertinent. In his view, the stimulation of research represented one of the most significant ways to counteract these baleful tendencies. This implied a triple critique of the Fureto-revisionist line. First, one had to resist the disparagement of the Revolution implicit in revisionism and amplified by its counterrevolutionary parasites. The Revolution would not be portrayed as either an accident or a catastrophe. Second, "it is important to correct the idea, indolently received" -a grave stricture against a productive and critically minded intellectual, the mutual accusation of indolence became a staple of the VovelleFuret bicentennial polemic-"that the history of the Revolution, when all is said and done, is fully constituted, completed in its essential traits, henceforth leaving place only for glosses, variations on a hackneyed canvas." Fin:>Ily, invoking as evidence the experience of 1889, Vovelle vigorously rebutted the claim, a galactic dogma grounded on the same centennial experience, that research and celebration were incompatible activities. 3

148 Farewell, Revolution

An Institution for the Bicentennial Given the decayed state of the existing institutions with some potential claim on orchestrating the scientific side of the commemoration, both of which were closely associated with Soboul-in particular, the "Jaures" Commission, founded to promote the publication of work in economic and social history, and the Societe des etudes robespierristes, the scholarly society animated by Mathiez early in the century that remained the bastion of the Jacobin school-Vovelle urged the minister to invest his ambitions in a new, untainted structure, capable of "investing this bicentennial with dynamism." Following this counsel, the ministry set up a commission of historical research under the aegis of the Centre national de Ia recherche scientifique. Briefly, until he ceded his position as a result of declining health to Vovelle, the commission was headed by Ernest Labrousse, a legendary figure on the historical scene, collaborator of Leon Blum, one-time mentor to both Furet and Vovelle, lyric force in the efflorscence of economic and social history, the revolutionary left's answer to Fernand Braude!. The fact that Labrousse endured a busy but obscure retirement while Braude! enjoyed an uninterrupted series of apotheoses leading finally to the Academie franlj:aise struck Vovelle as profoundly unjust. Much of the difference had to do with Braudel's empire building. Retiring from the presidency of the supreme antiuniversity, the soon-to-be Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (which Furet would later head), he shifted imperceptibly to the presidency of the Maison des sciences de l'homme, largely his creation, which had been built with the critical help of American Cold War money. In contrast to the iconoclastic opulence that fueled Braudel's machine, a frontier frugality characterized Labrousse. He remained a simple artisan, a guildsman faithful to the university, whose institutional/budgetary "misery"-Vovelle's term-joined with his lack of talent for self-aggrandizement, limited the influence he could exercise outside the circles of specialists. In his lament, Vovelle tended to forget just how completely Labrousse had dominated the historical scene in the 1950s and '60s, when he exercised decidedly more influence than Braudel.4 Aged and somewhat fragile, Labrousse had not lost all of the ardor that had been his patent. In the first number of the bulletin published by the bicentennial commission, he reminisced about his personal acquaintance with the five

149 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

grand figures of university Revolutionary historiography-Aulard, Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul, and now Vovelle. In his mind their work was bound above all by "the critical love of the Great Revolution." While Furet and Ozouf repeatedly warned that love and learning were incompatible modes, the venerable professor emeritus whom Vovelle called "our Master" insisted that "critical love was a noble chance of knowledge." Science and fervor are reconcilable. s When ill health constrained Labrousse to withdraw to the presidency of honor, Vovelle, heretofore secretary-general, replaced him. Officially he was named by Maurice Godelier, an eminent Marxist anthropologist, who served as the head of the division of human and social sciences at the CNRS. Furet, a member of the executive committee, complained that the commission was "an infiltrated thing," and that Vovelle "surrounded himself with people from the party." Though Communists may have abounded in Vovelle's personal entourage, the accusation is impossible to sustain when one looks at the recruitment of the executive committee or of the larger commission. After Soboul's death-he had shared the vice presidency with another elder in the ranks of Revolutionary scholarship, Jacques Godechot ofToulouse-Claude Mazauric of Rouen was the only Communist ("antiestablishment," he emphasizes) on the twelve-person board besides Vovelle. Four or five Socialists sat with Furet in the inner circle: is it possible that Furet assimilated them to the Communists on the redscape of his mind? Of the commission's thirty members, about half were Socialists and approximately six were Communists, including the eighteenth-century historian Fran~ois Hincker (who was on his way out of the party), the Enlightenment specialist Roland Desne ofReims (simultaneously a Mason and already wavering in his commitment to the party), the social historian Guy Lemarchand, Mazauric's colleague at Rouen, Raymond Huard, a nineteenthcentury historian from Montpellier, Antoine Casanova, a historian of Corsica and a leading party militant, and Frederic Robert, a musicologist. There were a number of ex-Communists, ranging from venerable renegades such as Jean Nicolas of the University of Paris-VII to more recent abdicators such as Fran~oise Brunei. It is true that the only well-known rightists were Jean Tulard, a specialist in the Revolution at the University of Paris-IV, and Jean Favier, a distinguished medievalist and the director of the French national archival system.

150 Farewell, Revolution

Vovelle the Communist Vovelle's Communism remained an issue throughout the period. Vovelle tends not to be voluble about his political views. The fact that he joined the party in 1956 at the very moment when everyone else was beginning to leave suggests that he made a carefully considered choice. Anguished doubt as well as zealous resolution attended his engagement. As a Communist, he acknowledged errors and even horrors, but they seemed to strengthen his conviction that a truly revolutionary solution was necessary and that a renewed PCF was its only possible vector. More than most Communists, Vovelle seemed to distinguish between his personal development and his institutional insertion. His engagement in the party did not in the least foreclose, he intimated, his spirit of "independence and free thought." He attributed immense importance, without ever mapping out the concrete implications, to the five years that separated his "generation" from that ofFuret and LeRoy Ladurie. "My generation was able to escape Stalinism," he claimed, construing this contamination in extremely narrow chronological terms that certainly would surprise historians of contemporary mentalities. For Vovelle, this ideological orphanage, aggravated by the Algerian trauma, taught him, perhaps forced him, to "sort things out on his own." The year he spent in North Africa during the war-"the definitive death of the father"scarred him deeply and perhaps marked him as a permanent outsider. In this parsimonious Dickensian moralizing tale, it is hard to see exactly what consolation the Communist family afforded him. Vovelle resented the bicentennial intrusion/inquisition into his political life, which he tended to regard as a private matter, the way others construe religion. The particular situation of the PCF, buffeted by the winds from the East, increased the pressure on Vovelle to demarcate his position. His deep loyalty to the party-or perhaps to the party's historical aspirationsestranged him from the internal dissidents whom party chief Georges Marchais stigmatized as "liquidators." Yet he allowed publicly that he was not "a Communist of strict orthodoxy," and he pointed vaguely to the contestatory petitions that he had signed at one time or another, without frankly showing his color. After the twenty-seventh party congress he admitted that he "despaired" for the party's future. To break with the party hierarchy, however, just at the moment when he

151 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

assumed a national task intimately associated with the party's past must have struck him as an unthinkable act of apostasy (though, arguably, his friends among the "renovators" must have felt a symmetrical sense of betrayal). Schoolmates from the Ecole normale of Saint-Cloud remember Vovelle as both unostentatious and unveering in his political commitment. His parents, both schoolteachers, intransigent laics in the Catholic and conservative region of the Perche, taught him to be unflinching about his beliefs from his earliest childhood. Claude Mazauric, a one-time member of the central committee, similarly noted Vovelle's tenacity. Though he was a somewhat strange figure, "the government made an error," Mazauric contended, if it thought that it had recruited a quivering or complaisant Communist. Above all, Mazauric cogently suggested, Vovelle was "a man of fidelity, a man of tradition. "6 Shortly after the right returned to power in 1986, Minister of Culture Frans:ois Leotard, under considerable pressure from the conservative intellectual community, tried vainly to replace Vovelle as president of the bicentennial commission. He failed because he could not find a credible and willing replacement-Furet repeatedly conveyed his lack of interest-and because he encountered a considerable wave of solidarity for Vovelle among fellow universitaires regardless of political persuasion. The most acerbic and hyperbolic public attack on Vovelle occurred unexpectedly at a colloquium held at the National Assembly under the sponsorship of Solidarites modernes, a club of reflection associated with Laurent Fabius, a former premier and the current president of the Assembly. Vovelle opened with what Liberation described as "a long speech, a bit marxiste-!enifiant." He emphasized the Jaureso-Labroussean theme of the Revolution's social "anticipations" -the audacious adumbration of the social agenda for which working-class France and its left-bourgeois allies would fight for the next two centuries. This telic dramaturgy aroused the ire of Marcel Gauchet, a philosopherhistorian, self-styled modern leftist, student of Claude Lefort, archenemy of Foucault, and latterly a stalwart of Furet, who battled for years to obtain his election to the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. Assimilating Vovelle to the antidemocratic and pseudohistorical "Revolutionary catechism" that Furet had lacerated years before, Gauchet warned that "we are threatened by a horrifying bicentennial." In Vovelle's stained hands, the historical line would necessarily be tendentious, apologetic, even subversive.

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With McCarthyite aplomb, the philosopher asseverated that "the Socialists have the historical responsibility for having placed the commemoration under Communist rule. "7 The violence of Gauchet's onslaught shocked Vovelle, and confirmed him in his belief that the road was increasingly open to the resurgent counterrevolutionaries now that Furet's galaxy had decided where to draw the line. Perhaps Gauchet's outburst was meant as a provocation-to elicit from Vovelle a visceral reaction that might embarrass him or sap his irenic will or ecumenical posture. But Vovelle was cautious even in his spleen. Did his politics imperil democracy? While not a tropistic Communist, "I am forever driven by one idea," Vovelleavowed, proudly and solemnly: "we must change the world." Though inscribed on Marx's tombstone, the formula was nebulous: it could be read in several quite different ways. The point was to remain elusive, to play on the oneiric register of the Greater Left. In no case, however, would he permit himself to be stigmatized as "the manager of any sort of Communist bicentennial, still less as impelled by any sort of hegemonic will." Proportionately, noted Vovelle meticulously, there were as many Communists on the commission as voters who had cast their suffrages for the Communist candidate in the presidential elections of 1988: 6 percent-"a hegemony at the very least discreet." Gauchet and his galactic comrades were employing Red herrings, scapegoating, and fabricating "any imaginary monster that serves to terrify the media." But Vovelle knew full well that it was one thing to expose the caricature of the Gauchet discourse and quite another to arrest its efficacy. 8

Vovelle the Pluralist In his management of the affairs of the bicentennial commission, there is little evidence of the perfidious gauchissement that Gauchet decried. While the executive committee focused on broad policy lines, three subcommittees looked at programs, publications (the failure to elaborate "a grand publishing project comparable to that of the centennial" disconcerted Vovelle till the end), and foreign relations. Indefatigably, Vovelle affirmed his profession of liberal faith: he would assure "an indispensable pluralism in the representation of different currents of thought and sensibilities concerning the French Revolution." While the commission would coordinate and stimulate intellec-

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tual undertakings, notably colloquia, both at home and abroad, its president pledged that "it is the vocation of the national commission not to reprimand, regulate, or award or deny labels but to facilitate contacts and the harmonization of initiatives." Maurice Agulhon, who considers himself a friend of both Vovelle and Furet, and who served with them on the commission, vehemently contested the charge that its president showed any sign of partiality or favoritism. His leadership was "absolutely impeccable," in part because he was "fundamentally honest," had a "sense of the new problems," and practiced both "nuance and measure." Both undermining and fortifying his characterization, Agulhon relates how Vovelle pressed to overcome a majority vote against funding a "lightweight" and "mediocre" project of rightist inspiration precisely because it emanated from the right and Vovelle was loath to risk the charge of ideological bias. From the very outset Vovelle consciously strained to keep a balance, without which he knew he could not succeed. When he called on Chevenement to strengthen the infrastructure of his lnstitut de l'histoire de Ia Revolution franyaise at the Sorbo nne, "almost totally deprived of means for the last few years," at the same time he added "that it will be suitable to encourage the activities envisaged by the EHESS" concerning the bicentennial. Despite his deep distaste for the counterrevolutionary movement that sought to annex for its own purposes the call for revising the history of the Vendee, Vovelle rejected "exorcisms" and "condemnations without appeal" in favor of a patient investigation that would examine the character and significance of all peasant movements (as Furet demanded), rectifying both the idealization from the right and the neglect and lack of understanding from the left. The head of the commission did not· seem to worry about the risks of a policy geared to please everyone, of a bureaucratic conception of commemoration that failed to give birth to a grand project. Even some of his critics claim they would have preferred a single act of audacity to what one of them called endless "cosmetic gestures. "9 One of the rare moments when Vovelle publicly addressed the issue of his fairness occurred when L'Histoire, an influential semischolarly historical magazine, published a piece charging that Furet was persona non grata at the bicentennial commission. Denouncing its manifest "intention to do damage" and to impugn "an institution that has functioned for the last three years as a result of the pluralist devotion of its team," its president affirmed that Furet had been a member of the executive committee from the beginning, that he

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had participated "sometimes," and that he had requested and received substantial subsidies for scholarly activities. (At the very same executive committee meeting in October 1986-attended by Labrousse, Bergeron, Plongeron, Mazauric, Roche, Agulhon, and Suratteau-at which Vovelle deplored "the press campaign currently mounted against the commission," he proposed a motion to finance Furet's Paris colloquium.) Supporting its author, the editorial board deplored the extravagance of Vovelle's counterattack and maintained that Furet had been wholly marginalized despite his official place. 10 On the surface there was some reason for the adamantine adversaries of the cursed catechism to take heart in Vovelle's arrival at the Sorbonne. Born in 1933, he was of a younger generation than Soboul, and he had forged a very different career. A graduate of the other Ecole normale at Saint-Cloud, after the standard elitist apprenticeship at Louis-le-Grand and Henri-IV, he had succumbed to the charisma of Labrousse, who gently moved him backward from the Commune toward the social structures of the old regime. "It was the time when the social was everything," recalled Vovelle. "Among us who would have placed this in question?" Intimately identified, in retrospect, with the sclerotic social interpretation, in those buoyant early days Soboul was among the scholars who resisted the idea that "all history is social." He worried that the focus on structures would swallow up the Revolution in its long-run voracity. "Don't sociologize too much," he warned Vovelle and his peers. (Ironically, years later in his Penser Ia Revolution franfaise, Furet reproved the "tyranny of sociologism" that Soboul allegedly promoted.) Though on quite dissimilar trajectories, Soboul and Furet, increasingly alienated from social history for different reasons, were to become objective allies in the campaign to restitute legitimacy to the political and to the French Revolution, which stood homologically at risk vis-a-vis the Braudelian juggernaut. Convinced of the need to use quantitative methods, to explore the long as well as the short run, and to scrutinize structures, Vovelle began, however, to take a burgeoning interest in that protean sociocultural realm that was somewhat quixotically baptized "mentalities.". Religion was to be the general subject of Vovelle's thesis; more specifically, religious practices and their genesis across a relatively long period of time. "I did not have the feeling of a deviation, of keeping the techniques and abandoning the content," confided Vovelle many years later, always beset with fidelity, "but of a continuity, on the work site of a history of mentalities that remains for me in the forefront of

155 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

social history." Voicing serious doubts about Vovelle's problematic and his methodology, Soboul discouraged him from taking his degree at the Sorbonne. Before that Soboul had savaged him publicly on the occasion of his first scholarly paper at a conference. As Vovelle put it wryly, it took Soboul many years to forgive Vovelle for the harm th~t he, Soboul, had caused him. It is hard to imagine that these rebuffs did not inscribe some animus in Vovelle's relationship with the mentor of Revolutionary studies. It may be that the two men never fully reconciled, though Vovelle felt that Soboul was sincere in giving him his blessing when he visited him just after Chevenement solicited him to undertake the bicentennial task. 11 By and large, Vovelle seemed closer intellectually to the Annates school than to the school of the Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise. He had close ties with historians of diverse orientations. Pierre Chaunu's passionate and avuncular interest in his work was critical in both intellectual and affective terms. There are curious parallels in the careers of Chaunu and Vovelle. Both men exercised across an astonishing range of subjects, they dealt with all three of the levels that had become the Annates trinity, they were both unusually prolific, they both operated for many years on the periphery, respectively in Caen and Aix-en-Provence, investing deeply in the life of the laboratory and the team that ran it. The theme of death haunted the work (and the lives) of both men. Religious practices and forms of expression, humble and lofty, individual and institutional, intrigued both historians, albeit in rather different ways. Both adored the metier of professor, Vovelle perhaps even more than Chaunu, who was always tempted by other arenas. Both were deeply imbued with the values of the university. They believed in its mission and they espoused its traditions. Arguably, there was barely more trace of Marxism in much of Vovelle's production than in Chaunu's. Temperamentally, Vovelle was much less effusive and forthcoming. He tended to shield himself, to hide behind wordplays and irony. When Vovelle "ascended" to Paris, the professors of Paris-I who elected him did not know what to expect. They chose him because he was an extremely accomplished early modernist, not a master of Revolutionary history, though his immense bibliography included an early anthology of Marat's writings, a general history of the fall of the monarchy and the coming of the Revolution, an important and original study of dechristianization during the Revolution, a monograph dealing in part with the Revolutionary career of an Aixois notable, and countless articles on subjects directly and indirectly

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touching the Revolution. 12 A number of his new colleagues hoped that he would clean house, that he would inject fresh blood and fashion new structures in the Institut, that he would launch a veritably new beginning. Though he made changes, he tended to carry on and accept more than he transformed. Institutionally, he refused to take the same distance from the Soboulean heritage that he took intellectually. One disappointed colleague confided that his hopes were dashed when he saw the party nomenklatura gather to celebrate Vovelle's accession, and when he found that he could not gain unencumbered access to the lnstitut's library.

Vovelle and Revisionism With some exceptions, Vovelle inherited Soboul's adversaries as well as his acolytes. As the historian charged with the double stewardship of the Jacobin tradition of the university's historiography of the Revolution and the scientific side of the bicentennial, his major concern was the sweeping revisionist tide, in the wake of which counterrevolutionary currents drew fresh sources of energy. Though the revisionist movement had been long in gestation and boasted Anglo-American roots, in the French (pre)bicentennial context, for all practical purposes, revisionism was tantamount to Furetism. 13 Vovelle tried to cast the issues in broader scholarly terms precisely to avoid reducing a rich and vast debate to personalized hand-to-hand combat. Strategic considerations, themselves preceded and shaped by intellectual convictions and temperamental disposition, disinclined Vovelle to assume an aggressively confrontational posture. In his own way, he had contributed to the revisionist enterprise; with certain threads in the revisionist fabric, he felt quite comfortable. In order to succeed polemically and remain true to himself intellectually, Vovelle needed to recast the revisionist definitions and to reappropriate a substantial share of the terrain staked out by the galactic squatters who considered themselves exclusive proprietors. Vovelle's problem was complicated by the difficulty-perhaps the impossibility-of confining the argument to the so-called scientific theatre, an ideal type of antiseptic space uncontaminated by putatively exogenous concerns. Historically saturated with ideological and political considerations, the debate over the Revolution, on the eve of the bicentennial, in a world shaken every day by revolutionary aftershocks of one sort or another, could not be represented as a mere (or as a grand) scholarly joust, despite the fact

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that all the contenders battled for the scholarly high ground. (Not the least, in Sartrean terms, in order not to disespirer their various Billancourts abroad, in which their allies often continued to labor to the beat of the positivist drum.) While Vovelle called vigorously for a pluralistic approach to the study of the Revolution-one way of decentering if not destabilizing revisionism-he also argued passionately that the Revolution was not a purely archaeological object. He did not always seem sure of just how to handle the revisionist beast. On the one hand, it seemed perilous to concede too much, and to acknowledge openly the disarray of the Jacobins. On the other hand, it appeared useful to denounce the new (and necessarily stifling) hegemony of the revisionists ("the progressively affirmed, built-up hegemony of the historiography that is called revisionist") even as they had once assailed the tentacular empire of the Jacobina-Marxists. Yet the psychologically mobilizing underdog role did not spare Vovelle from lapsing willingly into a defensive stance (fiercely denying that the Revolution was "finished," that it was a "dead object," or that it was the matrix of all totaloterrorism).I4 Addressing the republic of historians, Vovelle readily conceded that revisionism had renewed the debate in some very positive ways. He proffered a generally favorable assessment of the early revision of 1965: "that which refused any preestablished schema, which sought to ground itself in the reality of the facts, which insisted in American fashion on the pragmatic approach, empirically oriented, which distinguishes itself from abstract modeling." But in the same breath, he contested Furet's claims to paternity and ownership. Its time had come, and the heuristic benefits of revisionism were considerable. "At the risk of appearing incurably optimistic"-realistic might have been a more apposite word-Vovelle wrote, "I consider that this debate was fecund and productive." He welcomed the "opening" of historiography. In its "ghetto," Revolutionary research had suffered "years of compression and of quasi regression." li stagnated in part because the triumphant long-run perspectives of Braudelism choked off its air. Perhaps also, acknowledged Vovelle, because of "somewhat rigid personalities" who conducted the polemics, which were often sterile. The "rediscovery of the political," or "the return of the political," was a veritable turning point. Widely associated with Furet, despite his institutional grounding in the House ofBraudel, "the return of the event, the taking into account of the breaks, the brusque changes in the historical field" was even more decisively the fruit of the rise of the new cultural history of which

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Vovelle was one of the pioneers. Vovelle argued that he had never accepted the Braudelian contempt for politics as superficial epiphenomena and for the event as a misleading and contemptible object of investigation. "I was always careful to hold on to the two ends of the chain, to be simultaneously attentive to the short run and the long run," he noted. In this sense, the rehabilitation of the political was partly the fruit of his labors, and those of Labroussean colleagues such as Agulhon, well before it captured the imagination ofFuret, who preached an unbending message of quantitative social history as the sole avenue to salvation until midcareer. As tonic as it was, however, the "political" dynamic in its turn became threatening when, doped by a sort of historiographical anabolic-steroid treat.,. ment, it became the artificially swollen "all-political," a Prometheus liberated but perverted and poisoned. The stimulus of the political, Vovelle located in its pluralistic vocation: "political history in all its forms." By narrowing it, deracinating it, cutting it off from its multiple linkages with other areas and methods of inquiry, the revisionists risked repeating the very errors of monomania, crankish sectarianism and parochialism that they had deplored in the Jacobino-Marxist camp. "From the all-social to the all-political, if one follows the path opened up by Fran~ois Furet, the seesaw shift is rough and, at the very least, maiming," contended Vovelle. Brandishing the Boy Scout flag of sworn objectivity to distract attention from his maneuver, Furet succeeded merely in replacing one vulgate with another. In Vovelle's view, moreover, Furet's particular brand of the political-abstract, metahistorical, "seeking its references in historiography without trying to inject material of a new nature" (presumably this meant Furet's well-known distaste/ contempt for the archives and for · other new sources beyond the standard printed ones whose true sense he flattered himself with finally having elicited under the tutelage of the great historical thinkers of the nineteenth century)-carried within it "the danger of a new, sterilizing dogmatism."

A Common Ground and/or a New Deal? De bonne guerre, the revenge of the outsider on the new insider, Vovelle's critique of the all-political reveals a certain ambivalence in his attitude toward the social, and perhaps also grounds for possible entente. Intellectually, he

159 Managing the "IDstorlcal" Bicentennial

maintained, there was no reason for the return of the political to require the disqualification or exorcism of the social. Whatever its contributions, the (new) political history "could not place into question the social reading of the Revolutionary phenomenon." This affirmation meant a number of different things. On the first level, it signaled that class would continue to matter critically as a historical variable-but not necessarily class as it was traditionally analyzed. It announced that in Vovelle's hands class was not the only indicator of or approach to the social, and it intimated perhaps also that fortune or relations of production were not in every case the privileged litmuses of class. In his most polemical/reductive moments, Furet, who used to see social history as embracing everything, viewed it as a beggared proxy for applied Marxism, that is, as a genre of more or less deterministic economic history. Despite his ties to Labrousse, Vovelle seemed to suffer no gnawing nostalgia for that economic history, which had once performed Herculean tasks and now found itself for the time being out of breath. (In the aftermath of the bicentennial year, he would invoke the need to "revivify" social and economic history "by taking it out of the ghetto in which certain people wanted to imprison it."} With the collapse/eclipse of the economic, the social had cast a new framework for itself, in Vovelle's reckoning. It had moved into the sphere of "the imaginary," more broadly into the realm called "mentalities." This shift looms as a postmodern imperative: "the optimistic schema, the vision of a conquering and linear progress-begotten by the Enlightenment and rejuvenated by the inspiration of the Liberation-upon which we had counted since the end of the war has been undermined by the force of the facts." Impelled by the desire "to pursue things more deeply," as a self-described social historian Vovelle "felt the necessity to formulate the issues differently." The "simple explanation by the force of the inertia of unaccomplished change" -the world viewed through an Annates-anthropological keyhole-had become a dead end. The focus on a prise de conscience that seemed to become reified mechanically if not magically at the right material-historical moment was no longer enthralling. "It was necessary to shift the focus to collective representations in order to study how they emerge, are elaborated, and fare," reasoned Vovelle. Nor did this take him for an instant outside the domain of the social. Rather, it changed his way of entering it, in order to allow for "the play between the objective conditions of the lives of men" -an insufficiently luminous formula- "and the representations that they make of them."

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For Vovelle, mentalities did not imply "the history of multisecular currents adrift across the long run, a way of avoiding the unwieldy object [called] 'Revolution."' On the contrary, the Revolution offered the student of mentalities an extraordinary opportunity to test an arsenal of hypotheses because it was "one of these very great breaks, a moment in which an entire institutional, social, familial, mental, and cultural apparatus falls apart." What better place for the historian to sharpen and test his tools of apprehension and analysis than in "this place of experimentation," this "unhinging" in which one could observe "the construction of a new humanity in all of its expressions," including gestures of violence, the discovery of politics, and new attitudes toward life and death? The object for Vovelle was not to reflect on the paradigmatic significance of, say, the regeneration theme for the political discourse of the Revolutionaries and their descendants, but to look concretely at the ways in which different social groups perceived the world, acted, and represented their actions in very diverse conditions. Among the sites of investigation were fetes (but not according to the gospel of Ozouf), fears, hopes, forms of sociability, and artistic expression. What made the history of mentalities a quintessential social history was, inter alia, Vovelle's insistence that "the theme of crisis is very much my area of inquiry." The long and the short terms were in constant tension, dialectic, and dialogue. As historian of both, Vovelle profited from a relentless cross-fertilization and a refreshing give and take. Nor was this style very different from the way in which Fran~ois Furet looked at political history, or at that part of it which made the Revolution a secular, even a multisecular affair, in the wake of Tocqueville, and beyond to Arendt, Talmon, and Solzhenitsyn. Had Furet listened carefully, he would have heard in Vovelle's defense of the social a profound shift away from "classical" preoccupations. Resolutely faithful, Vovelle repudiated nothing. But surely he aspired to a rather radical reproblematization of the social, driven in part by the rediscovery of the political, with the goal, in part, of redefining and deepening the points of contact and contrast, the synergies and the antagonisms between them. What Vovelle proposed was his own ecumenical version of revisionism, favoring "globality" at the expense of the "monolithic." In his own way, he launched a sort of stock-takeover fight -an "OPA" in French terms-for the control of political history as construed by Furet, viewing it as a mere synecdoche-run amok-of his more encompassing and evenhanded revisionism.

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For Vovelle, the pluralist discourse was simultaneously an obligation, an opportunity, and a risk. It was an obligation because he had official responsibilities and because his label as a Communist cast-unfairly-a permanent shadow of doubt on his capacity to avoid partisanship as well as on his sincerity (not as an individual but as a member of an organization notorious for its opportunism and circumlocution). This constant requirement to demonstrate and rehearse his genuine commitment to pluralism handicapped Vovelle in his ongoing debate with Furet, who had no such public millstone to bear, no liabilities to liquidate ritually, and no regular accounts to render. Yet the reiterated embrace of pluralism implied a logic of laissez-faire that exposed the historical realm to the perils as well as the advantages of the market. A relatively brusque deregulation was bound to have perverse effects. Thus, even as Vovelle espoused a sort of unlimited historiographical multiculturalism-an unmitigated right to be different -he assured that research would not become, "for all that, cacophonous or contradictory." He cobbled the compact euphemism "complexification" in order to describe and account for the play of(endlessly?) multiple variables whose restitution to the field of inquiry could only enrich the historiographical enterprise. He considered complexification an exciting challenge, a new frontier, and in some sense a new professional ethic. It would not, vouchsafed Vovelle, degenerate into chaos; it would not unravel into an indiscriminate relativism. Somehow "the object that is the Revolution, in its myriad facets, with all the tensions it reveals, maintains all the coherence of a collective experience which everyone questions according to his or her own problematic." Not only did the gap between complexification and coherence seem unbridgeable (save perhaps by the mysterious workings of the Invisible Hand), but it also pointed to jeopardy right and left. Despite the rigors of the scientific protocol implicit in the demarche, would not complexification/pluralism justify or at least tolerate every counterrevolutionary discursive excess? And how would the Communist/Marxist audience, conditioned to distinguish between scientific verities and bourgeois distortions, greet the new departure? In the worstcase scenario, complexification would merely be the sign denoting an auberge cspagnole. In the best, it would respond to Edgar Morin's philosophical challenge to reckon with multiple and apparently contradictory variables; it would reinject what Milan Kundera called "the spirit of the novel." In the name of the revisionists' own scruples-in particular, their denunciation of manichaeanisms-Vovelle quarreled with the polemical morphol-

162 Farewell, Revolution

ogy of the debate. In his view, it was aberrant to portray two monolithic groups separated by a gaping chasm. There was no single, unified Jacobin historiography any more than there was a unique, coherent revisionist historiography. There were multiple currents and contradictions on the Jacobin side. Mathiez had done political history before he came to the social. Lefebvre had always considered Soboul a political historian. Soboul had assailed Vovelle for his early work on dechristianization in the 1960s, yet he himself undertook studies in the realm called mentalities. Vovelle would have included Marcel Reinhard in the Jacobin line-the historiographical eclipse of Reinhard, holder of the Aulard chair and a groundbreaking historian of demography, religion, the army, science, Paris, and so on, is one of the most shameful products of the manichaean proclivity-despite the fact that he was Catholic and non-Marxist. Vovelle regretted the "rigidification" around the notion of "bourgeois revolution," which came to epitomize and fossilize the Jacobin position at the cost of obfuscating all the other components. New lines of reflection had begun to emerge in the last Soboulean decade, and the post-Soboulean agenda of the Institut, given the explosion of new interests in language, politics, cultural practice, and the like, repudiated the earlier inertias. (From a different vantage in mid-1990, Vovelle worried about the risk of relapsing, under the enormous pressure of contemporary historical change, into "a nostalgic maximalism, crystallized inwardly either around an incantatory republican discourse on liberty and human rights or around the renewal of an explanatory conception impoverished because not adapted to the new realities of society.") Even as he depicted the reconstruction in the Jacobin camp, Vovelle ventured to show diversity and incongruity on the revisionist side. He pointed to Furet's own evolution over the years, to the substantial differences between R. R. Palmer's and Alfred Cobban's revisionism, to the unregenerate empiricism of certain Anglo-Americans in contrast to the more theoretical concerns of other revisionists, to the more recent tendencies he styled (and deplored) as "populist" and contrasted with Furet's "elitism" and "fatalism." This line of reasoning led Vovelle to formulate a proposition for a kind of New Deal consequent upon an armistice which betrayed as much the voice of the loser as that of the dove. "Finally, can one not wonder," asked the historian, "whether it is still advisable to cling to received denominations that are narrow-minded, ambiguous and, especially, reductionist or on the contrary, to be done with the labels 'Jacobins' and 'revisionists'?" The term

163 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

"Marxist" had slipped imperceptibly into oblivion. "Jacobin" had become a surrogate for it, despite the fact that the two appellations-spurious appellations d'origine controlie-were not nearly coterminous. Following Soboul, Vovelle frequently referred to the "classical" school of historiography, an adroit packaging adjustment that endowed the marriage of Jacobinism and Marxism with a heraldic consecration. Ironically, the new "old" label emphasized the conservative features of the traditional university exegesis that had made it so vulnerable in the first place. Revisionism is, of course, what keeps historians in business; until recently, the term conveyed a melange of pugnacity, critical spirit, and adventure. Given the very nasty connotation that the negationist/Faurisson school has given the word, and the risks, especially through media insouciance, of conflating the two enterprises (as the far-rightist Fran~ois Brigneau craftily attempted to do), the New Deal may have had some vague allure. But the Furetians had already rebaptized themselves "the critical school" -a term at once less ambiguously charged and more insulting. A bit as had George Bush in a different context in which Good and Evil faced each other in the desert, the revisionists had every interest in drawing the line in the sand that separated the sullied Other from themselves.l5

The Soboulean Heritage As part of the deal, Vovelle clearly but circumspectly distinguished himself from his predecessor at the Sorbonne. Indirectly, uneasily yet incontrovertibly, Vovelle underlined his break with that part of the Soboulean heritage that imprisoned itself in a "dogmatic and cramped conception." (As if to expiate for this vacillation in fealty, in the aftermath of the bicentennial Vovelle made a point of scoffing at the myth of Soboul "as the representative of a dogmatic historiography, which his entire scholarly corpus contradicts.") Navigating between "fidelity and renewal," he depicted himself as "heir of this lineage in which I repudiate no one." While he did not endorse the multiple efforts to explicate and rehabilitate Soboul with bicentennial glaze, he tended to make his case obliquely by emphasizing the very different trajectories that he and Soboul had followed. "I did not come to the Revolution by some sort of detour or contortion; for me it is an essential thematic, but one taken up in a complex array of questions," he explained.

164 Farewell, Revolution Vovelle conveyed the image of a scholar who had greater range than Soboul, who was more cosmopolitan, and who was more sophisticated. He rejected the "tradition of quite narrow specialization characteristic of the historians of the Revolution." He was a richer historian of the Revolution precisely because "the Revolution is not my only field." Though Soboul's sprawling bibliography shows forays into relatively exotic places in countryside and city between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, there is no doubt that he was obsessively focused on the Revolution for the bulk of his career. He was also much more overtly concerned with theoretical debates among Marxists about the nature of historical materialism, about the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and about the eschatological as well as the epistemological side of historical science. In intellectual as well as in temperamental terms, the notion of revising-of fundamentally rethinking and of asking critical questions-was intrinsically much less inimical to Vovelle than to Soboul. 16

Attending to the Chapel While Vovelle projected an open attitude toward the notion of revision generally as revitalization and more specifically to certain research vectors promoted by the revisionists, he did not overlook the ideological dimensions of revisionism, especially when addressing not his world-historians' audience but his Communist clientele, to whom his pastoral obligations were of a different order. The unavowed agenda of revisionism, at least in its French avatar, was to discredit the Revolution. Politically, a "living Revolution" constituted "a more than annoying obstacle" to revisionist ambitions whose precise character Vovelle left to the imagination of the readers of L'Humanite. To them it was clear from Vovelle's lesson that those who first questioned the vocation of the Revolution as the agent of transition from feudalism to capitalism, then contested the class character of the (bourgeois) Revolution, and finally deriied "the necessity of a popular movement going beyond the bourgeois revolution" could not have the authentic interests of the French people at heart. The Communist audience, whom Vovelle went out to meet, was predictably receptive to him, and this heartened him. The fact that three hundred visitors (of the tens of thousands present) at the Fete de L'Humanite in

165 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial

September 1988 came to his talk, he avowed, "fortifies me in the view that a sort of reappropriation of the Revolution as a living object can be accomplished, that the demand for the French Revolution remains very brisk." Yet his message was not devoid of ambiguity. On the one hand he praised people for clinging to the right revolutionary values even as he stressed the need for a critical spirit on the other. The problem may have been that his militant audience was not used to exercising that faculty, and/ or that he, the evangelical Vovelle, was mesmerizingly convincing. La Marseillaise, the Communist daily of the south, reported that at a lecture he gave in the cite phocienne, the historian-preacher was "listened to with a quasi-religious attention." Only in tone did Vovelle's in-house homily in L'Humaniti differ from the Soboulean discourse. Given their "global repudiation of the legacies," it is no wonder, concluded Vovelle, that the revisionists end up portraying the Revolution both as a gigantic and malevolent manipulation of opinion and, more ominously, as "the matrix of all modern totalitarianisms." Confined to academic circles, revisionism could be parried. But in the period before the bicentennial the grave danger was that it was escaping from the hands of historians-Vovelle tended to equivocate on the extent to which he held Furet responsible for this dirapage-and taking on a political mandate. He pointed to a direct link between the newly won notoriety of revisionism and the resurgence of the idea of the Revolution as "the absolute evil" preached by the counterrevolutionary anathematists. 17

Front the UvingRevolution to the

Historiographieal Journees Bevolutionnaires

W

Neither Mausoleum nor Museum

hile he confessed that he sometimes felt "isolated," while he toiled honestly to give the bicentennial commission a pluralist complexion, and while he often represented himself as a historian of the troisieme type, Michel Vovelle admitted to an unregenerate Jacobin core: he was "an unrepentant Jacobin" at bottom. This side of him emerged most acutely when he addressed Furet's apothegm that the Revolution was over. It was an ambiguous phrase, a brilliant shibboleth, and a vulpine trap. It ensnared Vovelle, placed him (again) on the defensive, and induced him to reveal how deeply imbricated were his civic/ideological and scientific personae. Once the media picked up the formula and made it into the measure of good sense, Furet had nothing more to explain. He left to others the business of glossing it, extending it, deforming it; huge unearned dividends thus accrued to him at very small cost. The phrase became Vovelle's bicentennial dybbuk; it inhabited him and taunted and haunted him without reprieve, eliciting some of his deepest feelings and exposing him to serious contradictions and strictures. The slogan seemed not only to question the wisdom of a celebration and/ or commemoration but also to cut the ground from under the notion of the Revolution as a historical force both in the present/ future and in the past. It was the 166

167 Living Revolution, Historiographical Joumees

perfidious nucleus of revisionism in epitome, corrosive of hope as well as of memory, disdainful of the people, infeodated to ruling institutions. Vovelle refused both the mausoleum and the museum, equally sinister repositories. Not only would he not "bury" the Revolution; he would also not allow that the body had cooled. Furet's "cold look" upon a "cold object" was a scientific imposture, an effort to mask an ideological struggle in a scholarly veil. "As if the illusion of ending the Revolution," noted Aulard's successor, "had not dawdled about for two centuries, incessantly revived in specific contexts by those who were tempted to exorcise the cumbersome object." The stability, consolidation, and consensus stressed by Furet, in Vovelle's analysis, reflected the flight of "our liberal societies" from the specter of change. On the surface, Furet's France bumptiously proclaimed the liberal triumph, but its rush to repress betrayed an anguished sense of its own fragility. If the liberals were really serene in their conviction that revolution was obsolescent or appropriate only elsewhere, queried Vovelle, "why this wave of fears, this escalation of exorcisms, ranging from the most veiled forms to the most brutal expressions?" Projecting his own obsession, Vovelle portrayed the adversary as desperately trying "to exorcise in a derisorily definitive manner a phantom that is still very much alive and haunts them." Vovelle operated on both the historical and contemporary fronts. For the Revolution, the two were enmeshed in an inextricable solidarity. To lose ground in one theatre was to suffer a setback in the other. Inescapably, the attack on the Jacobin interpretation was "a calling into question" of "any idea of revolution." Beyond the debate on the Revolution Vovelle plainly discerned "a much more sweeping challenge, tantamount to an emptying of the model of the revolutionary transformation of society. And this includes the original model constituted by the French Revolution, that of a total subversion of the social order." To be sure, Vovelle understood that the contemporary conjuncture was not favorable. "We are obliged to acknowledge," he conceded, "that there is no theoretical articulation of the revolutionary break today in the sense in which one knew it in the past." Put less turgidly, "France is not [today] in a revolutionary situation, a brutal change of the world is not within reach." More broadly, "the international revolutionary movement is subjecting itself to questions about its goals and its references." In this bleak climate the Furetians and their liberal/ conservative allies "profit from what might be felt to be a zone of weakness" -the professor's formula is exquisite, but the fact

168 Farewell, Revolution

that in this instance he was writing for L'Humanite warrants forebearancein order to attempt "to topple over completely the global reading of history and in the end to place into question any perspective of a transformation of society."

Life Imitates Art One of the most conspicuous and disconcerting markers of this ominous tide was Wajda's film Danton. Virtually everyone on the left had expected the Polish director to flatter their self-image. Instead his film turned out to be a stinging rebuke to their revolutionary nostalgia (though it must be noted that the line of cleavage regarding the film passed through the PS itself and cannot be reduced to a conventional right-left dichotomy). At about the time that he entered the Sorbonne, Vovelle reviewed it, mournfully and splenetically, in L'Humanite under the headline "The Revolution Is Not a Fit of'Delirium."' The film's caricatural story line revealed a Wajda who had renounced his objectivity along with his progressive idealism. The film pivoted on a crude opposition between an earthy, charismatic Danton embodying "the Revolution with a human face" and a mannered, pathological Robespierre incarnating "the frozen and dehumanizing Revolution." The idea that tens of thousands of persons lacking in historical knowledge would see the film and succumb to its tendentious yet alluring aesthetic deeply troubled Vovelle. The image of Year 11-a euphemism for the Terror-reduced to a carceral environment featuring denunciation, demoralization, and starvation pained the historian of the Revolution. Vovelle deplored the absence of the paramount actor in the R/revolution: the people, ignominiously "reduced to the role of passive spectator." In the end Wajda missed the central point that Vovelle yearned to drive home to his readers: the task of radical transformation remained in their hands. I Yet the bicentennial season brought fateful surprises that eddied against the tide. Amid all the theoretical disarray, "the Revolution was breaking out everywhere"-Wajda to the contrary notwithstanding-and Vovelle was not willing to concede this (counter?)revolution to the revisionists. Because these uprisings appeared to confirm their theses regarding the horror and futility of the 1789/93-1917 model, the Furetians, among others, rejoiced in the liberation of Eastern Europe (as well as in the more ambiguous signs ofliberaliza-

169 Living Revolution, Historiographical Joumees

tion in the Soviet Union). For Vovelle, however, there were neither discontinuities nor contradictions between the French Revolution and the upheaval in Eastern Europe (he tended to avoid the Soviet case). He blithely appropriated "a whole current, properly revolutionary, which takes its inspiration from '89 [which apparently postulates neither '93 nor 1917] in order to claim liberty, equality, and fraternity" at precisely the moment that the homogenizing galaxy declared the end of French exceptionalism. In Eastern Europe, despite the Soviet graft and several generations of indigenous reproduction, Vovelle esteemed that "the revolution is not accomplished, it remains still to be done." It is interesting to note that in a piece called "New Appraisal of the Bicentennial" drafted in mid-1990, Vovelle evinced doubts about the nature of the seismic changes that wracked the GDR, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. He wondered whether "one could truly characterize as revolutionary" these events "without taking into account their contents, which sometimes seem to have more affinity with a restoration." For fear of undercutting his own moral position, he was disinclined, during the bicentennial year, to aver candidly, as he did in 1990, that "it is more than ever indispensable to question oneself on what the term Revolution now signifies."

Keeping Utopia on the Map The fidelity to which he often referred was perhaps more than anything Michel Vovelle's refusal to abandon the messianic horizon. To relinquish hope of a "profound and intentional transformation of the world" was to lapse into a living death, a nihilism of resignation that he opposed with all his force. It was precisely the voluntarism of'89/'93, feared and reviled by Furet, that Vovelle yearned to resuscitate and to nurture. He would never allow the people-Robespierre's, Michelet's, Jaun!s's-to become mired in the despairing belief "that one never changed the way of life, that revolution is a delusion, that there is no solution to the crisis." The end of French exceptionalism, in a profound manner for Vovelle, was the end of embattled optimism. It was the reduction of the French Revolution to "the magic reference of those who cling to an archaic, outmoded, and terroristic dream." Once the dream could be discredited in the past, it had no claim on the future. Symbolically, the sacrifica1 "putting to death" of excep-

170 Farewell, Revolution

tionalism cast France in a posture of abjuration and abjection. It represented a wayward and importunate people seeking their way into "the club of civilized nations" in exchange for an endless penance for having unleashed on the world the lethal contagion of totalitarianism. For Vovelle the terms of this bargain were as historically flawed as they were humiliating. The "Revolution is over" -the end of exceptionalism-portended "a gradual normalization" that would strip France of its singularities and its ferments. It issued in a sort of Americanization (with the portrayal of a "clean" American Revolution that engendered a durable democracy as oppposed to a tarnished and tumultuous French Revolution that in the end turned out at best to be a toxic Tantalus), a willingness to truck the struggle for equality for the mirage of an elusive and unfairly allocated liberty, a submission to the forces of the market that infested every sphere of public and private life, a congeries of dramatic and subtle changes akin to what Debray called the triumph of democracy over republicanism. Perceived as less politically partisan and threatening, the republican theme surely exercised a broader appeal than the social/revolutionary one, though for Vovelle the one was manifestly the surrogate for the other. Recurrently he deplored "the absence of the republic" from the bicentennial discussions. The republic was not born of spontaneous generation nor was it a gift of the gods: "I fear somewhat that we have forgotten the Revolution as founder of the republic." If most French women and men today were republicans, then in some sense they were also Revolutionaries. The end of exceptionalism was merely another refrain of the age-old song of the forces of order directed against the forces of movement. There was a French way, and that specific way was still relevant in a world awash in revolution elsewhere and pregnant-gestation period unknown-with revolution at home. "How many generations," observed Vovelle, "have dreamed of announcing the end of the Revolution? But our society is far from having attained its equilibrium: to this extent is it prudent to be done with the fundamental demand presented by the French Revolution?"

Resisting Normalization: The French Way The Revolution was "this last experiment in the possibility of changing the world and changing it intentionally." No other historical experience, English

171 Living Revolution, Historiographical Journees

or American, had the multiple dimensions and the depth of the French Revolution (a "total subversion" marshaling not just the elites but the popular masses, urban and rural), which conferred "the validity of its model." The "French model of the revolutionary path" had confirmed "its plasticity" over the years. This plasticity developed out of "the formulation of a certain number of demands that are far from having been satisfied." Revolution still had work to do-presumably this meant authentic revolution, rightly done-and nothing, East or South or hexagonal, apparently jolted Vovelle's conviction that the potential for it still abounded. The "anticipations" of '93-the trajectory of despotism for Furet-had not yet been fully realized by millions of people in France and in the rest of the world. In traditional Jacobino-Marxist style, Vovelle still contrasted the "real rights" of these anticipations with the formal rights of the Declaration, necessary and invaluable, to be sure, but radically incomplete. These anticipations constituted a "dynamic" -in Lenino-Labroussean language, it was "bearer of its own transcendence" -that had never ground to a halt, although it had repeatedly lost steam. This dynamic was "on the move for a battle that remains our combat today," pledged Vovelle. Thus "the French Revolution cannot truly be finished" and it is "our responsibility in the current situation, which we know generates intolerable imbalances on the international scale, not to lock France up in the comfort of a soft normalization." Cosmic in focus, nebulous in substance, ominous in resonance, Vovelle's response to Furet was less an argument of refutation than a profession of faith. As a rule, in light of his official bicentennial capacity, Vovelle avoided explicitly making connections between these momentous issues and the microcosm, the world of party politics. But for him the PCF was not just another party, and its courageous historical engagements exposed it to particularly insidious attacks. Revisionist normalization targeted the PCF as well as the destiny of the masses for whom it still pretended to speak. Those who wanted to confiscate their history from the people took aim at the party's double stewardship of France's two greatest moments according to its reckoning, the Revolution and the Resistance. L'Humanite denounced a parallel bicentennial campaign against the sacred shrines of the Revolution and the Resistance. While Vovelle did not intimate that this double-barreled revisionism emanated from the same sources, he believed that they comforted and profited

172 Farewell, Revolution

from each other's efforts. The Resistance revisionists, like their Revolution counterparts, aimed to show that the former liberation effort, no more than the latter, had "never existed." The first marauders purged all that was "authentic and heroic" in the Resistance in order to desacralize it and reduce it to a paltry, transient episode, while the others drained the Revolution "of its emotional value, of its power as reference." In Vovelle's view the Resistance sprang from the same principles and aspirations that inspired the Revolution and that were solidified by it. Neither must be allowed to be "eradicated" from the collective memory of the nation by the revisionist forays.

Beloved, Holistic, and Maligned Given Michel Vovelle's position as scientific coordinator of the bicentennial, he could not afford to herald any lack of resolve on the so-called objectivity question. Nor could he allow Frans;ois Furet to capture the terra firma of scholarship and relegate his adversaries to the boggy ground of ideology. Yet he revealed himself to be torn about how to articulate the relationship between vie scientifique and vie militante. Both the nature of the bicentennial issues and the stakes involved made it hard to segregate the two impulses. An important part of Vovelle's evangelism, after all, turned on the idea that reflection on the French Revolution "is not merely an academic or school exercise." Otherwise, it would be that cold/mummified object that he assailed as a feckless placebo if not an outright fraud. Since "the Revolution today is still an object of battle" and "of pertinence," it was bound to elicit very strong feelings. Indeed, to make his case for exceptionalism-and perhaps to heighten the sense of a beleaguered minority status that he hoped would sharpen the Jacobin resistance-Vovelle contended that France remained deeply divided over the Revolutionary heritage/message/mission. Today's "anticipations" were no less terrifying to many French citizens than had been those of 1793. The bicentennial pivoted on "battles over the choice of society" that involved a complexified political landscape containing at least two rights and two lefts. The historian's vision of permanent confrontation undermined his complaint against the allegedly untoward resurgence of the counterrevolutionaries, who in fact lived in a curiously symbiotic relation with his own revolutionary camp. In the same vein, Vovelle was forced to argue a position that worried most

173 Living Revolution, Historiographical Joumees

historians-that "objectivity" and "fervor" were not incompatible. (In another text Vovelle backed off a bit, juxtaposing fervor and "precision" rather than the more imposing and elusive "objectivity.") Indeed, as far as the history of the French Revolution was concerned, they were perforce complementary, for there was a "civic dimension in the history of the Revolution" that morally had to be put "in the service of the republic." Thus in the case of the Revolution celebration went hand in hand with commemoration, somehow without sacrificing or blemishing the critical purview without which the historian had no legitimacy. Since "the terrain of study of the Revolution carried a 'plus' that went beyond its properly scholarly dimension," it apparently allowed for a certain derogation from the standard rules. Thus Vovelle situated "his action" in the "lineage" of Alphonse Aulard's aphorism, "To understand the French Revolution, one must love it." (On the morrow of the bicentennial, a more relaxed Vovelle was able to affirm less agonizingly that in the R/revolutionary field, "scholarly approach and ideological engagement are indivisible.") In Vovelle's analysis, the Revolution was alive, hot, beloved, somewhat jealous, and mercilessly maligned. 2 The holder of the chair in the History of the French Revolution took umbrage at a number of themes of denigration and distortion that flowered in the bicentennial prologue. While he rejected the notion of the Revolution as a bloc as not-or, more precisely, no longer-"useful," he himself oscillated between two conceptions that were not coterminous. On the one hand, he emphasized the wholeness of the Revolution (calling it "un Tout"), its ramifying interconnectedness, and the idea that "nothing must be neglected." This argument against truncation echoed the case made on the right, though it spawned from very different considerations. From the outset Voveile felt uncomfortable with a telescoped commemoration whose unique fulcrum was 1789, either in its lean or bloated versions. On the other hand, if the Revolution was a complex whole, it was also "like a movement, like a conquest, like a dynamic, like a continuity." Without standing as a monolith, the Revolution nevertheless partook of many of the qualities of coherence and infrangibility that alimented the bloc regard. But a certain momentum and proclivity did not mean necessity. Vovelle vigorously restituted the play of contingency against the asphyxiating "fatality" that he imputed to the revisionists. Until well beyond 1789, the Revolution was capable of "turning good or bad." Its development was dynamic but not ineluctable. Adamantly he contested Furet's suggestion of a

174 Farewell, Revolution

logic inscribed in 1789 that largely set the whole scenario. Even as Furet had once assailed the Soboulean catechists for their teleological adoration, so Vovelle reproached the revisionist leader with a teleological view that permitted him to contrive an apocalyptic program from the beginning. Deploying multiple "anachronisms" to stage his drama, including the wholly extraneous deux ex machina of 1917, Furet reduced the whole Revolution to a few discursive spasms of 1789, purging the people as veritably autonomous actors, exorcising circumstances as mere events (thus replicating in his own fashion the Annaliste malediction), and excluding the social and economic dimensions in favor of a narrowly construed political eschatology. Yet, while Vovelle refused '89 as a sort of all-purpose Revolutionary metonym, in his own way he argued that there was a dose of '93 in '89. Seventeen eighty-nine could not be purged and sequestered from the turbulence and the blood of the Revolution. There were not two revolutions, "1789 and 1793, the good and the bad, one of human rights and liberties and another of a totalitarian and terroristic nature." With the same vehemence as commentators on the far right, Vovelle depicted '89 as rife with violence and bloodletting. But for him the violence issued directly from the obdurate and ultimately treacherous refusal of the monarchy and the privileged to embrace the reformist path. Seventeen eighty-nine was no more "unanimous" than 1790 was "the happy year," as Furet and Richet idyllically described it. Replete with explosive tensions, '89 and '90 both lived in the shadow of counterrevolutionary "normalization." The Revolutionary dynamic contained or rather generated both good and bad from the beginning till the end. Both were fruits of a struggle, partly rooted in the past, partly galvanized by the unfolding events themselves. Vovelle did not attempt to work out the relation between the "good" and the "bad." He maintained that the bad was the combined product of secular habits inculcated by the Old Regime and stringent resistance to further repression rather than the fruit of political logic driven by a diabolically slippery ideology. For Vovelle the "totalitarian matrix" premise was a calumny rather than an argument; thus he could dismiss it indignantly rather than attempt to rebut it and thereby inject it with rhetorical credence. Stalin, Pol Pot, and other artisans of modern horror had nothing to do with our understanding of the French Revolution as far as Vovelle was concerned.3 One of the ironies of the bicentennial debate is how Fran~ois Furet and Michel Vovelle reversed and in some sense exchanged their previous posi-

175 Living Revolution, Historiographical Joumees

tions on the idea of the bloc. Furet had first criticized it, and deconstructed it, in the book he published with Denis Richet in the mid-1960s. The Sobouleans took such umbrage with the two authors in part because they could not separate in their minds the integrity of the historical Revolution from the integrity I necessity I destiny of the Rl revolutionary legacy. Subsequently, Furet attacked the bloc within the terms in which the Jacobino-Marxists defended it: metahistorically, as icon and metaphor, as moral guarantee and political mobilizer. From the early days of the bicentennial debate, Vovelle made a point of distancing himself from the bloc, though not without ambiguity and opportunistic regression. The object was to underline the difference between the newer and older Jacobinisms and to reflect Vovelle's own more nuanced conception of the Revolution's historicity. At the same time, however, almost imperceptibly, Furet edged closer and closer to an unavowed vision of the Revolution as a bloc. If'93 began to germinate in '89, if the "logic" of the later Revolution was consubstantial with discursive representations of the early Revolution, if there was denouement rather than derapage, then implicitly the Revolution reacquired a unity in the 1980s that Furet had denied it in the 1960s. The Jacobins found no solace in the reconstitution of the bloc, precisely because it was was far closer to the organicist conception of Burke than to the militant version of Clemenceau. 4

On the Pastoral Road: Jacobin Friends and

Counterrevolutionary Foes Vovelle's friends marveled at his frenetic pace as he crisscrossed the world in order to stimulate and coordinate research, and to show the French flag in reponse to "an intense demand" to see it flourished. There is no doubt that these travels, however physically draining, recharged the historian, in part enabling him to relativize the impact of revisionism. Whether or not this dispersion of energy was a compelling strategy remains open to question. Vovelle played cheerleader rather than coach. Instead of an overall game plan there was a desire to multiply the number of games. The president of the commission did not articulate a hierarchy of objectives; he encouraged scholars to do whatever interested them. "I represent the bicentennial" was his topos; his schedule was so taxing that he was more than once obliged to

176 Farewell, Revolution

rush in and out of colloquia in various parts of the world, with time barely to join a symbolic rather than a substantive dialogue. Ironically, the self-styled "traveling salesman for the bicentennial" felt more at home in some of the quasi-Old Regime nations than in the so-called advanced democracies. Almost always he encountered pristine landscapes of Jacobinism-"happy Jacobins"-in nations still groping for a democratic polity. It was especially in Latin America, "in these countries of fragile or threatened democracy," related Vovelle, "where the people who welcomed me were former exiles or prisoners, that I felt most powerfully the chord of revolution vibrate and the authentic heritage of the Revolution." There was no question for these struggling vanguards of fantasizing about the end of R/revolution; for them, "the Revolution is democracy." Vovelle took pleasure in informing blase Parisians, not all of whom were of revisionist persuasion, that "these foreign colleagues are astonished by the moodiness of the French vis-a-vis their own bicentennial." The dozens of colloquia and less formal roundtables held in Latin America, the Far East, and in other parts of the globe, where research was still largely framed by the classical model, testified in Vovelle's mind to its (re)vitalization and its continued pertinence. Outside the rather confined "western-Atlantic world," the Revolution "arouses a remarkable convergence of interests." Understandably, for Vovelle, "to restrict oneself to Europe is a bit pathetic."S Historiographically and politically, Vovelle worried about the connections between revisionism and the Counterrevolution. "The Revolution, according to a discourse that is gaining hegemony, merges into the Counterrevolution," he observed, in reference to recent historical writings. At the same time, he was struck-genuinely surprised, he insisted-by the "vivacity" and "pugnacity" of the counterrevolutionary discourse, reinforced by "the takeover of certain themes of today's historiography." It relegitimated and updated its "anathema" in appropriating both the Furetian dimension (the Revolution as matrix of totalitarianisms) and the "Anglo-Saxon" populist line (stressing the breaking up of the Revolution into multiple poles of resistance). Given the privileged access of the counterrevolutionary forces to the media, the "public debate" was increasingly dominated not by a confrontation between the revisionist and classical schools but by a visceral, inexorable, and impoverishing polarization into Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary camps. Weary, simplistic, and discredited arguments that otherwise would have merited little or no attention (e.g., Revolution =Terror) suddenly found

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new life. Because "our television sets will be saturated with chouanneries for the bicentennial," Vovelle feared that it would be "difficult" to achieve a "republican consensus." (Was this an oblique summons to Furet to join a common republican front drawn along lines whose significance superseded those of the historiographical polemic?) The holder of the Sorbonne chair anguished less over the impact on the scientific debate (an elitist affair in the first instance) than over the implications for those who constituted the "popular culture" that embraced the bulk of the nation, who would be denied the necessary information to make the right choices. Vovelle felt increasingly bitter about the media's alleged servility to the right and animosity to the left. The media, viewed in more or less cabalomonolithic terms, not only favored the counterrevolutionary views but also disseminated disinformation regarding the Jacobin side. As fellow party member and historian Antoine Casanova put it, "it's the promotion of forgetfulness and silence, censorship, deliberate neglect." Jaures? Lefebvre? Soboul? Labrousse? They were "unknown in the hit parade of historians singled out by the media." An "ambient ostracism" marginalized the youngerunder sixty!-school of Marxists. Highly placed in the party hierarchy, Casanova complained that as president of the Commission nationale de la recherche historique pour le Bicentenaire, Vovelle "deserved much more attention from the media." If this indignation was understandable, it could not conceal the extent to which Vovelle was at least in part responsible for his own marginalization. To be sure, ideological considerations shaped the way in which the media covered the bicentennial landscape. But supply and demand factors played as well. Vovelle offered the media relatively little: no grand project for the commemoration, either collective (as an expression of the labor of the commission) or personal (his own production). Much of Vovelle's bicentennial was bureaucratic: management was both a requirement imposed by the nature of his official task and a particular strategy he self-consciously chose in order to discharge that task more or less serenely. It was not the stuff of headlines. Given his passionate and tireless commitment, Vovelle's frustration must have turned to anger when he found himself savagely and unfairly attacked on the left for failing to defend his cause adequately. While Furet was the "winner before the start," given his heavy institutional and media firepower, charged Trotskyite philosopher Daniel Bensald, Vovelle was "confined before

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the start to the role of foil, of meek and accommodating sparring partner, guarantor of ideological pluralism.... he refuses the battle in the name of academic serenity." Without citing Vovelle by name, historian Fran~ois Dosse pronounced the same ferocious verdict: "the Jacobins have withdrawn to their university bunker. We do not hear them: silence or aphasia. They leave the terrain free for the triumph of the liberal discourse.... Furet wins today without having to wage a battle, ... by default."6 Beyond his party fealty, Vovelle suffered from another serious handicap. He did not "pass well" on the television, which further diminished his chances of being invited. It was not his lack of a tediously svelte silhouette, which he could easily have turned to his advantage. It was rather his mien and manner. A bit preoccupied and overly solemn, he wore too heavily the Herculean burden he shouldered. He had the look of a swaddled and harried nomenklatura rather than a warm and feisty veteran of the classroom. He rarely had an opportunity to communicate his considerable fund of wit and verve.7

Organizing the Climactic Congress The academic forum rather than the media stage was Vovelle's home ground. As initiator, advocate, and participant, he had a role in literally scores of colloquia connected with the bicentennial. s This was his sector; treasury willing, he could make things happen. Sometimes, in despair rather than hubris, he had the impression that it was the only sector of the bicentennial scene where something was happening. "The grand organizational structure," he wrote in a worried (yet obdurately sanguine) editorial in the Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise at the beginning of 1988, "coordinating initiatives in the most varied spheres-pedagogy, research, culture, and the media-that we have been awaiting impatiently is taking a long time in coming on line." He suspected that the hesitation reflected "the malaise of the national community over the way to deal with this major moment of our collective memory." He saw little evidence of the "republican consensus" on which his friend Maurice Agulhon urged the public powers to build. While the latter tergiversated, the forces of darkness swarmed to occupy the vacuum. "The French Revolution, or the impossible serenity?" Vovelle wondered

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aloud. "Perhaps this remark should not lead to a pessimistic appreciation of things." When practiced at the highest level, Vovelle suggested, debate and/ or polemic were not "necessarily sterile or ossifying." He promised that to the extent that it depended on him, Revolutionary historiography would be on the move for the bicentennial. He closed his editorial with a certain optimism framed as always with a gyroscopic sense of balance, a (bi)polar strategy of exchange that may have exacted a higher price than Vovelle realized: "Let us hope for a deepening, without any boundaries, of all the faces of the Revolution, the violence, to be sure, but also the anticipations and the hope."9 His paramount achievement, for which he toiled passionately, was an international congress that was to take place at the Sorbonne during the week preceding Bastille Day. As he described it at different moments, the congress was to be several things at once. Under the aegis of a commission scientifique, of course it had to be a scholarly undertaking. Yet in deference to larger ambitions, or perhaps in reaction to strictures from Furet questioning its scientific seriousness, Vovelle somewhat perplexingly pledged to avoid "making it an academic meeting, in order for it to be, rather, the crowning of a multifaceted activity." Whatever this meant, it is clear that Vovelle, along with numerous fellow historians and members of the Mission, believed that France had absolutely to invite the hundreds of historians around the world who consecrated their lives, professionally and often emotionally, to the study of France, and in particular to its Revolutionary itinerary. It was a moral obligation and a cultural imperative even before it constituted an intellectual opportunity. Such an undertaking was bound to be extremely complicated and costly, for it involved assembling historians of drastically different backgrounds and practices, recruited from dozens of nations in all the corners of the globe. To make such a congress tenable, it was necessary to articulate a theme that promised some coherence but that was sufficiently supple to meet radically diverse interests and fields of expertise. On Labrousse's suggestion-Vovelle sought both to enhance and exploit his master's prestige: Labrousse as "the man of the grand congresses, Paris in 1950, Rome in 1955"-the commission fixed on "The Image of the French Revolution." On one level, the unavowed objective was to provide an open ticket to as many actors as possible. "Image" was a traditional and accessible notion, laden with none of the sophisticated epistemological traps, say, of "representation." At the same time it did not foreclose conceptualization of the most complex character. What seemed

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surprising about it on the surface, given Labrousse's patronage and the ongoing polemic with the revisionists, was its ostensible estrangement from the social or, as an astute reporter for Le Monde put it, "from the reality of the Revolution." The cultural spin, however, was clearly consonant with Vovelle's own interests and with his desire to place his personal mark on the gathering, in addition to being a guarantee to the funding authorities of the authentically pluralist nature of the congress. "The field of cultural history, in the broadest sense," Vovelle told L'Humaniti, "is probably today the one that impassions the largest number [of researchers]." Certain foreign scholars even read the cultural accent as an olive branch extended in Furet's direction. The head of the bicentennial commission wanted to privilege themes with which he had been associated-mentalities, the imaginary, the play of memory, the testimony of art, the discourse of religion-as well as the newer trends that he found alluring, including the return of the political and the production and transmission of cultural practices of all sorts. Even if the theme degenerated on the margins into a catchall, through a system of rapporteurs-talented synthesizers handpicked by Vovelle-the organizer felt confident that the Babel of voices would become a veritable choir. Vovelle made a plausible argument in favor of the theme. Construed metaphoricallly, the notion of image would elicit "a sort of appraisal-in-progress, a retrospective picture of the different ways of looking at this universal shock." "Image" would emphasize the Revolution as a "founding event" and "model" throughout the world. The congress would rivet the point that "the French Revolution is today no longer a Franco-French phenomenon." Even as it directed attention to the Revolution as an "idee-force" that shaped the political, social, and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would also invite researchers to reassess the Revolution itself from multiple points of view in the quest to fathom its protean nature, its contradictions, and its astonishingly durable and robust influence. Nor would the "negative" image of the Revolution be muffled, vowed Vovelle. "The entire current of counterrevolutionary thought" was of interest, even if the French counterrevolutionaries seemed little inclined to enter into dialogue with the Jacobinorepublicans. ("I take note that we have received no proposal for a paper from this group," Vovelle told Le Monde.) There is no reason to doubt that he earnestly hoped to confront the widest possible range of arguments. "We do not want an approving liturgy," he

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reiterated. Yet at the same time he would not tolerate a "congress-in-chaos." He wanted a lively debate, but within boundaries that he established. His critics interpreted the tension in his own description as a sign of a latent manipulative disposition. "Thus we have no intention of dodging debate," assured Vovelle, "even if we do not wish to give to this endeavor a polemical dimension." A free-for-all without polemics? Was this old-style Jacobin nostalgia for une volonti une, or simply a prudent impresario's desire not to lose control of his show? The holder of the chair in French Revolutionary history encountered serious difficulties in raising the millions of francs he needed to finance his extravaganza. Certainly the idea of organizing a prestigious international gathering was on Chevenement's mind when he first created the commission. But he provided no long-term funding. The commission disposed of a sum on the order of two hundred thousand francs a year to subsidize scores of small-scale colloquia; among others, it helped finance the tripartite series codirected by Furet at Chicago, Oxford, and Paris. By the time the grandiose world-congress idea had fully germinated, Vovelle's protector was no longer in power. Like the other official commemorators, he had to slog through the quagmire of cohabitation. His dense travel campaign prepared the way for a planning meeting of some thirty scholars in November 1987. Claire Andrieu, the Mission's historical coordinator, remembers having felt a certain shame at receiving some of the world's scholarly leaders in a dilapidated basement room in the Sorbonne, "an emblem of the premium that we place on research." The Chinese delegate ingenuously summoned the French government to articulate its bicentennial needs so that the national congress coordinators could work toward those ends. Andrieu intervened to dissipate categorically any dirigiste reverie: it was not the business or the intention of the government to give instructions to scholars on what they should say. Vovelle reinforced her rejection of a militant's colloquium of one tendency or another. The official target was "a high scholarly level." Yet Vovelle, backed by Andrieu, firmly held out for accepting virtually every proposal for a paper that reached the organizing committee, regardless of the unavoidable and perhaps even egregious disparities in quality that would result. In this particular instance, they argued, the "national function" had to have precedence over the scientific standard. Eschewing any appetite to control the agenda, the state did not conceal its interest in monitoring the guest list. France the nation issued a call for a rassemblement in which mem-

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bers of the scholarly community would not be ignominiously divided into active and passive citizens. ("We'll receive the visit of the inevitable Ghanian," scoffed an influential rightist historian, counselor to the tutelary ministry of the commission.) Governed by the temporary fiction-grounded in "social utility"?-that all historians of the Revolution "are born and remain free and equal in rights," the delegates to the preparatory meeting, divided into subcommissions, attended to the arduous task of breaking down the "image" theme into viable categories and matching sessions. Perhaps even more critical for the success of the congress was the meeting held with Jacques Lautman, a sociologist who had replaced Maurice Godelier as head of the Departement des sciences de l'homme et de Ia societe of the CNRS. Among the others present were Jean-Pierre Bardet, an accomplished demographic historian with close ties to Pierre Chaunu and little enthusiasm for the French Revolution, who served as a counselor to the minister of national education and research, and Claire Andrieu and Jean-Pierre Cabouat representing the Mission, which became increasingly identified as the major institutional patron of the congress. Edgar Faure had tentatively pledged a million francs toward the undertaking. Cabouat forthrightly pressed the CNRS to make a generous commitment. With a haughtiness that Andrieu described as "odious," Lautman offered a meager two hundred thousand francs, a sum he judged fitting, for it matched the CNRS's allotment several years earlier to the centenary of the Pasteur Institute, about whose contributions to French civilization no one quarreled. Lautman courted absolutely no risk of vexing his minister, Jacques Valade, who had openly expressed reservations about a costly and boisterous bicentennial conflating research and ritual. Vovelle emerged shaken, and Andrieu and Cabouat worried about the impact this decision would have on Faure. If Faure never wholly abandoned anyone, he changed his mind frequently in terms of the degree of solicitude (or largesse) he felt obliged to deploy. It was about this time that he faced the rightist "Fronde" in his own advisory committee, aimed in part against the Vovelle "circus," as one protesting member styled it. Another characterized it flatly as a "Communist colloquium," a sort of coronation of Vovelle based on his overlapping ideological and clientelist networks. Outside the circle of historians, another member of the committee, Dominique Besse, lobbied hard against Vovelle. A specialist in social economy possessed of an agile mind, she had accompanied Faure on his trip to Japan and had easy access to his ear. Fran~ois Furet did his best to

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sabotage the enterprise. He denounced the very principle of a leviathan congress without rigorous criteria of recruitment and a compelling focus. On the grounds that such a gathering could not reasonably be expected to advance scientific knowledge, he felt it would be foolish and irresponsible to invest massively in it, or even to accord it symbolic approbation. The public relations argument-the glory of France-he dismissed as vacuous and self-serving. Consulted by Edgar Faure, Furet characterized the congress as "woolly," "without a subject," and prodigal. An anecdote circulated, "trop belle," as the French say, to be entirely false. On Vovelle's behalf, Maurice Agulhon is said to have ventured to dampen Furet's ardor in opposing the project. They are all Communists, complained Furet. But no, rejoined Agulhon, look at the names, that's not so. "You're overlooking the former ones" ["Tu oublies les anciens"], Furet, himself an alumnus, allegedly retorted. Another influential scholar sympathetic with Vovelle's cause, though not part of his orbit, held him responsible for isolating himself and projecting precisely the image that he labored to overcome. Though Vovelle himself, before his election to Soboul's chair, had argued the need for new structures for organizing the bicentennial, once installed in the capital he fell back on the old-line apparatus of the Institut at the Sorbonne and its secular arm, the Societe des etudes robespierristes. Confining himself to the true believers, he had insufficient contact with the rest of the French scholarly universe, most of which was neither Communist nor irretrievably revisionist. According to this view, until Vovelle finally obtained the agreement of scholars such as Dominique Julia, Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel, and Daniel Roche to collaborate with him, his congress was genuinely in peril, at least for its credibility. Convinced of Vovelle's pluralist sincerity and of the need to convoke the historians of the world for a bicentennial reunion, Claire Andrieu pressed the case directly with Faure. She urged him to stand up unequivocally for the congress, first by convincing Bardet, who represented the "research" section of the Ministry of National Education, to lend his support, and then by inducing Furet to change his mind and accept Vovelle's invitation to participate in the congress. Furet's assent would help to attenuate the anxiety of the historians of the right that the influence of historians of the left and far left was "excessive" and to "reequilibrate the colloquium." Andrieu assured Faure that in any event the congress would not be "monolithic," but she was a realist who understood the significance of image, especially in a conference

184 Farewell, Revolution devoted to images: "It is notorious in France and abroad that the historiographical debate on the French Revolution has for protagonists M. Vovelle et F. Furet." Sensitive to the persistently negative counsel of Furet and "shaken" by the intense antagonism ofthe right-provoked in part, Andrieu conceded, by the "rashness" of certain members of the Mission who failed to calculate the political impact of their acts, which appeared to favor the Jacobin clanFaure began to show ominous signs of hesitation. Aside from his sense of justice andjustesse, Andrieu banked on his political instincts. He knew better than anyone that cashiering Vovelle would constitute "an unhoped-for gift" to the PCF. Faure scheduled a meeting with Vovelle, cancelled the appointment, and then agreed to receive him at his home on a cold evening not long before he fell ill. Bolstered by Andrieu, a nervous Vovelle-"he played double or nothing" -had barely a quarter of an hour to make his pitch. Andrieu had prepared him carefully on the right inflection to impart to his design. He stressed the multiplicity of perspectives which would be represented, the "international influence" which would accrue to the nation, and the "national duty" of responding to worldwide demand. Faure recounted frankly the pressures he was under, but acknowleged the force ofVovelle's arguments. In addition, he found him "pleasant," not the least significant of criteria when dealing with this politician. So Faure seemed to agree to finance the congress, though, in the absence of any written engagement, one could not be sure until disbursement. For Vovelle, this was a psychological turning point. During Faure's protracted absence and after his death, Cabouat reaffirmed the Mission's commitment. Mitterrand's reelection and the return of a Socialist government resolved the issue. In addition to allocations from the Mission and the CNRS, Vovelle received substantial support from the Quai d'Orsay and the Ministry of National Education, a supplement from the Ministry of Research, and a large subsidy from Robert Maxwell, the left-leaning English press baron, a passionate Francophile, investor in Faure's Arch Foundation project, and the head of Pergamon, the semiofficial bicentennial publishing house. Aware that he would be under a relentless and perhaps occasionally malicious surveillance, Vovelle placed the funding in the hands of a nonprofit association (according to the protocols of the famous law of 1901) presided by a distinguished former member of the Cour des comptes, as cogent a guarantee as he could provide. 10

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Vovelle's Triumphant Moment and Furet's Absent Presence Vovelle remained bitter about Furet's adamantine hostility. "This colloquium was geared to be hospitable to all the 'readings' of historians of different persuasion," he told one interviewer. "Certain currents, certain colleagues"-he referred to Chaunu as well as Furet in this instance-"are absent." Because of their prominent public roles in the French scholarly arena, Vovelle felt that they had a moral obligation of sorts to participate. "Nevertheless the scholarly weight of the colloquium will not be diminished," he concluded. Interviewed by Le Monde just as the congress opened, Vovelle caustically contrasted his democratic and pluralistic stance with Furet's elitist and sectarian instincts. Furet's principle, three times rehearsed in the years just preceding the bicentennial, was the "closed colloquium bringing together a score of historians of an identical viewpoint." (This accusation was demonstrably false, but the conflict between Vovelle and Furet never really turned on matters of ascertainable truth.) While Vovelle said that he regretted Furet's boycott, he added: "I do not believe that it will damage the scholarly quality of the meeting; I think that it will do more harm to Fran~ois Furet himself." Vovelle's ire stemmed less from Furet's nonparticipation than from the efforts he made to scuttle the whole affair. Overbearing and intolerant of either criticism or competition, Furet, in the view of his Communist rival, had not yet fully dealt with his Stalinism.l 1 In response to Vovelle's strictures, Furet blasted the congress publicly in a letter to Le Monde published just as the meeting was coming to an end. The colloquia he coorganized with Keith Baker, then of Chicago, and Colin Lucas, then of Oxford, he rightly noted, "were not limited-far from it-to those who shared more or less my kind of interpretation." As for his truancy from the Sorbonne, he explained himself in brutally frank terms: "I have little taste for these Gargantuan meetings, destined to discuss nothing probingly precisely because they treat everything. And this [bicentennial] colloquium seems to me less than any other to escape this sort of rule." Long after the event, in retrospect, Furet acknowledged tliat "people found me a bit haughty." 12 Maurice Agulhon understood Furet's position but deplored it nevertheless. Perhaps he was right that the congress would be less a colloquium than a

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· jamboree, colorful and sociable but intellectually chaotic and mediocre. Still, given the significance of the French Revolution in the world and the stakes involved for France as well as for the republic ofletters, it was "unthinkable" in Agulhon's estimation not to convoke a "somewhat commemorative and somewhat scholarly" international congress. Jean-Noel Jeanneney referred mordantly to Furet's absence and his manner of justifying it in his closing speech to the congress (for reasons of delicacy, one supposes, he had these references expunged from the published version, a rather surprising effort to shape history on the part of the historian). "I observed that a leading historian chose to remain on the sidelines to the keen and arnica! regret of all those who have a great respect for his work and for the new vistas that this work opened," he said. But he was was "a bit surprised" -in fact, scandalized-by Furet's manner of explaining himself with a broadside blast in Le Monde. Having himself tasted the atmosphere and read the work of the congress, Jeanneney regretted that Furet "did not practice more fully in this instance the experimental method and show up in order to confront the anxiety that sparked his a priori condemnation with the concrete reality that you have lived throughout this week." He forewent the malice of adding the widely held suspicion that concrete reality did not often command galactic priority. 13 Despite Furet's absence, President Mitterrand inaugurated the congress on 6 July at the Sorbonne. The man whose strategy had favored the marginalization of the PCF in part by thrusting its narrow sectarianism into stark relief, praised Vovelle, the stalwart, albeit discreet, Communist, as the faithful guardian of the "common patrimony of humanity." Hailing the historian for his heroic missionary work throughout the world, the president also congratulated him for his pluralist ethic in terms that had a curiously exclusivist, quasi-confessional edge. "I know that there will be expressed here, and this is a very good thing, viewpoints of different historical schools, schools opposed on much save on one point" -but what a critical point!-"you have said that we are celebrants, yes, there are here only celebrants of the event that brings us together." Mitterrand proscribed any "official truths," but "the collison of problematics" apparently excluded anti- as well as counterrevolutionaries. In a barely veiled allusion to Franyois Furet, whom he knew personally and admired, the president made the case, by invoking the passion ofTiananmen, "that the Revolution is still very much alive in hearts and minds."14 In his opening address, Vovelle found it impossible to exorcise the absent

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presence of Furet. The latter's shadow framed much of what Vovelle had to say. The Revolution was "a live, animated object," he declared triumphantly, drawing the proof from the very vivacity of the debates that Furet's affirmations about its demise had detonated. Even more problematically, Vovelle found evidence for the living R/revolution in the events that convulsed Eastern Europe and the USSR, the very events that fortified Furet's conviction that the revolutionary idea no longer commanded any significant constituency, moral, political, or popular. Vovelle elided the issue by resorting to an uncharacteristically consensual and flaccid notion of the revolutionary adventure as "the demand for democracy." Antirevolutionary for Furet, the quest for democracy stood as prooffor Vovelle that R/revolution prospered. In more guarded terms, the Sorbonne professor made the same point in his closing remarks, in which he again affirmed his belief that the desire to "change the world," which first erupted in '89/'93, still burned in people's hearts and minds. The Jacobino-Marxist voice sounded perhaps its sharpest note in Vovelle's juxtaposition of an "equality still so modestly affirmed in '89" to the swelling demand for "real rights" in '93, the vertiginous moment of the "anticipations." On this issue Vovelle remained faithful to a distinction between allegedly abstract versus concrete rights that the PCF itself was increasingly loath to espouse in the conjuncture of the late 1980s. All genre of debate was in some way fecund, Vovelle allowed, provided that it respected a certain republican discipline-that is, it did not spill over into the anathematization "of a Revolution identified with Absolute Evil, with the triumph of violence and terror." His evocation of the Aulard-Mathiez confrontation sounded a somewhat strange note. If it was meant to point out, in some Leibnizian fashion, that everything turns out for the best or that acrimonious exchange did not prevent the efflorescence of a Revolutionary historiography which "radiated with its brightest eclat," then perhaps there was some contemporary pertinence. But Vovelle was perforce destined to be Robespierre-Mathiez, despite his real affection for Aulard. Furet resembled Mathiez more than Aulard in temperament, but he was clearly on the side of Danton (especially to the extent that Danton resembled Mirabeau), and he would likely feel comfortable about Depardieu playing his life on the silver screen. If Vovelle felt the need to defend and justify the congress, it was again in response to Furet's strictures. He boasted with reasonable pride that the pluralist contract had been fulfilled: "any sort of liturgy" was avoided. Nor

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was the congress marred by the sort of elitism that Furet practiced. It was open to all-not just to the North-North trajectory of the galaxy but to the South, the East, and the Far East as well. Vovelle's only debatable claim was that the overwhelming gigantism of the gathering did not compromise its scientific quality. Certainly Furet was right about the unevenness of the contributions. The papers ranged from fresh and provocative to stale and sterile. But by a skillful use of talented rapporteurs, Vovelle succeeded in imposing a certain coherence and extracting ideas of heuristic value. The quality of the discussions varied considerably from sector to sector. It was widely understood among the participants that the colloquium was a sociocultural and commemorative event, justifiable in its own terms, as well as a scholarly forum. There was much less anxiety among the foreigners than among the French about the verdict on scientific achievement. Certainly the participants not privy to the quarrels of the microcosm had the impression that the encounter was professionally useful as well as enjoyable, and that Vovelle was capable of masterful organization, despite small embarrassments and comic lapses here and there. Pluralistic, democratic, rigorous: Vovelle the impresario and Vovelle the historian identified with Aulard's dual commitment to objectivity and to a certain passion that the subject inexorably elicited. "We hardly expect to succeed," wrote the first occupant of the chair in the History of the Revolution, "in concealing completely our preference for the people from which we come, and for the science that we serve." In the end Vovelle subscribed to a relativism that the congress program itself reflected: "The discourse of historians in truth only reflects the multiple meanings that the march of history has invested in the Revolutionary heritage."l5 In his closing remarks Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the president of the Bicentennial Mission, seemed to undercut Mitterrand by propounding the need "to distinguish very carefully between the task of celebrator and that of historian." But if it gratified Furet on this delicate issue of compatibility, the better part of Jeanneney's speech was an encomium to Vovelle for his courage and energy in overcoming obstacles and his wholly ecumenical spirit. Rather than the solid Red colloquium that certain parties feared, Vovelle's congress was more like Goude's parade: planetary and variegated, mixing "the intelligence of the past" with a certain "emotion." In its universality, it was faithful to the Revolutionaries themselves, who aspired to legislate for all humanity. Jeanneney welcomed the modest but auspicious opening to the South and the

189 Living Revolution, Historiographical Joumees

considerable presence of "the Communist world at the moment when it is shaken by so many unprecedented and violent movements." He hailed the opening to all opinions and disciplines as well as to all cultures, a pluralism virtually guaranteed by the theme itself. As a political historian, Jeanneney appreciated the political turn that research had taken. But he worried about the "inverse excesses" promoted by an overheated revisionism that disdained the social. Solidary with Mitterrand and Vovelle, in a final allusion to Furet, Jeanneney exclaimed with conviction, that "No! The Revolution is not a dead object!" 16 Vovelle's friends and Furet's enemies rushed to pronounce the congress a resounding victory, in anticipation, on a much smaller scale-science ceding readily to fete-of the rush to declare Goude's parade an unequivocal triumph. Claude Mazauric, a professional colleague and party comrade of Vovelle's, saw it as a "severe defeat" administered to Furet. "We won our bet," Vovelle exulted in L'Humaniti "The success of the congress goes beyond all our hopes." (One wonders if uninitiated readers, even mildly paranoid militants, fathomed why it was such an achievement to lure several hundred scholars to spend a glorious early summer week in Paris.) "The richness of the central theme" and "the quality of the papers," affirmed the organizer, "enabled scholarship to take a big step~forward." 1 7 Writing the following week in Le Monde, for whom he regularly chronicled historical debate, Roger Chartier made it clear that this positive evaluation was not merely in-house boosterism. The congress was "a handsome success" first in terms of"the presences" (rather than the absences). By this he meant hundreds of scholars representing forty-three countries of capitalist, Socialist, and Third World character, hundreds of observers participating in the sessions, and almost three hundred papers published in advance through the prowess of Maxwell's Pergamon Press. But the congress was a triumph "even more by its intellectual contribution." Fresh approaches to the study of the French Revolution outside France enthused the commentator, who himself served as rapporteur for one of the liveliest sessions, devoted to public opinion and propaganda. Historians examined the transfer of concepts and symbols, the vehicles of the circulation of ideas, the geography and chronology of their diffusion and renewal, and the political/ideological refraction that shaped changing interpretations of the French Revolution-as-referent. Chartier was pleased to note that a large number of participants endorsed through their work a thesis that he had vigorously propounded in several

190 Farewell, Revolution

different contexts, including the case of the French Revolution: "that symbolic struggles, consisting of confrontations between the images which groups or powers give of themselves and those which are imposed on them against their will, are as decisive as struggles of an immediately economic and social character." This argument-cum-leitmotif provided the strongest proof that Vovelle had not concocted a surreptitious strategy to ratify the old social interpretation. "The congress," Chartier stressed, "was above all attentive to the specific tools, to the individual strategies, and to the particular vocabularies of these struggles of/ over representation." Alongside the study of the symbolic extirpation of the monarchy and the privileged orders and the elaboration of a rationale for the specific sorts of violent purification, the scholars at the congress accorded a major place to the scrutiny of political practices, juxtaposing the invention of radical new principles and institutions with the stubborn customs and comportments of the past. Finally, Chartier was struck by the probing light focused by the participants on the evolution of historiography in their homelands, which revealed, for instance, the depth of the Soviet break with "its wooden concepts."l8 From the beginning Michel Vovelle disliked the intense personalization of the bicentennial debate in terms of a duel between himself and Fran~ois Furet. The media distorted the grounds of their rivalry and, with few exceptions, favored Furet. He benefited enormously from "the huge publicity campaigns that marked the appearance of his two books." The ineptitude of Vovelle's "strategy" stupefied Furet: for him it was "unthinkable" that his fellow historian did not prepare "a major book" for '89 which might have projected him into the limelight. In fact, Vovelle produced a number of important books for the bicentennial-in addition to his Herculean organizing and evangelizing activities-including a multivolume presentation of iconography that deserved more press than it received. Vovelle remained convinced that whatever he did, he would not have obtained Furet's most-favored-historian status. In any event, just as he had felt that they were from two different social worlds when they had had occasion to work on common projects under Labrousse's aegis-Daniel Roche remembers the malaise that he shared with Vovelle when visiting Furet in his superb family apartment thirty years earlier-so Vovelle believed that they were destined to operate in two completely different circuits. While Furet the banker's son paraded before the Media Moloch, Vovelle the son of schoolteachers, "thanks to numerous series of lectures, directly touched a

191 Living Revolution, Historiographical Joumees

world closer to the heart of France [Ia France profonde ], in the sense of a Republique profonde des professeurs, connected by a network of very active cultural sociability." (Furet rejoined that he, too, scoured the hexagon, as part of his book promotions, lecturing to large and enthusiastic audiences delighted to hear a truly laic version of the Revolution.) Perhaps because Vovelle knew that he was in a no-win situation, he bitterly-and pathetically-refused "to be the 'Dukakis' of Fran~ois Furet." 19 Fran~ois Furet manifestly enjoyed reigning as "king of the bicentennial," and his triumphalism, driven by the media, raised Vovelle's hackles. A fullpage article in El Pais in which Furet crowed "I won!" fairly ruined Vovelle's trip to Barcelona. "Who won, who lost?" asked the Sorbonne professor in retrospect. "I don't think that the conflict should be assessed in these terms." How was one to deal with "this fabrication of a personalized object, the prop of a pseudoverity affirmed as irresistible because it was located on the plane of facts"? It was easy to scoff at this media commodity when addressing the faithful. The readers of Revolution, for example, knew that Furet's allegedly moribund adversaries "represent a force, in terms of collective aspirations, by their very existence." But this langue de bois had no purchase in the mainstream media, and Vovelle, despite all the accumulated revolutionary tools, could not effectively make the antiroyalist case that might have disabled if not guillotined the king of the bicentennial. The educated public did not understand Vovelle's critique of Furet as "embarked on a quest for his ancestors." They did not respond to the reproach that the revisionist discovered and said nothing new. Vovelle's efforts to deflate and relativize "conceptual history" had no more impact on the media coverage of the bicentennial than, say, Furet's intermittent assault on university-style erudition. However tendentious Furet's interpretation may have been, a very large segment of the public addressed by the media found it ideologically congenial and politically reassuring. For Vovelle, Furet's capacity to overwhelm the adversary painfully mimicked the institutional rivalry between the arriviste, well endowed, and dynamic EHESS and the venerable but obsolescent, lethargic and impecunious Sorbonne. When the lnstitut lacked a librarian and the means to buy the books and periodicals it required, and Soboulluxuriated in an annual budget of four thousand francs, was it any wonder that the Furetian juggernaut was able to marginalize the classicists? Vovelle seemed to ask. For his part, Furet felt comfortable in his bicentennial role, though he was

192 Farewell, Revolution

himself surprised by the magnitude of his public success. Vovelle had apparently made certain mollifying gestures when he first arrived at the Sorbonne, such as inviting Furet to contribute to the Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, and in his role as president of the national historical commission, when he unhesitatingly supported Furet's requests for funding, despite the latter's extremely tepid performance as a member of the executive committee. But there were residual tensions from their Labroussean days and from the very much incandescent issue of Vovelle's continued Marxo-Communist engagement. Furet candidly enjoyed his coronation and the "victory" the press accorded him over Vovelle, and everything that Vovelle ostensibly represented. If he triumphed, he believed, it was because he had a better case that he pleaded more cogently. "That's what Vovelle cannot forgive me for-for having been right," substantively and strategically. Vovelle consoled himself and his faithful with the standard cry of defiant determination: like the Revolution, the bicentennial was not over; 1989 was only the beginning of the struggle. "We have set up a dynamic of celebration and research," he told L'Humanite. "It goes without saying that we must not botch in 1992 the rendezvous with the republic, and in 1993-94 the anniversary of the social democracy of Year II." By the time of the latter occasion, so dear to the Labrousseans, Vovelle would no longer be officiating from the Sorbonne's illustrious chair. In the spring of 1991 he informed his students that he would be retiring sometime in 1993, at about the same time that Furet was expected to retire from the EHESS. Neither boasted an heir or heiress apparent of compelling stature; and, unlike his rival, Vovelle did not take pains to safeguard the institutional succession. zo

Farewell

H

eavily politicized, the historians' quarrel had an immediate impact on the national stage in the bicentennial theatre and a more diffuse impact in the professional historical and intellectual circles where its effects have not yet fully registered. Relatively long in gestation, French Revolutionary revisionism was not by any means a bicentennial surprise. Until the bicentennial eighties, however, it remained a relatively esoteric matter. With the coming of the commemoration, it received an extraordinarily wide press. At its best, revisionism amounted to a refreshing and liberating cold shower. It stripped the Revolution of its canonic-iconic immunities. It reproblematized issues that had congealed into articles of dogma. It rescued the study of the Revolution from stultifying pieties and sterilizing modes of analysis. Even as the revisionists deployed their critical artillery against the old vulgate, however, they forged a new one. In its own way, it was hardly less rigid, catechistic, and (doubly) partial than the old. Tht: revisionists claimed to inaugurate the age of scientific historiography of the Revolution. What they offered · France above all was a view of the Revolution that resonated with the national mood and with the evolution of political and intellectual currents on the international plane. The good news was the principles of democracy and the rights of man. The bad news was the seed for despotism borne by these very principles as they were formulated in '89. There was some slurring of the causal and relational links, but this line gave a real legitimacy to a position that had heretofore been defended only by 193

194 Farewell

counterrevolutionaries: that there was a significant dose of '93 (and thus 1917) in '89. Beyond the fact that celebration was an unthinking stance, it was now substantively unthinkable to celebrate the Revolution save in a very limited and guarded fashion. Indeed, the momentum was clearly in the other direction: unmasking the perils and ignominies of the Revolution, its defects and failures, and the cover-ups in which its Jacobin admirers later engaged to conceal the truth or promote their own version of it. The Revolution that dominated the bicentennial featured not the Peopleas-Actor engaged self-consciously if not autonomously in a struggle to avenge injustice, but the People-as-Discourse, filling a rhetorical power vacuum with its claims of kingly sovereignty in the language arena where politics took place. According to this script, that theory of popular sovereignty precluded a healthy and modern practice of democratic politics because it precluded pluralistic give-and-take predicated on the free play of interests. Political voluntarism fueled the Revolution, a transposed absolutism that pretended, like the older version, to resolve all the questions that confronted the new order without tolerating sustained dissidence. The Revolution's fatal instinct, inscribed in its very nature, was to use the state to recast society through a process of regeneration. This ideological program led more or less ineluctably to the Terror, which had very little to do with the circumstances tropismatically adduced by the Jacobin apologists. Less interested in the history of the Revolution than the Revolution's (subsequent) history, the revisionists stressed the ways in which it poisoned French political life through the nineteenth century and then contaminated by inspiration and affinity the revolutionary currents of the twentieth century. The grave intellectual weaknesses of the revisionist analysis must not obscure the amplitude and significance of its bicentennial triumph. Unlike the counterrevolutionaries, who had in various ways anticipated parts of their argument, the revisionists carried the day thanks to the unction of scientific authority and the pedigree of political enlightenment. They legitimized and normalized antirevolutionary positions that heretofore had projected a sectarian or confessional cast. They seriously complicated the task of the commemorators. They made it much more difficult to celebrate the Revolution than it had been in 1889 or even 1939. In the end, the rout of the Jacobino-Marxists owed much more to internal weaknesses and the broader political and cultural conjuncture than to the revisionist onslaught. But that attack was brilliantly engineered and pitilessly

195 Farewell

executed. Aided by other Jacobins and republicans, the Marxists defended a refurbished "classical" interpretation with eloquence and some suppleness. But in what passed for the public sphere-the national bicentennial stagetheir demarche had little effect. Not inured to being beaten on what used to be their exclusive playing field, the Jacobins erupted in anger, indignation, and frustration, all of which testified to the magnitude of their disarray and perhaps also to a sense of shame for having failed in their custodial mission at one of the most important moments in its history. They were understandably loath to admit that the Revolution, even if it were not over, would never again be the same. "Never again" is perhaps melodramatic and overdrawn. Yet, beyond the ideological stakes, the terms of the historiographical debate have been fundamentally altered. Revisionism is only partially responsible. In addition to the stagnation of Marxist thinking in general and the astigmatism of the Soboulean brand of social history in particular, the more prestigious social history identified with the (Braudelian age of the) Annates school was already in trouble. Cultural historians refused to sit in the back of the bus in the space reserved for the "third level," hierarchically inferior to and ontologically dependent on the economic and social levels. The disgrace of political history (a sort of fourth level) and the disdain for the event appeared increasingly implausible to historians of all sorts (not the least of whom were Marxists). The institutionalized periodization that bracketed the Revolution as an epoch unto itself no longer made sense. The field was ripe for insurgency if not revolution. Certain strains of revisionism were widely applauded, even by many historians of Jacobin inclination. In particular, the rehabilitation of the political, the quasi primacy accorded to cultural factors, and the concept of political culture (construed as a complement rather than as an absolute alternative to class struggle as a categorical imperative) found favor. 1 It would have been hard to fashion an abyss between rival schools from these materials alone. Indeed, the post-Soboulean leadership was resolutely "culturalist" within the framework of a more or less credible pluralism, and even in the bad old Soboulean days Marxists had been among the pioneers in taking the "linguistic turn." Revisionism claimed its singularity from its particular stamp of political and cultural analysis, from its deep-set anxiety to obliterate the ex-vulgate in all its avatars, and from its steadfast refusal to acknowledge the extent to

196

Farewell which ideology infested and drove its project. The least convincing, and least durable, revisionist doctrine is its anathematization of the social, and its hermetic separation of the social from the political. A caricatural and debased notion of the social became the proxy coinage for old-style historical materialism in a scheme even more reductionist than the reductionism it condemned. Nor did one have to be a Marxian to qualify for revisionist malediction: it sufficed to. place emphasis on economic factors or to venture a sociological analysis of any kind. (Could Margaret Thatcher's "Class is a Communist concept" have served as a revisionist shibboleth? 2 ) The revisionists assailed social historians, amalgamated in this fashion, with the same vehemence that they attacked the revolutionaries of Year II. (By a sort of transference, the revisionists symbolically sought to extirpate the extirpators-the revolutionaries and their scholarly queue.) Privileging a discourse analysis whose originality they overestimated, the revisionists estranged the discourse entirely from its social conditions of production and exchange, concept oblige. The analysis of the dire obviated the study of the foire; practice, like circumstances, represented a lesser-order object, fitting for pedestian erudition but unworthy of lofty hermeneutics. Reproducing the very flaw for which they reproached the JacobinoMarxists, the revisionists repeatedly took the revolutionaries at their word and followed their interpretive lead. Their insistence on the primacy of · politics is one example of this habit. It was less, however, the claim for the primacy of politics than for its autonomy on which revisionism foundered. The illusion of the political fed on the illusion of philosophical idealism that served as both a methodology and a profession of faith. The idealizing approach in turn engendered, and acquired strength from, the fetishization of a metahistorical point of view, the apotheosis of a carefully selected panoply of nineteenth-century thinker-historians, and the commingling and utter conflation of history with historiography. Finally, the revisionists' dependence on autarchical internal "logics" powered by toxic (or heroic) ideas, their own Leninist fixation, and their besetting interest in forging a usable history that could account for and justify their normative program for modern democracy burdened them with the same sort of teleological tic that had afflicted, and tainted, their adversaries.

Notes

Chapter 1 The French Historikerstreit 1. Let it be clear that the comparison adumbrated here involves two communities of historians grappling with their respective pasts (and presents). It neither suggests not warrants any sort of rapprochement of the historical objects. The Revolution and Nazism evidence little common ground. 2. The German conservatives also made opportunistic and fruitful use of the relatively new variant of social history called Alltagsgeschichte, primarily associated with practitioners on the left but disapproved by the custodians of the dominant voice of social history, the Gesellschaflgeschichte structuralist school identified with Bielefeld. See Mary Nolan, "The Historikerstreit and Social History," New German Critique, no. 44 (spring/summer 1988): 51-80. 3. Variations on these practices exist in the, university worlds of most other societies as well. The French case is not singular because it is morally inferior-"la merde dans le bas de soie." In the words of a leading French sociologist known for his pitiless criticism of his own milieu, "Ia merde est partout ou Ia domination domine sous des modalites diverses." 4. For a crude but suggestive idea of the mass of bicentennial scholarly production, see the special issues of Prifoces (May 1989) entitled Les Livres de Ia Revolution franfaise, which counted around thirteen hundred works. For other perspectives, quantitative and qualitative, on the bicentennial production, see M. Vovelle with Danielle Le Monnier, Les Colloques du Bicentenaire, and M. Vovelle with Antoine de Baecque, Recherches sur Ia Revolution, both published in Paris by La DecouverteInstitut d'Histoire de Ia Revolution Fran~aise-Societe des Etudes Robespierristes, 1991. 5. Radio France Culture, "LeBon Plaisir de F. Furet," 21 November 1992.

197

198 Notes to Pages 21-31

6. Le Nouvel Observateur, 4-10 May 1989. 7. T. Nipperdey cited by Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 12-13.

Chapter2 Credo and Crusade: Pierre Chaunu's Revised Revisionism 1. P. Chaunu, "Le Fils de Ia morte," in Essais d'ego-histoire, ed. P. Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 62-71. C( p. 67: "Car au commencement de rna memoire, il y a Ia mort, le bruit, Ia 'noise' de Michel Serres, et l'histoire qui commence est comme un au-dela de Ia mort. Je mesure maintenant sur le tard combien a pese lourd dans Ia formation de rna personnalite cette fracture qui traversa rna petite enfance." On Chaunu's life, career, reputation, and positions, see also the dense and enlightening series of interviews that constituted "Le Bon Plaisir de Pierre Chaunu" on Radio France Culture, 22 February 1992. Much in this broadcast is familiar, including Chaunu's emphasis on his own prophetic talent in the domain of contemporary social and public policy ("In [such-and-such year] I correctly predicted that ["X" event] would transpire"). Somewhat surprising is the exchange between Chaunu and Furet, in particular the latter's apparent endorsement of a number of Chaunu's peremptory claims, for example, regarding the development of Bolshevism as a central cause of the rise of Nazism. 2. P. Chaunu, "Le Fils de Ia morte," in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 61-l 07 (Chaunu wrote the text in mid-1982). Cf. the interview in which Chaunu unconvincingly makes light of his very solemn engagement with the Revolution: "On m'a souvent dit Ia chose suivante: 'Un historien de metier ne se commet pas sur un terrain qu'il connait mal. Rangez vos fiches et achevez vos enquetes, reprenez vos travaux sur Seville, sur Ia mort, plutot que de vous aventurer sur Ia planche poisseuse de Ia machine adecerveler du pere Sanson.' Je reponds a cela par rna liberte. J'ai, apres tout, le droit de prendre mon petit quart d'heure de recreation." Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 4 (April 1989). 3. Interview with P. Chaunu in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 4 (April 1989); Chaunu, preface to J.-F. Fayard, La Justice revolutionnaire, chronique de Ia Terreur (Paris: R. Laffont, 1987), 13; Chaunu, LeGrand Declassement: A propos d'une commemoration (Paris: R. Laffont, 1989), 32, 189, 207; Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 June 1989; Chaunu, "Demythifier Ia Revolution," Le Figaro, 17 December 1984. 4. P. Chaunu, "Demythifier Ia Revolution," Le Figaro, 17 December 1984; Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 60, ll2; Chaunu in La Croix, 29-30 June 1986; Chaunu interview, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 4 (April 1989). Chaunu's metamedical metaphors are redolent of the classical counterrevolutionary vocabulary. See, for example, Daudet and company in 1939 ("cancer," "gangrene," "metastases"). Pascal Ory, "La Commemoration revolutionnaire en 1939," in La France et les Franfais en 1938-39, ed. Janine Bourdin and Rene Remond (Paris: Presses de Ia Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1978), 125.

199 Notes to Pages 32-39

5. P. Chaunu, preface to Fayard, La Justice revolutionnaire, 13; Chaunu, preface to Gendron, La Jeunesse sous Thermidor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 8; Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 62-65, 280-81; Chaunu in Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 June 1989; Le Monde, 4 July 1989; Figaro-Magazine, 4 March 1989. Citing Crouzet, Aftalion, and Sedillot along with Chaunu, the conservative historian-bibliographer Alfred Fierro flatly states that ten years of revolutionary wars and troubles "ruined" the French economy, a fact that pro-Revolutionary historians have lacked the courage to acknowledge: "Le silence des historiens favorables a Ia Revolution sur ce sujet est lourd de signification." But the evidence is far from univocal, and the debate is not likely to be closed soon. See the sensible considerations of Denis Woronoff, "Un take-off brise?" in L'Etat de Ia France pendant Ia Revolution, ed. M. Vovelle (Paris: La Decouverte, 1988); 287-90, and the more polemical argument of Guy Lemarchand, "Du feodalisme au capitalisme: apropos des consequences de Ia Revolution sur !'evolution de l'economie fran~aise," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 272 (April-June 1988): 171-207. On the basis of my own work, I believe that Chaunu exaggerates the character of Revolutionary subsistence difficulties and seriously underestimates those of the eighteenth century (after 1709). 6. P. Chaunu, LeGrand Declassement, 30, 38-39, 43, 55, 58, 75, 91, 125, 132, 14344, 152, 157-59, 166-67, 185-86; Charles-Emile Freppel cited by Marc Angenot, Le Centenaire de Ia Revolution, 1889 (Paris: La Documentation Fran~aise, 1989); Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 June and 13 July 1989; Chaunu, Rejlets et miroir de l'histoire (Paris: Economica, 1990), 52, 94. Chaunu might be fruitfully read in terms of Albert Hirschman's three figures of counterrevolutionary rhetoric: futility, perversity, and jeopardy (e.g., change would have occurred anyway, without revolution; any jolting change places other gains in jeopardy; etc.). See his Deux Siecles de rhetorique reactionnaire, trans. P. Andler (Paris: Fayard, 1991 ). 7. P. Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 48, 63-64, 67, 83, 176, 186; Chaunu in France catholique, no. 2215 (14 July 1989); Le Quotidien de Paris, 13 July 1989; Liberation, 7 May 1987. 8. P. Chaunu, LeGrand Declassement, 72-73, 125, 167-70, 173, 190-91, 197,200, 204,211, 219, 228, 250, 254-55; Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 June 1989. Cf. F. Furet, "La Revolution dans l'imaginaire politique fran~ais," Le Debat, no. 26 (September 1983): 179. 9. P. Chaunu, preface to Gendron, La Jeunesse so us Thermidor, 8; Chaunu, Pour l'histoire (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1984), 171-72; Chaunu, L'Historien dans tous ses hats (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1984), 10-11; Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 259-60, 270. 10. P. Chaunu, Pour l'histoire, 170; La Croix, 29-30 June 1986; Chaunu, "Ce que je pense de Ia Declaration de 89," Historama, special bicentennial issue Ouly 1989): 60; Chaunu, "Demythifier Ia Revolution," Le Figaro, 17 December 1984; Chaunu, preface to Gendron, La Jeunesse sous Thermidor, 8. 11. La Croix, 29-30 June 1986; P. Chaunu, foreword to Reynald Secher, Le Genocide franco-franfais: La Vendee-Venge (Paris: PUF, 1986), 21. C£ Secher's extraordinary canonization in the rightist press, which put him in a class with Burke. Le Quotidien de Paris, 17 September 1986. Fran~ois

200 Notes to Pages 40-46 12. F. Lebrun, "La Guerre de Vendee: Massacres ou genocide?" L'Histoire, May 1985, 94, 96-97, 99; P. Chaunu in La Croix, 29-30 June 1986; Chaunu, "Demythifier la Revolution," Le Figaro, 17 December 1984; Claude Langlois, "La Revolution malade de la Vendee," Vingtieme Siecle, no. 14 (April-June 1987): 72-73, 75, 77. 13. P. Chaunu, Pour l'histoire, 170; Chaunu, preface to Fayard, La Justice revolutionnaire, 15; Chaunu in Le Nouvel Observateur, 4-10 May 1989; Chaunu, LeGrand Declassement, 55-56; Chaunu, "Ce que je pense de la Declaration de 89," Historama, special bicentennial issue Ouly 1989): 57, 60; Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 June 1989; Chaunu, L'Historien dans tous ses hats, 332-33. Cf. the suggestive remarks of Mona Ozouf, "Celebrer, savoir, feter," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 26. 14. A vigorous promoter of research, Chaunu took the risk, in order to score a point, of misleading the public about the work of historians. For example, this startling demagogic outburst: "Il n'y a pas une eructation, une crampe d'estomac de ces grands revolutionnaires qui n'aient pas fait l'objet d'une cascade de gloses pedantes, contradictoires et ennuyeuses." Le Figaro, 22 September 1986. Chaunu's acerbic assault on this hermeneutic pedantry should not be confused with Furet's scathing critique of erudite pedantry. 15. La Croix, 29-30 June 1986; Le Figaro, 22 September 1986 and 4 March 1987; P. Chaunu, preface to Gendron, La Jeunesse sous Thermidor, 8; Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 46-47, 92; Chaunu, Pour l'histoire, 170; Chaunu, L'Historien dans tous ses hats, 10-11. For another example of the counterrevolutionary use of Furet, see Luc Baresta, "Sainte guillotine," France catholique, no. 2215 (14 July 1989): 31. Perhaps to salvage and reaffirm his own Braudelian linkages, Chaunu asked Furet to share credit for revisionism with the loosely knit group of historians associated with the Annates: "Il n'en demeure pas moins qu'entre 1970 et 1980, gr:ice essentiellement a l'equipe des Annates, gr:ice a Ia "Nouvelle Histoire" de Ia gauche que l'on a ose dire "caviar," l'historiographie frano;:aise de Ia Revolution avait rejoint le camp des activites scientifiques telles qu'on les entend dans les pays civilises." LeGrand Declassement, 47. In fact, Furet himself consciously had kept his distance from the Annates even (especially) when he presided over the Ecole des hautes etudes, and the revisionists did not draw heavily on the Annates network. 16. P. Chaunu, LeGrand Declassement, 30, 46, 231. 17. Ibid., 21, 25; Le Quotidien de Paris, 15 August 1989; P. Chaunu, preface to Fayard, La Justice revolutionnaire, 14-15. 18. P. Chaunu, interview, Le Quotidien de Paris, 15 August 1989; Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 9-14, 58-59, 131; Chaunu cited in L'Anti-89, no. 25 (October 1989); Chaunu, "L' Apologie du crime," Liberalia, no. 4 (winter 1989); Chaunu, Rejlets et miroir, 59-60 ("Comme dans une vulgaire republique banane, nous avons ete engages dans une entreprise de falsification de l'histoire .... les limites de Ia decence ont ete franchies"). Cf. France catholique, no. 2215 (14 July 1989). 19. P. Chaunu, "Le Fils de Ia morte," in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 95, 102-3; Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 46, 49; Chaunu, L'Historien dans tous ses hats, 649; Chaunu, "Demythifier Ia Revolution," Le Figaro, 17 December 1984. 20. In order better to thrust into relief the alleged excesses of the bicentennial, Chaunu exaggerated the restraint of the centennial celebration of the Revolution,

201 Notes to Pages 47-49

gliding over the radically different political contexts. Had he ventured cross-cultural comparison, he would have found that the French bicentennial was both underfunded and undercelebrated when set against the recent American and Australian anniversaries. Chaunu, "L'Apologie du crime," Libiralia, no. 4 (winter 1989). 21. Le Quotidien de Paris, 13 July and 16 August 1989; La Croix, 29 June 1986; P. Chaunu, Le Grand Declassement, 46-47, 285; Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 4 (April 1989); Chaunu, "Le Fils de Ia morte," in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 92-93, 103-4. 22. Le Quotidien de Paris, 20 June and 13 July 1989; P. Chaunu, LeGrand Declassement, 43, 176; La Croix, 29 June 1986; Chaunu, preface to Fayard, La Justice revolutionnaire, 12; Chaunu, "Le Fils de Ia morte," in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 103-4; Le Figaro, 28 Apri11984; Liberation, 7 May 1987. For examples ofChaunu's propensity to exaggerate, in sometimes surrealistic terms, see Le Grand Declassement, 89, 90, 118, 143, 151, 175. 23. An interesting and productive historian, Jean Tulard merits far closer scrutiny than he can be accorded here. His family experience, particularly during World War II, cannot by itself account for his particular brand of eclectic conservatism. Closely associated with the unreconstructed right, he was involved in numerous bicentennial projects, including a work entitled Histoire et dictionnaire de Ia Revolution franfaise, 1789-1799, in collaboration with J.-F. Fayard and A. Fierro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), which is frequently anti-Revolutionary in substance and tone. Yet much of Tulard's own scholarship is open to.diverse points of view. In private, where he is less risk-averse than in public, he claims not to "reject" the Revolution. He viewed the Old Regime, both state and society, as hopelessly bottlenecked. He adhered to a vaguely Soboulean scenario of the increasingly vehement demands of a Promethean bourgeoisie. And he saw the Terror as partially justifiable by circumstances and not "shameful in itself." He was a weekend cinephile rather than an evangelist, and has become one of France's leading authorities on the history of the movies. Interview with Tulard, 10 April1991. 24. Note in this regard the comments of one of France's most esteemed historians, a contemporary of Chaunu who had spent many years in the PCF and still identified himself ardently with the left. "I am horrified by everything that he has written," but in human terms "one cannot force oneself to detest him." Sever;tl disincentives to openly harsh criticism converged in the case of this colleague: a susceptibility to Chaunu's "human warmth" and "kindness," a corporate/university sense of the solidarity of the Elders, and a certain personal humility ("I had my phase of estravagance and critical mindlessness," noted this historian in reference to his party years-"! was a fool when I was young; he's taken the opposite road"-he could not cast the first stone). This historian conceded that Chaunu was "dangerous," but suggested optimistically that he was "desservi par sa propre outrance." 25. M. Gallo, Lettre ouverte a Marimilien Robespierre sur les nouveaux muscadins (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), 49-50; D. Bensald in Le Quotidien de Paris, 13 July 1989; M. Winock, "Mais ouest passee Ia droite republicaine?" L'Evenement du Jeudi, 20-26 April 1989; Joel Roman, "Commemorer Ia Revolution fran~aise?" Esprit, no. 154 (September 1989), 87.

202 Notes to Pages 51-59

Chapter3 Vive le Roi 1. Who's Who in France, 1990-91 (Paris: Editions Lafitte, 1991), 723; interview with F. Furet, 13 Apri11991; "LeBon P1aisir de Fran~Yois Furet," a three-hour radio program on France Culture interviewing Furet and many of his close friends, including Mona Ozouf, Gilles Martinet, Georges Kiejman, and Pierre Nora, 21 November 1992 (this program is the closest thing we have to an (auto?)biographica1 portrait; the journalist regretted Furet's adamant unwillingness to discuss any aspect of his private life and his lack of interest in discussing the social and institutional environment in which he operated); La Pensee aujourd'hui, in the Collection dossier, no. 2 of Le Nouvel Observateur, 35; Valeurs actuelles, 4 November 1988. According to historian Pierre Vilar, Raymond Aron in 1938 "avait exclu de Ia condition d'historien Ia plupart des specialistes de Ia Revolution fran~Yaise pour leur 'optique de partisan.' " "E. Labrousse et le savoir historique," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franr;aise, no. 276 (AprilJune 1989): 114. 2. Interview with F. Furet, 13 April1991; Radio France Culture, "LeBon Plaisir de Fran~Yois Furet," 21 November 1992; Furet's conversation with B. Pivot on Apostrophes, 28 October 1988; F. Dosse in L'Evenement du Jeudi, 2-8 February 1989. 3. M. Ozouf, "Cetebrer, savoir, feter," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 29; ]. Julliard, Le Nouvel Observateur, 8-14 February 1990. The galaxy's permanent conceit and leitmotif-escamoteur remained "we have ideas while our antagonists are barren." See Ozouf, "Cetebrer, savoir, reter," 28. Joel Roman employs another variation in his eruption against Fran~Yois Dosse, "we tell the truth, and they tell lies." See his "Commemorer Ia Revolution fran~aise?" Esprit, September 1989,88. 4. Radio France Culture, "LeBon Plaisir de Fran~Yois Furet," 21 November 1992. 5. A sociologist or anthropologist interested in the workings of the Franco-Parisian cultural scene in general and the galaxy in particular might, for instance, explore the process by which Pierre Nora received the 1991 Louise Weiss-Bibliotheque Nationale Prize. See the invitation to a reception convened, "sous le haut patronage de Jack Lang," by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, an old friend and rival of Furet's, and Antoine Gallimard, head of the publishing company for which Nora toiled. 6. Interview with F. Furet, 13 April1991; P. Lepape in Le Monde, 26 August 1988; R. Debray, Que Vive Ia Republique (Paris: 0. Jacob, 1989), 17; L'Evenement duJeudi, 28 February 1989, including an interview with L. Joffrin, and 20-26 December 1990, interview with A. Finkielkraut; C. Nicolet, in Entretiens de Ia Federation franr;aise des Maisons des jeunes et de Ia culture, December 1988. 7. F. Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franr;aise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989). 8. D. Richet, "Une Restauration dans Ia Revolution," Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 September 1988. 9. See, for example, Fran~Yois Crouzet, Historians and the French Revolution: The Case of Maximilien Robespierre (Swansea: University College, 1989), 22. 10. Carla Hesse points out that if Ozouf did not play a major role in launching revisionism in France, she intervened decisively to shape its second incarnation. Her La Fete revolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) appeared before Furet's Penser Ia

203

Notes to Pages 61-79 Revolution franraise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), and in Hesse's opinion "anticipates many of the key methodological and interpretive insights of the latter." To author, 18 January 1992. II. Le Nouvel Observateur, 3-9 November 1988 (the deliciously paradoxical headline ran: "Franfi:ois Furet, le roi de Ia Revolution"); New York Times, 13 March 1989; Le Monde, television supplement, 5-11 December 1988; interview with Furet, 13 April1991. C( Claude Mazauric's evaluation ofFuret's success, which "n'est pas du, selon moi, aIa qualite de son oeuvre ... mais asa valorisation mediatique en raison de son incidence ideologique dans une periode marquee par le recul des idees revolutionnaires." Interview, 20 April1991. C( M. Reberioux's anxiety about the impact of the media. Entretiens de Ia Federation franraise des Maisons des jeunesse et de Ia culture, November 1988. 12. F. Furet and M. Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire critique de Ia Revolution franraise (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 7-16; Furet and Ozouf interviewed by B. Pivot, Apostrophes, 28 October 1988. 13. C. Langlois, "Franfi:ois Furet et !'atelier de Ia Revolution." Esprit, June 1990, 13-16. For another thoughtful appreciation of the Dictionnaire from an American critic of revisionist excesses, see Isser Woloch, "On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 95 (December 1990): 1452-70. 14. P. Gut in L'Humanite, 1 December 1988; E. G. Sledziewski in La Quinzaine litteraire, 16-30 November 1988; personal communication from E. G. Sledziewski, 28 June 1993. 15. F. Furet and M. Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 721-30. 16. Ibid., 126-32. 17. Ibid., 751-61. 18. Ibid., 574-84. 19. Ibid., 185-95. 20. Ibid., 156-69. See also the entries on the Maximum (596-602) and on Babeuf (199-205). 21. The sales figures are from Figaro-Magazine, 7 January 1989. 22. F. Furet, La Revolution: De Turgot d Jules Ferry, 1770-1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 8. 23. Interview with F. Furet, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 2 (February 1989). 24. F. Furet, La Revolution: De Turgot d}ules Ferry, 21-59,99. 25. Ibid., 73-157. 26. Olivier Betourne and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l'histoire de Ia Revolution: Deux Siecles de passion franraise (Paris: La Decouverte, 1989), 11. 27. Ibid., 81-82, 143-44, 172-83. 28. Ibid., 24-25, 31-32, 144, 149, 201-16, 218. 29. R. Halevi in Magazine littiraire, nos. 267-68 Ouly-August 1989): 60-61. C( nineteenth-century historian Michelle Perrot's infinitely more intelligent and judicious appraisal: "Ce livre est un fragment de cette vaste entreprise [exploring the historiography of the Revolution]; livre sans complaisance, documente et relativement impartial. En depit de leurs preferences pour Ia tradition jauresienne et une histoire

204 Notes to Pages 81-85

sociale fortement matinee de 'mentalites,' a Ia maniere de Georges Lefebvre et de Michel Vovelle, les auteurs n'en rendent pas moins justice aIa novation majeure dont Franc;:ois Furet est le principal responsable (avec Mona Ozouf, dont I' oeuvre devrait etre mieux reconnue dans son originalite propre): le retour a une histoire politique et intellectuelle renouvelee de Ia Revolution .... aFranc;:ois Furet, ils reprochent moins son inconstance que de ne pas s'expliquer sur ses propres changements. lis lui comparent le vieil Edgar Quinet, Hannah Arendt et Claude Lefort, dont les recherches surla 'fondation,' Ia citoyennete, le volontarisme politique, les rapports du public et du prive, etc., leur semblent plus profondes." Liberation, 11 May 1989. Another historian, J.-P. Rioux, a specialist in the twentieth century, took a much harsher line on the book: "Un peu moins d'entetement acrimonieux contre celui qui pretendrait 'a Ia plus grosse part du gateau commemoratif' aurait donne a leur livre l'allure et Ia juste mesure du bon manuel d'historiographie civique qui nous manque cette annee et qu'il pouvait etre." Le Monde, 26 May 1989. The Betourne-Hartig critique of his work so exasperated Furet that it is reported that he broke a contract, as a gesture of outrage and vengeance, with the Seuil publishing house, where Betourne at one time had served as secretary-general.

Chapter4 Bicentennial Hotline: Dial93-89-1917 1. P. Guilbert, Le Figaro, 7 July 1989; M. Agulhon, "De bats actuels sur Ia Revolution en France," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 279 Oanuary-March 1990): 7; E. G. Sledziewski, "La Strategie Furet," Raison presente, no. 91 (1989), 1718; R. Debray, "Diviser pour rassembler," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 16; M. Ozoufin filmed interview, S. Moati,Journal d'un bicentenaire; L'Alsace, 12July 1989. C£ Jean-Rene Suratteau: "Q!Ie represente l'idee revolutionnaire dans notre monde actuel? C'est Ia question primordiale." In A. Soboui, Dictionnaire historique de Ia Revolution franfaise, ed. Jean-Rene Suratteau and Franc;:ois Gendron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), xxxi. 2. F. Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, nos. 7 Ouly 1989) and 12 (December 1989); Furet in Dictionnaire critique de Ia Revolution francaise, ed. F. Furet and M. Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 1038; Furet, "Reponse aM. Agulhon," Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 40; Furet, "Est-il coupable?" L'Express, 7 July 1989, 60, 62; Furet and Ran Ha1evi, "L'Annee 1789," Annates: E.S.C., January-February 1989, 324; Furet and R. Halevi, eds., Orateurs de Ia Revolution franfaise, vol. 1, Les Constituants (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), xx-xcl. 3. F. Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 7 Ouly 1989); Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution au milieu du X!Xe siecle: Edgar Quinet et Ia question du Jacobinisme (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 114; Furet, Penser Ia Revolution franfaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 168; P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec F. Furet," L'Histoire, no. 52 Qanuary 1983): 76; interview with Furet, Liberation, 7 May 1987; Furet, "La Revolution dans l'imaginaire politique franc;:ais," Le Debat, no. 26 (September

1983): 178 (a piece in which Furet reveals himself to be the most penetrating analyst of

205 Notes to Pages 87-92 Revolutionary historiography since P. Geyl). Could one shut down the Terror overnight, asJ.-F. Revel suggested, any more easily-and without remotely commensurate means-than one could dismantle NATO after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union's behavior in the Gulf War, and Gorbachev's partial entry into the G-7? See Le Point, 24 October 1988. 4. Citation from F. Dosse, "La Triade liberale," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 85~86; F. Furet, Penser Ia Revolution franraise, 78. 5. F. Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution, 66~67; M. Ozouf in Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfranraise, no. 4 (April1989); filmed interview ofJ.-D. Bredin by S. Moati, A propos de Ia Revolution franraise; interview with Furet, Liberation, 7 May 1987; Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 7 Ouly 1989); interview with Furet, Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February-6 March 1986. 6. Le Monde, 18 July 1988; J.-P. Faye, "Visibilite et narration dans l'histoire," EspacesTemps, nos. 38~39 (1988): 67. C£ the indignant letter to the editor by a reader of Le Monde from the Haute-Savoie who attacked the revisionist "genealogy of terrorism." Beyond the "polemical amalgams" that accounted speciously for the Terror, he pointed to the "reasons of state" which dictated such horrors as Saint Batholomew and Louis XIV's destruction of the Rhenish Palatinate. Andre Bouvet, Le Monde, 10 February 1989. 7. M. Gallo in a debate in Le Nouvel Observateur, 4~10 May 1989; R. Debray, "Diviser pour rassembler," EspacesTemps, nos. 38~39 (1988): 16~17; M. Agulhon, "Faut-il avoir peur de 1989?" Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 35; Agulhon, "Debats actuels sur Ia Revolution en France," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 279 Oanuary-March 1990): 7. Cf. M. Reberioux's enigmatic attempt to be reassuring: "toute circonstance analysee cesse de l'etre." Interview, 11 April1991. Elsewhere she argues that a political theory cannot have historical weight unless the historian can unravel the "circonstances dans lesquelles les hommes sont amenes a faire ce type de choix." Entretiens de Ia Federation franraise des Maisons des jeunes et de Ia culture, November 1988. 8. M. Agulhon, "Faut-il avoir peur de 1989?" Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 33, 35; F. Furet, "Reponse aM. Agulhon," Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 42. Furet mistakenly situates Talmon in the 1960s. In fact he published his major work on the totalitarian phenomenon in 1950. Cf. Furet in Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February~6 March 1986; Furet's treatment of Rousseau's crystallization of the critique ofliberalism (the creation of the denaturalized, abstract citizen susceptible to Jacobin regeneration) in "La Revolution dans l'imaginaire politique franvais," Le Debat, no. 26 (September 1983): 177; and J. Julliard's Talmono-Furetian reading of Rousseau and political overinvestment in La Faute Rousseau (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), 45. 9. M. Agulhon, "La Revolution franvaise au bane des accuses," Vingtieme Siecle, no. 5 Oanuary-March 1985): 13; interview with Agu1hon, 11 April 1991; F. G. Sledziewski, in Revolution, 6-12 February 1987; C. Mazauric and A. Casanova, Vive Ia Revolution, 1789~1989, ed. C. Ducol (Paris: Messidor/Editions Sociales, 1989),

a

115~16.

10. M. Gallo, Lettre ouverte a Maximilien Robespierre sur les nouveaux muscadins (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), 17~18, 54~55, 121, 125, 128~29; Gallo, "La Revolution:

206 Notes to Pages 92-96

Une Dynamique sociale et politique," Revue politique et parlementaire, July-August 1989, 9-10; Gallo, Entretiens de Ia Fiderationfranfaise des Maisons desjeunes et de Ia culture, February 1991; Gallo, "Le Nouveau Catechisme," Le Figaro, 17 December 1984. 11. D. Bensald, Moi, Ia Revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 154; R. Debray, "Diviser pour rassembler," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 18. 12. Aspects de Ia France, 13 July 1989; J.-L. Martens and Olivier Ihl, "La Revolution fran~aise et le narcissisme ideologique," La Revue Tocqueville, no. 9 (1987-88): 132; J.-F. Sirinelli, "La Greffe maurrassienne," L'Histoire, July-August 1988, 90; Pascal Ory, "La Commemoration revolutionnaire en 1939," in La France et les Franfais en 1938-39, ed. Janine Bourdin and Rene Remand (Paris: Presses de Ia Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1978), 124; Present, 14-15 July 1989; Daniel Raffard de Brienne in L'Anti-89, no. 18 (March 1989); Valeurs actuelles, 2 May 1989; Figaro-Magazine, 23 January 1988 and 18 March 1989; Georges Gusdorf, Les Revolutions de France et d'Amerique: La Violence et Ia sagesse (Paris: Perrin, 1988), 59; C. C. O'Brien in the New York Review of Books, 15 February 1990, 49-50. Cf. Jacques Julliard's evocation ofBurke's prescient sense of the sort of'93 that '89 was bound to beget. J. Julliard in Le Nouvel Observateur, 13-19 July 1989. 13. Interview with M. Agulhon, 11 April 1991; Agulhon in Magazine litteraire, March 1987; Agulhon, "Debats actuels sur Ia Revolution en France," Annates historiques de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, no. 279 Oanuary-March 1990): 7. Another voice from outside France, that of political scientist Stanley Hoffmann-a sort of anti-Conor Cruise O'Brien-powerfully reinforced Agulhon's argument. Looking closely at the "relentless hostility of so many royalists, and even of ex-revolutionaries eager to stop the Revolution's momentum" and at the "misreading" that painted Rousseau as a totalitarian, Hoffmann concluded that the "Jacobin dictatorship was not the necessary outcome of the democratic-populist legalism that both Sieyes and the Declaration exhibited." S. Hoffmann, "The French Revolution and Its Commemoration in Retrospect," Bulletin ofthe American Academy ofArts and Sciences, no. 44 (December 1990): 33-34 (I owe this reference to the kindness of my colleague Michael Kammen). 14. Carla Hesse thoughtfully suggests that it would be worth probing the influence of Jean Starobinski on Furet's reading of Rousseau. To author, 18 January 1992. 15. Interview with F. Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, no. 2 (February 1989); interview in Le Figaro, 20-21 February 1988; television interview by B. Pivot, Apostrophes, 28 October 1988; interview by F. Ewald, "Histoire de !'idee revolutionnaire," Magazine litteraire, October 1988,20. The "disparition de !'analyse des causes de Ia Revolution" was not restricted to "le debat mediatique," as Max Gallo optimistically suggested. "La Revolution: Une Dynamique sociale et politique," Revue politique et parlementaire, July-August 1987, 9. 16. P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec F. Furet," L'Histoire, no. 52 Oanuary 1983): 72; interview with Furet, 13 April1991. There are suggestive similarities in the way in which-for very different objectives-Fran~ois Furet and Ernst Nolte use 1917 to buttress their arguments. See Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 27. If one marries Furet and Nolte, one arrives at a compact genealogy of

207 Notes to Pages 98-100 horrors. If the Terror is the matrix of the gulag (Furet), and the gulag is the direct precedent for (and perhaps even the indirect cause of) Auschwitz (Nolte), then the Terror in some sense caused Auschwitz (Lustiger?). On Nolte, see ibid., 68. 17. Dialogue between R. De bray and F. Dosse, Politis, 3-9 February 1989; D. Bensai:d, Moi, Ia Revolution, 251; interview with Furet, 13 April 1991; Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 March 1986; F. Furet, "Les Feuilles mortes de l'utopie," Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 April-2 May 1990; P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec F. Furet," L'Histoire, no. 52 Oanuary 1983); interview with Furet, Le Figaro, 17 July 1989. The latter interview marks another step in Furet's bicentennial repositioning. Distinguishing carefully between the horrors of 1793 and the continued fascination exercised by the gallicized ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity on the contemporary world, he remarked: "Si !'idee de revolution est en crise, les principes de 1789"he avoided the word "Revolution"-"sont plus universels que jamais." But Furet's adamant refusal to assume responsibility himself for exploiting the 1789/93-1917 link is at best self-mystification, at worst hypocrisy. See his self-serving indictment of, first, the Communists and, second, the right, for using the analogy to crystallize "partisan passions." Furet, "1789-1917: Aller et retour," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 15-16.

Chapter5 From the Social to the Political via the Nineteenth Century 1. P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec Fran~ois Furet," L'Histoire, no. 52 Oanuary 1983): 76; interview with Furet, 13 April 1991, in which in particular he insisted on his personal effort to come to grips with Marx ("J'ai pris Ia peine de passer deux ans sur Marx"). C£ galactic messenger/manager Pierre Nora's assessment of Furet's assault on the university: "a vast liquidation of the Marxists' entire manner of thinking, which was so deeply embedded in the academic culture that historians dealt with the Revolution in a Marxist manner without knowing that they were Marxists." Quoted by R. Bernstein, "The French Revolution: Right or Wrong," New York Times Book Review, 10 July 1988. 2. J. Guilhaumou and G. Noiriel suggested that Furet's war extended to the whole domain of the social and human sciences, not just social history. Guilhaumou, "L'historiographie de Ia Revolution fran~aise existe: Je ne l'ai pas rencontree," Raison prisente, no. 9 (1989): 9-12; Noiriel, "Une Histoire sociale du politique est-elle possible?" Vingtieme Siec/e, no. 24 (October-December 1989). On Furet's skepticism regarding the social sciences, in either their ecumenical or their deterministic avatars, see Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989), and F. Furet, L'Ate/ier de /'histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), 8-17. Yet c£ Marcel Gauchet's preemptive strike in the name of the galaxy: "Et qu'on ne vienne pas crier aux dangers idealistes de Ia philosophie politique ou a Ia remontee a Ia vieille histoire des idees, car c'est de leur complet renouvellement par !'inscription dans l'acte social qu'il s'agit." Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, no. 8 (August 1989). Sensitive to the strictures leveled against him, Furet the moderate insisted in an interview in 1991 that "je ne suis pas du tout

208 Notes to Pages 100-104

dogmatique." He was not "contre l'histoire sociale." He merely believed that "le social n'explique pas tout." Interview with Furet, 13 Aprill991. Furet's friend and fellow historian Jacques Revel remembers being first struck by the virulence of Furet's discourse against the social at the Chicago leg (September 1986) of the three bicentennial conferences that Furet coorganized with Keith Baker and Colin Lucas. Interview with Revel, 8 January 1992. 3. Furet's memory of this project with Richet, his then brother-in-law and close friend, is interesting, not least because of its revisionist tone on Furet's ancient passion for quantitative social history and because of its evocation of Labrousse and Soboul: "Dix ans apres, lui et moi, imprudemment embarques dans des recherches d'histoire sociale quantitative aux rendements decroissants, nous avons saisi au vol une perche que nous tendaient ensemble Guy Schoeller et Bernard de Fallois: ecrire une histoire generale de Ia Revolution fran~aise. Le sujet nous passionnait depuis toujours. Le Parti etait loin deja. Nous aimions encore L'Esquisse de Labrousse, mais nous n'avions pas trap d'admiration pour le petit Precis d'histoire de Ia Revolution franfaise de Soboul. Nous avons redige le 1er tome a marche forcee, dans l'ete 1964, le second l'ete suivant. L'ouvrage re~ut un accueil chaleureux, et bientot le tir de barrage communiste paracheva le succes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21-27 September 1989. 4. F. Furet, L'Atelier de l'histoire, 7. Self-analysis remained Furet's blind spot. In the mid-1980s he insisted, "rna periode de polemique avec !'historiographic communiste de Ia Revolution fran~aise est terminee depuis longtemps." "Reponse aM. Agulhon," Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984). 5. La Lettre politique et parlementaire, 14 April1991; Le Nouvel Observateur, 7-13 June ("Le President de Ia Republique s'avise qu'il faut 'faire du social,' wrote Laurent Joffrin) and 28 June-4 July 1990; J.-D. Bredin cited in Le Monde, 3 January 1989; F. Ewald cited in Le Monde, 30 April1991, and in L'Ane, no. 46 (April-June 1991); Furet cited in Le Monde, 26 August 1988. 6. Interview with F. Furet, Le Figaro, 20-21 February 1988; interview with Furet, Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February-6 March 1986; F. Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution au milieu du X!Xe siecle: Edgar Quinet et Ia question du Jacobinisme (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 112, 114; F. Furet in Dictionnaire critique de Ia Revolution franfaise, ed. F. Furet and M. Ozouf(Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 1027, 1034; Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 1 Ganuary 1989); interview with Furet by Joachim FritzVannahme, "Radikal von Anfang an,'' Die Zeit, no. 21 (19 May 1989); FigaroMagazine, 28 October 1988. 7. F. Furet, "A Commentary,'' French Historical Studies, no. 16 (fall1990): 797-98. See also Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin, "La Revolution en question,'' Libre, no. 5 (1979). For an elegant and penetrating critique of Furet's use oflanguage and his treatment of a politics nested outside society, see Lynn Hunt's review of Penser Ia Revolution franfaise, in History and Theory, no. 20 ( 1981 ): 313-23. 8. See F. Furet, Penser Ia Revolution franfaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 104, and the suggestive critique of Furet's work by Don Sutherland, "An Assessment of the Writing ofFran~ois Furet,'' French Historical Studies, no. 16 (fall1990): 784-91. In an innovative study, Ted Margadant contests Furet's claims on several levels. He finds no evidence that power fled from institutions and social classes to take refuge in the ether

209 Notes to Pages 105-9 of discourse. His analysis of institutional reform in the National Assembly and of the "politics of parochialism" throughout the country challenges Furet's contention that a terrorist ideology, detached from social interests, emerged rapidly as the dominant discourse of the Revolution attendant on the early collapse of royal power. Margadant shows that the deputies were skillful negotiators, more responsive to the needs of constituents than to the imperatives of ideology. He also argues that the political culture of the Revolution was not new but instead deeply rooted in the practice of politics in the towns of the Old Regime. See Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 9. F. Furet, "La France unie," in La Republique du centre, ed. Furet,]. Julliard, and P. Rosanvallon (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1988), 28-32; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 204, 211; interview with Furet, Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfran(aise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989). C( Alain Touraine's perceptive discussion of the contemporary triumph of the political over the social ("Aujourd'hui, il est tentant de jeter !'enfant avec l'eau du bain et de dire que I' idee de mouvement social doit etre elimine avec celle de revolution. Le rejet violent du volontarisme revolutionnaire, pere du despotisme totalitaire, oriente d'abord vers le liberalisme qui elimine tout volontarisme et organise seulement les demandes et le marche"). Le Monde, 23 Janaury 1990. See also Blandine Barret-Kriegel's contention that "avec de nouveaux concepts, comme ceux de biopouvoir, de micro-pouvoir, de normes, de disciplines, Michel Foucault est a l'origine d'uneprofonde transformation de la recherche historique, par laquelle on est aile de I'idee de Ia preeminence du social-le social etant tout-a l'idee de Ia consistance du politique-les pouvoirs sont quelque chose." Le Monde, 13 October 1989. It is interesting to note the displacement of the social by the political in the German Historikerstreit. Conservative and "new nationalist" historians condemned social and economic history as irrelevant, or they simply ignored it. Intoxicated by the postmodern absinthe of discourse, they rejected social-scientific analysis in ways redolent of Furet, and they unmoored the political from any clearcut connections with the social structure. Furet, like the Germans, seems to have been inclined to a certain aestheticization of politics. See Richard Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 119, and Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 168-69. 10. F. Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution, 90; Furet cited by P. Lepape, Le Monde, 26 August 1988; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 1048; M. Gauchet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 8 (August 1989); interview with Furet, 13 April1991. C( M. Reberioux's evocation ofFuret's allergy to the people in Politis, 11 February 1988. 11. F. Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 575, 596~602 (my italics). Furet further pressed the artificial separation of the political and the socioeconomic in ibid., 1028 (he refers to "l'enigme de toute l'histoire de France, ou le politique est sans cesse en avance sur l'economique"). See also Marshall Sahlins (professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago), Ston( Age Economics (Chicago: AirlineAtherton, 1972). 12. D. Bensa.id, Moi, Ia Revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 253-54; E. G.

210 Notes to Pages 110-12 Sledziewski in La Quinzaine litteraire, 16-30 November 1988; J. Levy, "Revolution, fin et suite," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 71; "Un Entretien avec J.-N. Jeanneney, "Historiens-Geographes, no. 327 (1990): 154-55; C. Nicolet, "Faut-illarguer Ia Republique?" Le Monde diplomatique, June 1989; M. Vovelle, "L' Age de Ia prise de conscience," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988). In a letter toLe Monde, historian R. Etiemble remarked that ifFuret clung to a strictly political line, it was in order to serve "the dominant ideology" by evacuating "several struggles that are said to engender despotism." Le Monde, television supplement, 18-19 December 1988. 13. Interview with]. Tulard, 10 April1991; A. Casanova in Claude Mazauric and Casanova, Vive Ia Revolution, ed. Claudine Ducol (Paris: Messidor/Editions sociales, 1989), 30; E. Labrousse quoted by Pierre Vilar, "E. Labrousse et le savoir historique," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution francaise, no. 276 (April-June 1989): 118; interview with M. Reberioux, 11 Aprill991; M. Agulhon, "Ernest Labrousse, historien social (XIXe siecle)," Annales historiques de Ia Revolution francaise, no. 276 (April-June 1989): 129-30; Max Gallo, in Entretiens de Ia Federation francaise des Maisons des jeunes et de Ia culture, February 1989. Cf. Stanley Hoffmann: "Second, the relegation of economic and social history to the background, especially when it is accompanied by the suggestion that the main social transformations that took place in that era would have occurred anyhow, has gone too far." "The French Revolution and Its Commemoration in Retrospect," Bulletin ofthe American Academy ofArts and Sciences, no. 44 (December 1990): 32. Hoffmann also argued that Furet had proven faithless to his Tocquevillean mentor: "Tocqueville strikes me as much more sociologically oriented than Furet-more concerned with complex relations between a state both powerful and weak, and a society both fragmented and changing. Tocqueville is also far more interested in structures than in ideas, and although his work shows how the state superstructure can shape the economic and social system, his analysis is in a certain way closer to the Marxists' than to Furet's." Ibid., 31-32. 14. R. Chartier in Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfrancaise, no. 5 (May 1989). Long in gestation in his writings, Chartier's critique of the social history of mentalities was well known. His strictures against the "the new seductions of political philosophy," which he found even more mutilating, had not heretofore filtered beyond the electoral assemblies of the Ecole des hautes etudes, though he had hinted at them in the book reviews that he regularly wrote for Le Monde. (See, for instance, reviews of L'Atlas de Ia Revolution francaise, 1 July 1988, and of the iconographical studies of Antoine de Baecque and Claude Langlois, 6 January 1989.) In another substantial piece in the same newspaper, in which he praised in passing the book by Olivier Betourne and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l'histoire de Ia Revolution ("utile et informe"), Chartier made clear his sense that the issues at stake transcended the historiographical debates over the Revolution, which he seems to have found somewhat parochial. These issues were too important to be subordinated to the ideological and inevitably reductionist war galvanized by the bicentennial. A retrafficked version of the old history of ideas was no more attractive to him in a Phrygian bonnet than in an ordinary beret. Chartier espoused a social interpretation, but one that had very little to do with the Marxist variety which used to be on all the shelves. If there was a pox on both the houses, however, it was particularly virulent for the revisionist conceit. Le Monde, 8 December

211 Notes to Pages 113-14 1989. No one in the galaxy frankly addressed the issues that he had raised. Painfully allergic to criticism, especially when it emanated from what he regarded as his own terrain, Furet avenged himself in a perfunctory and intemperate review of Chartier's new book, Les Origines culturelies de Ia Revolution franfaise, published in 1990. The book was unimpressive in large measure because "il est fait comme un nid d'hirondelle, de materiaux pris de toutes mains; un peu de Mona Ozouf par-ci, beaucoup de Darnton par-hl, du Keith Baker par pincees, du Roche, du Vovelle, du Julia, je n'en finirais pas d'enumerer tous les dix-huitiemistes relus par notre auteur aIa lumiere de Norbert Elias et de Habermas." Does Furet think for an instant that one could not dispose of his recipes in the same contemptuous manner? Huge doses ofTocqueville, Qy.inet, and Cochin, smaller rations of Constant and Stael, myriad galactic seasonings, and a paucity of potentially enriching ingredients, left out to preserve the originality of the various concoctions. Furet's review is in Le Nouvel Observateur, 2531 October 1990. Though Chartier was never a member of his bande, there is no doubt that Furet took much of his recent institutional and intellectual behavior as a personal betrayal. Interview with Furet, 13 April 1991. Many of Furet's friends deplored the nastiness of his review of Chartier. The official galactic line remains, however, no less invidious: while Chartier is a skilled cobbler practicing the art of synthesis, Furet is a veritable thinker, enjoying real intellectual autonomy. In a postbicentennial recentering interview, in which Furet casts himself as an epistemological pluralist, he nevertheless anathematizes the sort of work Chartier does (and takes aim simultaneously at Pierre Bourdieu): "Si Ia denomination 'd'histoire culturelle' est une maniere deguisee de reintroduire une conception scientiste de l'histoire, par l'enfermement de l'individu dans les contraintes du groupe, alors elle debouche sur Ia meme impasse qu'on observe dans bien des livres de sociologie.... Prise dans ce sens, l'histoire dite culturelle n'est que 'Ia forme distinguee du marxisme vulgaire,' selon Ia formule de Philippe Raynaud." Le Monde, 19 May 1992. 15. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1951; New York: Norton, 1970), 70; F. Furet, La Revolution: De Turgot ti Jules Ferry, 1770-1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 50, 123; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 207, 936, 1030; Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution, 18-19; Furet in Le Nouvel Observateur, 2127 September 1989; Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. I Oanuary 1989); interview with Furet, Liberation, 7 May 1987; Furet, La Republique du centre, 16, 29, 52. Cf. C. Nicolet's cursory characterization ofFuret as a "neoidealist" who sees no utility in social analysis. "Faut-illarguer Ia Republique?" Le Monde diplomatique, June 1989. 16. F. Furet, "Est-il coupable?" L'Express, 7 July 1989; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 555, 578, 598, 599, 600; P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec Fran~ois Furet,'' L'Histoire, no. 52 Oanuary 1983): 71-77. ContrastJ.-F. Revel's acclamatory evocation of the revisionist critique of the illicit intimacy between the Sobouleans and their witnesses to Paul Viallaneix's laudatory rehearsal of the galactic method, which resembles what Revel censured. Revel: "Quelle est leur objection majeure contre Ia version officielle? C'est que le chercheur scientifique ne peut passe contenter, pour comprendre un phenomene historique, de prendre au pied de Ia lettre et de reprendre a son compte les explications de leurs actions qu'ont donnees les

212 Notes to Pages 114-18 acteurs eux-memes au moment des faits." Le Point, 24 October 1988. Viallaneix: "Furet consulte, du debut au terme de son parcours, les hommes dont il se sent precisement le successeur et qui furent souvent, eux aussi, historiens. II emprunte sa problematique a ces temoins ou parrains de notre modernite: Sieyes, qu'il etablit, comme il se doit, au premier rang; Mirabeau, Barnave, et Robespierre, Madame de Stael et Constant, premiers observateurs a disposer pendant le Directoire et le Consular, d'un certain recul." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 October-3 November 1988. 17. Though the ghost of Peguy stands between the two scholars, Furet may have experienced some of the feelings about the nineteenth century that Jacques Julliard relates: "Comme Ia plupart de nos contemporains, j'ai longtemps vecu dans Ia conviction qu'il n'y avait pas grand-chose a en tirer de bon. 'Le stupide 19e siecle,' disait Leon Daudet. Identifie au romantisme, cet enorme ventre mou parait nous separer, sans profit apparent, des deux grands moments fondateurs, dans l'ordre de Ia pensee, de Ia France moderne: le 17e siecle de Descartes, le 18e siecle des philosophes. C'est pourtant en lisant Rousseau que !'indulgence m'est venue pour le 19e siecle, car c'est lui qui a eu aaffronter les consequences intellectuelles et politiques du Contrat social. " Julliard, La Faute a Rousseau (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), 17. 18. The claim here is not that the historian's central task of unmasking requires archival exploration as opposed, say, to reading anew magisterial (or obscure) texts. Rather, it takes issue with the spiteful hierarchy that Furet implies. 19. Interview with F. Furet, 13 April1991; interview with Furet, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franr;aise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989); Furet, Penser Ia Revolution franr;aise, 185, 213,218,219, 248-49; Furet, "A Commentary," French Historical Studies, no. 16 (fall 1990): 792-93. See Furet's evasive answer when asked in the following issue whether there was a place in his work for "the study of the very texts of the Revolution, of its archives." He talked about the questions that governed his inquiry, questions inspired by the nineteenth century but solicited by twentieth-century concerns. He did not discuss research design or matching questions and sources-these are not his kind of issues. The gist of his answer was: I'm a thinker (unlike the others). Le Monde de Ia Revolution franr;aise, no. 2 (February 1989). Since the nineteenth-century historiographical/philosophical "tradition" was directly begotten by the Revolution, Furet reproached Vovelle, among others, for paying no attention to nineteenthcentury thought. Interviewwith Furet, 13 April1991. For an enthusiastic welcome to Furet's reintegration of the nineteenth century, see J.-M. de Montremy, "1789 et 1793: La Terreur en question,'' L'Histoire, no. 90 Oune 1986): 72-73: "L'histoire recupere de Ia sorte ses deux jambes et peut reprendre sa marche avec plus de rigueur." Like Furet, Montremy unself-consciously referred to the recourse to Qy.inet and Marx as a "retour aux sources" without exploring critically just what that meant. 20. Interview with Furet, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franr;aise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989); P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec F. Furet,'' L'Histoire, no. 52 Oanuary 1983); Le Nouvel Observateur, 14-20 December 1989; Furet, "Reponse a M. Agulhon,'' Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 39; Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution, 38; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 1078-80; Furet, Penser Ia Revolution franr;aise, 57, 59, 198-99. C( Furet's strictures regarding Tocqueville's flawed understanding of egalitarian ideology, of Physiocratic political economy, of economic and

213 Notes to Pages 118-25

technological issues in general. Ibid., 40, 196-98. On the ideological character of the use ofTocqueville, and the reluctance of his exponents to admit it, see Alfred Grosser in Le Monde, 9 March 1989. Cf. J. Tulard's use of the nineteenth century, "On pouvait eviter un bain de sang," Historama, July 1989, 8. 21. F. Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution, 46-48, 83, 113; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 1041-48. 22. F. Furet in Le Nouvel Observateur, 21-27 March 1991; D. Bensald, Moi, Ia Revolution, 230, 234; F. Ewald, Lettre au president de Ia Mission du Bicentenaire (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1989), 21-22; Joel Roman, "Commemorer la Revolution fran~aise?" Esprit, September 1989, 88; J. Guilhaumou, "Faut-il bruler l'historiographie de Ia Revolution?" Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 3 (March 1989); Guilhaumou, "L'Historiographie de Ia Revolution fran~,:aise existe: Je ne l'ai pas rencontree," Raison presente, no. 9 (1989): 12. 23. F. Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 979-97; Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution, 10, 115-16. Cf. Furet, "En marge des Annates: Histoire et sciences sociales," Le Debat, no. 17 (December 1981): 123, 126. Citing the four hundred pages of notes in the edition of Orateurs de Ia Revolution franraise (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) that he coedited with R. Halevy as well as his "enormous work" on the nineteenthcentury thinkers, Furet insisted that he was not against erudition in a postbicentennial interview, 13 April1991. See other elements ofFuret's self-portrait in "LeBon Plaisir de Fran~ois Furet" on Radio France Culture, 21 November 1992, where he confides that "il n'y a rien que je deteste tant que !'esprit partisan," and where he summons "Ia raison critique contre Ia passion de Ia denonciation." 24. Interview with F. Furet, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989); Le Monde, 29 January 1988; M. Ozouf, "CClebrer savoir, reter," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 30. See also Jean-Clement Martin, "Revolution et contre-revolution: Propositions pour enseigner le flou et le fluctuant," HistoriensGeographes, no. 324 (August-September 1989): 130; and the particularly pertinent remarks of Claude Langlois, "Fram;ois Furet et !'atelier de Ia Revolution," Esprit, June 1990, 12-21.

Chapter6 The End ofExceptionallsm 1. Joachim Fritz-Vannahme, "Radikal von Anfang an," Die Zeit, no. 21 (19 May 1989). The affirmation/hope that the Revolution was over was expressed more than once in the debates of the Constituent Assembly. Attempting to position himself above the fray, Furet in fact implicates himself (deeply and ironically) in it. 2. F. Furet, "La Revolution dans l'imaginaire politique fran~,:ais," Le Debat, no. 26 (September 1983): 177; Furet in Dictionnaire critique de Ia Revolution franraise, ed. Furet and M. Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 305. 3. The theme of singularity and exceptionalism is critical to the history and selfrepresentation of many nations. On the hyper-salience of exceptionalism as an instrument of explanation of the American past and as an expression of manifest destiny in

214 Notes to Pages 126-29

the unfolding of the national experience, see the richly textured piece, accompanied by an extensive bibliography, by Michael Kammen, "The Problem of American Exceptionalism Reconsidered," a paper presented to the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, 3 April 1992, at Chicago. On the German Sonderweg and the theory of belated development, with the special political consequences it entailed, see Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 102-3, 108, 114; and Richard Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 114-15. The German case stands in some ways in direct opposition to the French, for the German path led to modernization/ industrialization without a bourgeois revolution. The German debate over exceptionalism acquires its poignancy and urgency through its relationship to Nazism, whose modernity and lack of historical rootedness tends to be stressed by conservatives, while leftists emphasize Nazism's deeply traditional dimensions. 4. In retrospect, Furet may have been harsher than he was at the time, for friends recall that Mitterrand's victory braced him like "a stroke of youth" and that he seriously entertained becoming the directeur de cabinet of Alain Savary, the first minister of national education in the Socialist government. In part it was the nouveau riche manner of the Socialist embrace of power that exasperated his grand bourgeois sensibility and disinclined him to engage. 5. F. Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, nos. 1 Oanuary 1989), 2 (February 1989), and 7 Ouly 1989); interview with Furet, 13 Aprill99l;Jean-Pierre Rioux in Le Monde, 26 Aprill988; interview with Furet, Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February-6 March 1986; Furet interviewed by B. Pivot, Apostrophes, 28 October 1988; P. Assouline and E. Vigne, "Entretien avec F. Furet," L'Histoire, no. 52 Oanuary 1983): 72; Philippe Cailleux and Bertrand Renouvin, "Entretien avec F. Furet," Cite, no. 21 (spring 1989): 10; Joachim Fritz-Vannahme, "Radikal von Anfang an," Die Zeit, no. 21 (19 May 1989); Furet, "1789-1917: Aller et retour," Le Debat, no. 57 (NovemberDecember 1989): 4-11, 16; Furet, "Les Feuilles mortes de l'utopie," Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 April-2 May 1990; Furet, "La France unie," in Furet, J. Julliard, and P. Rosanvallon, La Republique du centre (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1988), 41, 58-66, passim; interview with Msgr. Dagens, 12 April1991; F. Dosse, "La Triade liberale," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 86; interview with Furet by F. Ewald, "Histoire de !'idee revolutionnaire," Magazine litteraire, October 1988, 20; interview with Furet, Liberation, 7 May 1987; Furet, "Cessons d'idolatrer Gorbatchev!" Le Nouvel Observateur, 5-11 July 1990. 6. Le Point, 10 July 1989; Le Quotidie11 de Paris, 15 December 1988; interview with G. Sorman, January 1990. C£ J.-F. Revel's discussion of "Ia normalisation democratique en France" in Le Point, 24 October 1988, and the ultra-Furetian disquisition entitled "The End of French Exceptionalism" by the editor of Le Point, Claude Imbert, in Foreign Affoirs, no. 68 (1989): 48-60. 7. Interview with J. Tulard, 10 April 1991. 8. C. Manceron in Le Monde, 8 October 1986; J.-P. Chevenement cited in FigaroMagazine, 17 May 1991; D. Bensald, Moi, Ia Revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 281,

215 Notes to Pages 129-30 287; F. Ewald, Lettre au president de Ia Mission du Bicentenaire (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1989), 24-25. For a soft American version ofBensaid, with a glimmer of a less elitist Debray, see Michael Zuckerman, "The Irrelevant Revolution: 1776 and Since," American Quarterly, no. 30 (summer 1978), especially pp. 225-41. Zuckerman laments the end of the Revolution in the United States and the inaptitude of Americans to identify with the republic and its values. Struck by the rampant disinterest of Americans for their bicentennial, he wrote that in 1976 "we declared our incapacity to connect rewardingly, or even coherently, with our Revolutionary origins. . . . the ideas and ideologies of the Revolutionary generation are essentially inert for us." The author rehearses the alienating transition from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft that mediated the distancing process, the contraction of a truly vigorous public sphere, the etiolation of public opinion (whose inadequate surrogate/reinventor is the high-tech public opinion poll), and so on. "The plain truth seems to be that we no longer believe in our Revolution. We have done our best to tame it and domesticate it .... We have essentially quarantined it. We have entombed it." 9. J.-N. Jeanneney, "Apres coup: Retlexions d'un commemorateur," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 104; Martha Zuber, "Les Enjeux de Ia memoire: An Interview with Jean-Noel Jeanneney," French Politics and Society, no. 7 (spring 1989): 32; interview with M. Agulhon, 11 Aprill991; C. Nicolet, "Faut-illarguer la Republique?" Le Monde diplomatique, June 1989. See also Stanley Hoffmann's vigorous attack on Furet's end-of-the-Revolution thesis, which concedes certain points to his analysis concerning the political evolution of the country but criticizes him for a slovenly historical methodology given to cliched pontification and oversimplification. "The French Revolution and Its Commemoration in Retrospect," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, no. 44 (December 1990). Cf. political historian and commentator Jacques Julliard's solidarity with Furet, his colleague, collaborator, and friend: "Jamais en effet depuis deux siecles les Fran~ais n'avaient ete aussi peu divises." In a decade Mitterrand managed, not always deliberately, to "desamorcer les trois meches lentes que la Revolution avait allumees et qui se consumaient depuis deux siecles, au risque periodiquement de faire sauter la Republique": the debate on institutions, the quarrel over Catholic and other parochial schools, and the so-called social question. Le Nouvel Observateur, 2-8 May 1991. 10. F. Ewald, Lettre au president de Ia Mission du Bicentenaire, 22-23. 11. Interview with F. Furet, Le Figaro, 20-21 February 1988; interview with Furet by P. Lepape, Le Monde, 26 August 1988; interview with Furet, 13 Aprill991. Furet did not reflect on the relation between interpretation and objectivity. Presumably interpretation had to correspond to facts of one sort or another. But whose facts? Culled where? Verified how? How were the facts to be weighed? How much factuality needed to undergird interpretation? When did interpretation become transmuted into fact? Did interpretation attain the power to supersede or contravene fact? Is it too vulgar to fret overly about the facts? Ironically, in the international revisionist division oflabor, the United States was becoming the subcontractor for (revisionist) facts (as it was, in Japanese eyes, for most everything else that the island nation needed to complement the essential). The irony lies in the inversion of the traditional relation

216 Notes to Pages 131-37

between French and American historians. Their easy access to the primary sources and their required institutional trajectory (the tyrannical old doctoral system) made the French the natural and primordial suppliers of information. American historian R. R. Palmer (at Princeton and later at Yale) used to tell his graduate students that they could not expect to compete with the French in the archives. Their task was to appropriate (with proper acknowledgment) the French research, ponder it, compare it with non-French information, and interpret it in fresh ways. 12. G. Suffert, "La Revolution n'est plus ce qu'elle etait." Le Point, 8 July 1985; P. Lepape in Le Monde, 29 January 1988; P. Billard in Le Point, 10 July 1989; L'Express, 7 July 1989; Sud-Ouest, 14 July 1989; dust jacket of Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique. 13. R. Bernstein, "The French Revolution: Right or Wrong." New York Times Book Review, 10 July 1988; C. C. O'Brien, "The Decline and Fall of the French Revolution," New York Review of Books, 15 February 1990; E. G. Sledziewski, "La Strategie Furet." Raison presente, no. 91 (1989): 19. 14. L'Alsace, 12 July 1989; La Revue generate, June-July 1989; F. Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989); Furet, La Gauche et Ia Revolution au milieu du X!Xe siecle: Edgar Quinet et Ia question du Jacobinisme (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 113, passim; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 1030; interview with Furet, 13 April1991; D. Roche, "1789: A chacun sa Revolution," Etudes, September 1988, 204. 15. F. Furet, "En marge des Annates: Histoire et sciences sociales," Le Debat, no. 17 (December 1981): 113-14; C. Nicolet, "Faut-illarguer Ia Republique?" Le Monde diplomatique, June 1989; F. Dosse, L'Histoire en miettes: des "Annates" d Ia "nouvelle histoire" (Paris: La Decouverte. 1987), 216; E. Morin, "L'Ere des ruptures," Espaces Temps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 41-43; Morin, "Remarques brisees: Entretien," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 209, 211. Morin's point is crucial and fruitful because it is not the knee-jerk leftist critique of Furet rooted in a classic discourse of betrayal-Furet, the erstwhile believer, become false prophet. 16. "Ce n'est pas entierement Ia faute de Furet, qui ne fait que profiter du totalitarisme insidieux qui s'est installe dans nos societes.... Je ne lui reproche pas d'en avoir [des theories], mais qu'on nous invite ales considerer beatement comme neutres et objectives." J.-E. Hallier in L'Humanite, 22 December 1988. 17. E. G. Sledziewski, "La Strategie Furet," Raison presente, no. 91 (1989): 21. 18. Cf. F. Furet, "Le Marxisme a-t-il encore usage?" "La Pensee aujourd'hui" in Le Nouvel Observateur, Collection dossier, no. 2 (1990): 30-31. 19. American history is filled with examples, locally and nationally, of the conflict between religion and democracy, and of the permanent tensions that must be managed for the two to coexist. That management obliges religion to obey strict rules that it often tries to circumvent. Operating on his habitually celestial level, Furet seems to mean that the American founding texts (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights) do not bespeak any irremediable incompatibility between democratic requirements and religious needs. 20. F. Furet, "Ret1exions sur !'idee de tradition revolutionnaire dans Ia France du

217 Notes to Pages 138-39

XIXe siecle," Pouvoirs, no. 50 (1989): 4-6; F. Furet, "Reponse aM. Agulhon," Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 39; Furet in Le Nouvel Observateur, 5-11 October 1989; Furet quoted by Walter Schwarz in the Guardian, 4 May 1989; Furet in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 302, 1044-45, 1051;Jean Boissonnat in La Croix, II July 1989; Furet, "La Revolution dans l'imaginaire politique fran~ais," Le Debat, no. 26 (September 1983): 173-74; Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution francaise, no. 2 (February 1989); Furet and Ran Halevi, "L' Annee 1789," Annates: E. S.C., January-February 1989, 12-17. For an enthusiastic endorsement ofFuret's reading of the AmericanEnglish experience, see J.-C. Casanova in L'Express, 23 June 1989; G. Gusdorf, Les Revolutions de France et d'Amerique: La Violence et Ia sagesse (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1988), 63-103, 192. For a critique of his position, seeM. Agulhon, "Fautil avoir peur de 1989?" Le Debat, no. 30 (May 1984): 32; R. Debray, "Entretiens Debray-Dosse," Politis, 3-9 February 1989; report on Furet's Foundation Lecture, Financial Times, 4 July 1989. 21. Jon Wiener, "Dollars for Neocon Scholars," Nation, 1 January 1990; F. Furet, "1789-1917: Aller et retour," Le Debat, no. 57 (November-December 1989): 9-10. On Furet's fetishistic insistence on "reality" as the test of political and analytical intelligence, see the testimony of Gilles Martinet and Georges Kiejman (the latter phrasing it somewhat elliptically: he refers to Furet's preoccupation to "ne pas etre dupe"). Radio France Culture, "Le Bon Plaisir de Fran~ois Furet," 21 November 1992. It was no accident that Furet revealed his most moderate side before an American audience-in part because he could not treat their empiricism with contempt and in part because the Franco-French imperatives did not apply there. See, for example, his exquisitely conciliatory position on the highly controversial issue of the role of "circumstances" in the Terror before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, which devoted a major session to his work. In reference to the Terror, he addressed those critics who "think that because I wanted to find its internal sources within the Revolution itself, by way of reaction against my predecessors, I have been led to underestimate the element of truth contained in the traditional explanation by circumstances, foremost among them the situation created by the war. They may be right to some extent, and I may have pushed this point a bit too for. All of us have a tendency, when an idea or an analysis is important to us, to lose sight of other factors. Yet while I accept the criticism that I have not always been sufficiently careful to avoid one-sidedness in my interpretation, the point I stressed was an essential feature in the mechanism of the Terror." "A Commentary," French Historical Studies, no. 16 (fall 1990): 796. 22. D. Bensa·id, Moi, Ia Revolution, 207, 240; M. Reberioux, "Les Enjeux du Bicentenaire," Politis, 11 February 1988; F. Dosse, L'Histoire en miettes, 213. See also C. Mazauric in Revolution, 2-8 December 1988; R. Debray, Que Vive Ia Republique (Paris: 0. Jacob, 1989), 54-55. 23. M. Vovelle, "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution," paper for the American Historical Association meeting, December 1989; E. G. Sledziewski, "La Strategie Furet," Raison presente, no. 91 (1989): 19.

218 Notes to Pages 140-43 24. M. Reberioux, in Entretiens de Ia Fiderationfranfaise des Maisons desjeunes et de Ia culture, November 1988; C. Mazauric in Revolution, 2-8 December 1988; Mazauric, "La Revolution dans les processus d'acculturation politique des Fran~ais contemporains: Quelques Donnees," in L'/mage de !,a Revolution franfaise, ed. M. Vovelle (Oxford and Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989), 3:2317; D. Bensald, Moi, Ia Revolution, 249. Daniel Singer, in the Nation, echoed the familiar line'on the strategic necessity of recentering: "the Rocbar [Rocard-Barre] crowd really did have to shift back to the center, having moved too far to the right of the stage. Influenced by the nouveaux philosophes, they had tried for a time to discredit the whole idea of revolution, attributing to it an innate tendency toward terror. They were quickly overtaken on this terrain by such truly rabid reactionaries as the group of historians around Pierre Chaunu, who exploited this breach to publicize books about, say, the revolutionary 'genocide' in the Vendee. Furet and his friends then had to retreat." "Dancing on the Grave of Revolution," 6 February 1989, 165-66. 25. The derapage thesis died a slow death. Since it seemed to presage and epitomize the antipathy for R/revolution with which Furet became increasingly identified in the 1970s and afterward, and because its neat dualisms (good and bad Revolutions, unity and conflict, from above and from below, etc.) seemed highly vulnerable, his critics clung to it more tenaciously than he. Defending the classical position, writer Henri Guillemin indignantly (and anachronistically) claimed that derapage was "le mot-de, le mot-de-passe" of the bicentennial. H. Guillemin, Silence aux pauvres! (Paris: Arlea, 1989), 8, 16-19, 35, 70, 80, 107. 26. F. Dosse, "Furet l'embaumeur," Politis, 25 November-1 December 1988; Dosse in L'Evenement du Jeudi, 2-8 February 1989. C£ Dosse's L'Histoire en miettes, 237-38. Friends of Furet accused Dosse, a former student of leftist Sinologist Jean Chesneaux, of building his career by using the galaxy to "showcase himself" A contempt for Dosse's work seems to be one of the points that unites galactic historians and their critics in and around the so-called Annates school. Whatever the merits or weaknesses of his historiographical criticism, Dosse deserves to be engaged and not merely dismissed. 27. Valeurs actuelles, 4 November 1988; F. Furet in Le Nouvel Observateur, 21-27 September 1989. 28. F. Furet in Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February-6 March 1986; Philippe Cailleux and Bertrand Renouvin, "Entretien avec F. Furet," Citi, no. 21 (spring 1989): 9-10; Guardian, 4 May 1989; Furet in Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989); interview with Furet, l3 April1991. In the latter interview, held well after the bicentennial fever had receded, Furet said simply: "il faut etre idiot d'etre contre Ia Revolution," which he characterized as "un immense evenement mal tourne." IfFuret did alter his stand during the bicentennial period, it was in response to the moderate left and center, not the PCF. Still, see L'Humanite 's attack on him for his "sournois travail de denigrement" against the Revolution. 31 October 1988. It should be underlined that not everyone on the right -even in the orbit of FigaroMagazine -anathematized the Revolution. For instance, Jean d'Ormesson regarded it as "le plus grand evenement de notre histoire atous, le plus important apres Ia mort du Christ." Cited L'Express, 3-9 June 1988.

219 Notes to Pages 145-53

Chapter7 Managing the "Historical" Bicentennial: Michel Vovelle as Insider and Outsider 1. M. Vovelle, A ventures de Ia raison (Paris: Belfond, 1989), 133; interview with F. Furet, 13 April 1991. 2. "Voyez-vous," added Chevenement, exhibiting his remarkable gift for selfdeception, "marxiste pour les uns, maurrassien pour les autres, je m'efforce simplement d'etre objectif." Figaro-Magazine, 17 May 1991. 3. M. Vovelle, Report to Chevenement, 3 July 1982, Mission papers, AN, 90050611534; Vovelle, Aventures de Ia raison, 133-34. 4. M. Vovelle, "La Memoire d'Ernest Labrousse," Annates historiques de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, no. 276 (April-June 1989): 99, 101, 107; M. Vovelle, "Plutot labroussien que braudelien," EspacesTemps, nos. 34-35 (1986): 18-19. See also Pierre Vilar's shock at "le contraste entre le quasi-silence autour de sa disparition [Labrousse's ], et !'emotion officielle et publique soulevee quelques temps auparavant, autour de Fernand Braude!." "E. Labrousse et le savoir historique," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 276 (April-June 1989): 113.

5. Bulletin de Ia Commission nationale de Ia recherche pour le Bicentenaire de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 1 (November 1983): 2-3; interview with F. Furet, 13 April 1991, who relates how Labrousse chided him for his (unwarranted) fascination with Napoleon. Vovelle recounts movingly Labrousse's evocation of "our Great Revolution" on his deathbed. Interview with Vovelle, January 1991. 6. Interview with M. Vovelle, January 1991; interview with M. Vovelle, Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, no. I Oanuary 1989); Le Monde, 10-11 September 1989; Vovelle's Report to Chevenement, 3 July 1982, AN, 90050611534; interview with C. Mazauric, 14 April 1991. 7. Liberation, 8 December 1987; Le Figaro, 20-21 February 1988. 8. Interview with M. Vovelle, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. I Oanuary 1989). It is too bad that strategic considerations blunted the pleasure that Vovelle could take in playing Marx to Gauchet's Hegel. Marx's epitaph, drawn from his last thesis on Feuerbach, was "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Cited by Richard P. Appelbaum, Karl Marx (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988), 147. I am grateful to Carla Hesse for calling this phrase to my attention. 9. M. Vovelle in Bulletin de Ia Commission nationale de Ia recherche historique pour le Bicentenaire de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, nos. 1 (November 1983) and 3 Oune 1986); Vovelle, Report to Chevenement, 3 July 1982, Mission papers, AN, 90050611534; Vovelle, Aventures de Ia Raison, 134; interview with M. Agulhon, 11 April 1991; minutes of the comite directeur, 18 October 1986, Mission papers, AN, 900506/937. Cf. conservative historian Fran~ois Crouzet's very different appreciation of Vovelle: "He has played the ayatollah, but in a covert, Tartuffian manner, more skillfully than the late Soboul. His aim has been to run down and isolate Furet and his group, and to reconstruct a sort of Popular Front ofleft-wing-historians (he went as far as pretending that Aulard and the Jacobin school had been in broad agreement!). His tactic has

220 Notes to Pages 154-57 been to attack violently the 'counter-revolutionary historians,' especially Pierre Chaunu." Historians and the French Revolution: The Case of Maximilien Robespierre (Swansea: University College, 1989), 23-24. 10. M. Vovelle to editor of L'Histoire, no. 92 (September 1986): 116. Michel Winock, "conseiller de Ia Direction," listed second on L'Histoire's masthead, vigorously supported Furetian positions throughout the bicentennial. A member of the editorial board, contemporary historian J.-P. Rioux, shared Winock's position. Both took immense satisfaction in Furet's revalorization of political history, and recent history, so strenuously decried by the old-time Annates arbiters. Another member of the board, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, shared their pleasure in the return of the political; but he publicly took his distance from the Furetian line. Board member Jean Lacouture, the eminent journalist, had multiple galactic connections. But it would be hard to tie fellow board member Eric Vigne, a masterful editor and searching historiographical critic, to the Furetian orbit, despite the fact that he worked for Antoine Gallimard. 11. For an idea of how far away Soboul stood from Vovelle in his approach to the history of the Revolution on the eve of the bicentennial period, see Soboul's report on Claude Mazauric's doctoral defense, "Sur les travaux de Cl. Mazauric," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franraise, no. 241 Ouly-September 1989): 473-82. 12. SeeM. Vovelle, Marat: Textes choisis (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962); La Chute de Ia monarchie, 1787-1792, in the Nouvelle Histoire de Ia France contemporaine series (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972); Religion et Revolution: La Dechristianisation de I'an II (Paris: Hachette, 1976); and L'lrresistible Ascension de Joseph Sec, bourgeois d'Aix (Aix: Edisud, 1975). He also published a work in Italian Breve Storia della Rivoluzione Francese (Rome: Laterza, 1979). In this narrow personal bibliographical sense, Vovelle clearly was, in the words of a fellow historian, "arme pour faire un bon Bicentenaire." For a more or less complete bibliography, see M. Vovelle, Aventures de la raison, 173-90. 13. Yet the American revisionists irritated Vovelle mightily. First, he resented their infidelity: not long ago they had practically all been cheerful Jacobins. Second, he resented the claims (characteristically made by their French allies) "que 1e renouvellement de notre connaissance de Ia Revolution venait d'abord d'outre-Atlantique." Vovelle scoffed at the idea that "ils connaissaient mieux meme Ia province que les fran~ais," whose work, he suggested, they had not bothered to read. On this unfortunate outburst, seeM. Vovelle, A ventures de Ia raison, 121, 135; Vovelle, "L' Age de Ia prise de conscience," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 37; interview with Vovelle, Revolution, 2-8 December 1988; interview with Vovelle, La Croix, 9 June 1988. "On peut se demander," wrote Vovelle in a paper delivered in his name at the 1989 meeting of the American Historical Association, "ce qu'il y a de plus vulgaire que le marxisme vulgaire, sinon peut etre l'antimarxisme vulgaire." Perhaps muffled anti-AngloSaxonism? "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolutions." 14. M. Vovelle, "Premiers Regards sur le Bicentenaire," Cercle Condorcet, no. 11 (March 1990): 15; F. Furet, Penser Ia Revolution franraise (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 137; interview with Vovelle, 12 December 1988, in Entretiens de Ia Federationfranraise des Maisons des jeunes et de Ia culture, May 1989. But compare his much more prudent statement at the meeting of the American Historical Association in December 1989:

221 Notes to Pages 163-65 "Peut-etre convient-il de reconnaitre qu'il n'existe plus aujourd'hui de lecture hegemonique, et que c'est sans doute un bien." "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution." 15. M. Vovelle, "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation"; interview with Vovelle, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franyaise, no. 2 (February 1989); Vovelle, "La Memoire d'Ernest Labrousse," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 276 (April-June 1989): 100, 104; interview with Vovelle, January 1991; Vovelle, Aventures de Ia Raison, 86-87, 91, 101-2, 105-10, 129-30; Vovelle, "L'Historiographie de Ia Revolution fran~aise," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 273 OulySeptember 1988): 307; Vovelle, "Un Bilan scientifique du Bicentenaire," Cahiers d'histoire de l'Institut de recherches marxistes, no. 40 (1990): 5, 7-8; Vovelle, "Nouveau Bilan du Bicentenaire," manuscript essay, circa fall 1990; F. Aubert and H. Tison, "Entretien avec M. Vovelle," Historiens-Geographes, no. 324 (August-September 1989): 119; Vovelle, foreword to L'Etat de Ia France pendant Ia Revolution, ed. M. Vovelle (Paris: La Decouverte, 1988), 4; Vovelle, preface to Recherches sur Ia Revolution: Un Bilan des travaux scientifiques du Bicentenaire, ed. M. Vovelle and Antoine de Baecque (Paris: La Decouverte-lnstitut d'Histoire de Ia Revolution Fran~aise­ Societe des Etudes Robespierristes, 1991), 7-10. Vovelle, "L'Age de Ia prise de conscience," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 (1988): 36-37; Vovelle, "Premiers Regards sur le Bicentenaire," Cercle Condorcet, no. 11 (March 1990): 15; Vovelle, "Plutot labroussien que braudelien," EspacesTemps, nos. 34-35 (1986): 16-17; Vive 89 en Ille-etVilaine, no. 3 (December 1988). Cf. the suggestive reflection on bicentennial historiography by Antoine de Baecque, "L'Histoire de Ia Revolution dans son moment hermeneutique," in Vovelle and de Baecque, Recherches sur Ia Revolution, 11-41. Historians did not reprove the term "revisionism" for the same reasons. Vovelle deplored the "ambiguity" of the label, "en particulier par Ia confusion a laquelle il prete avec !'autre revisionnisme-celui qui conteste dans l'histoire de Ia seconde guerre mondiale Ia realite de l'holocauste." "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution." While surely not indifferent to this perspective, Daniel Roche wrote: "Revisionnisme: terme qu'on devrait eviter a cause de ses connotations staliniennes marquees." "1789: A chacun sa Revolution," Etudes, September 1988, 203. 16. M. Vovelle, Aventures de Ia Raison, 129-30; Vovelle, "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution"; Vovelle, "La Sorbonne: La Galerie des ancetres," Magazine littiraire, no. 258 (October 1988): 79; Vovelle, "Nouveau Bilan du Bicentenaire," manuscript essay, circa falll990; C. Mazauric, "L'Intelligence de Ia necessite," Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 5 (May 1989). There seems to be some parallel between the orthodox Communist reprimand of Soboul in the late 1950s for "sociologism" pressed by Furet along with Annie Kriegel and Jean Poperen, and Soboul's own critique of Vovelle's deviance a decade later. 17. M. Vovelle in L'Humaniti, 15 July 1985 and 12 September 1988; La Marseillaise, 17 May 1987. Does the profane nature ofVovelle's audience account for his somewhat surprising use oflanguage? On the one hand, he censured Furet and Richet for both discountenancing and underestimating the significance from the outset of the role of the masses. Elsewhere in the piece he adverted to the shift of locus of the

222 Notes to Pages 168-75

popular Revolutionary "mythology" from sansculottic Paris to the peasant Vendee. Is it, then, a puissant mythology, as Furet often suggests, or is it a documentable and palpable experience of mobilization and action?

ChapterS From the Living Revolution to the Historiographical Journees Revolutionnaires I. M. Vovelle in L'Humaniti, 7 January 1983. 2. M. Vovelle, "La Revolution, Ia Liberte, Ia Republique" and "Revolution, Liberte, Europe," Cahiers du Bicentenaire de Be/fort, nos. 1 Oune 1987) and 4 (October 1988); Vovelle in Magazine litteraire, nos. 267-268 Ouly-August 1989): 58; filmed interview with Vovelle, S. Moati, Journal d' un bicentenaire; Vovelle in Revolution, 14 July 1989; Vovelle, "L' Age de .Ia prise de conscience," EspacesTemps, nos. 38-39 ( 1988): 36, 40; Vovelle, A ventures de Ia Raison (Paris: Belfond, 1989), 136-39; Vovelle in Revolution, 6-12 February 1987; interview with Vovelle, Le Monde, 6July 1989; F. Aubert and H. Tison, "Entretien avec M. Vovelle," Historiens-Giographes, no. 324 (August-September 1989): 120; Vovelle in L'Humaniti, 15 July 1985; Vovelle, "Rien n'est joue," Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 12 (December 1989); Vovelle, "L'Historiographie de Ia Revolution fran~aise," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 273 Ouly-September 1988); Vovelle, "Conter Ia Revolution ... servir Ia Republique," Armies d'aujourd'hui, March 1989, 35; interview with Vovelle, Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 1 Oanuary 1989); Vovelle, "Premiers Regards sur le Bicentenaire," Cercle Condorcet, no. 11 (March 1990): 13; Vovelle, "Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution," paper for the American Historical Association meeting, December 1989; Vovelle, "Nouveau Bilan du Bicentenaire," manuscript essay, circa fall 1990, kindly communicated by the author. Note that "fidelity" and "hope" are the leitmotifs of Vovelle's address before the Amis de Robespierre pour le Bicentenaire de Ia Revolution at Arras in June 1988. "Pourquoi nous sommes encore Robespierristes," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 274 (October-December 1988): 498-506. Vovelle's campaign was of immense importance to the Communist party. "Nous savons bien," commented Secretary-General Georges Marchais, "que la connaissance de notre histoire et de ses faits les plus enthousiasmants ne peut qu'aider les hommes, les femmes, les jeunes a mieux se situer dans les combats d'aujourd'hui pour mieux y participer et Ia mener jusqu'a Ia victoire." Revolution, 2-8 December 1988. 3. M. Vovelle, "Rien n'est joue," Le Monde de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 12 (December 1989); Vovelle, "La Revolution, Ia Liberte, Ia Republique," Cahiers du Bicentenaire de Be/fort, no. 1 Oune 1987): 10; interview with Vovelle, S. Maoti, Apropos de Ia Revolution franfaise.

4. Note how Jean-Rene Suratteau, a long-time collaborator of Albert Soboul, recoils from the bloc in the Dictionnaire historique de Ia Revolution franfaise, published under Soboul's authorial name and edited by Suratteau and Fran~ois Gendron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), xxix: "On ne peut plus considerer Ia Revolu-

223 Notes to Pages 176-79 tion comme un 'bloc,' ce qui serait admettre d'emblee que Ia nuit du 4 aout et Ia Declaration des droits avaient deja en germe obligatoire Ia guerre civile, Ia Terreur et leurs exd:s. La Revolution a ete plurielle en ce sens qu'il n'y a pas eu en 1789 un plan preetabli pour arriver a tel ou tel resultat, mais une volonte de promotion surtout enracinee dans un groupe social (si on repudie le terme de 'classe' a cause de sa connotation marxiste ulterieure)." What a retreat! 5. Interview with Vovelle, Entretiens de Ia Federation franfaise des Maisons des jeunes et de Ia culture, December 1988; Vovelle, Aventures de Ia Raison, 119-20; F. Aubert and H. Tison, "Entretien avec M. Vovelle," Historiens-Geographes, no. 324 (AugustSeptember 1989); interview with Vovelle, Revolution, 14 July 1989; interview with Vovelle, Le Monde, 6 July 1989; Vovelle, "L'Historiographie de Ia Revolution fran~ise a Ia veille du bicentenaire," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 272 (April-June 1988): 126. 6. D. Bensald, "Un Bicentenaire thermidorien," in Permanences de Ia Revolution (Paris: La Breche, 1989), 10; F. Dosse, "1789-1989 so us le linceul: La Revolution," in ibid., 18, 21. 7. M. Vovelle, "Revolution, Liberte, Europe," Cahiers du Bicentenaire de Be/fort, no. 4 (October 1988); Revolution, 14 July 1989; Vovelle, "L'Historiographie de Ia Revolution fran~aise," Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 273 OulySeptember 1988): 311, 314; La Croix, 9 June 1988; Vovelle, "Premiers Regards sur le Bicentenaire," Cercle Condorcet, no. 11 (March 1990): 13; Vovelle, in Entretiens de Ia Federation franfaise des Maisons des jeunes et de Ia culture, December 1988; Vovelle, Aventures de Ia Raison, 135; interview with Vovelle, L'Humaniti, 15 July 1985; A. Casanova in Vive Ia Revolution 1789-1989, by C. Mazauric and Casanova, ed. C. Ducol (Paris: Messidor/Editions Sociales, 1989), 31. 8. M. Vovelle, "Premiers regards sur le Bicentenaire," Cercle Condorcet, no. 11 (March 1990): 14. For the list of all the colloquia with which the Vovelle commission had some connection, see M. Vovelle with Danielle Le Monnier, Les Colloques du Bicentenaire (Paris: La Decouverte-lnstitut d'Histoire de Ia Revolution Fran~aise­ Societe des Etudes Robespierristes, 1991). Vovelle was not, of course, an actor or promoter in each of the 549 colloquia he registered around the world. Of these scholarly meetings, almost 42 percent took place in France (58 in Paris, 171 in the provinces), sponsored primarily by the universities and by various associations, including those created specifically for the bicentennial and, additionally, by archives, museums, and governmental institutions. The rest of Europe accounted for almost as many colloquia as France. The United States organized forty-eight colloquia, the next bulkiest contribution. Vovelle provides a suggestive analysis of rising and falling themes. The political was on the march, though it was not always easy to distinguish the more traditional political focus of the sort that dominated the centennial from the newer influences. Cultural history showed extraordinary inventiveness and vitality. The rights of man flourished as a theme that traversed many disciplines. Economic and social history were the dominant themes in barely 5 percent of the colloquia. See ibid., iii-xii. 9. M. Vovelle, editorial, Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franfaise, no. 263 Oanuary-March 1986): 4-6.

224 Notes to Pages 184-89

10. Interview with M. Vovelle, Le Monde, 6 July 1989; Vovelle cited in L'Humaniti, 22June 1989; interview with Vovelle,January 1991; Bulletin de Ia Commission nationale de Ia recherche historique pour le Bicentenaire de Ia Revolution franyaise, no. 4 Oune 1986): 4-5; C. Andrieu to E. Faure, 15 December 1987, Mission papers, AN, 900506/937; interviews with C. Andrieu, 17 January and 18 July 1991. There was surely a dose of irony in Vovelle's homage to "Ia sympathie non mesuree" of Edgar Faure in his inaugural speech to the congress. Vovelle, "Discours d'ouverture," 6 July 1989, Mission papers, AN, 900506/937. The organ of the PCF was not happy about Vovelle's forced dependence on big capital: "A noter que le peu de moyens financiers dont dispose le CNRS a contraint le comite de preparation afaire appel au magnat de presse britannique Robert Maxwell pour !'edition de ces ouvrages." L'Humaniti, 22 June 1989. Literary historian Roland Desne was one of several leftist scholars who denounced the idea of a colloquium funded by foreigners. Charismatic and creative in life, Robert Maxwell became deeply controversial at his death, which occurred in late 1991. A lifelong Socialist, he was a personal friend of Mitterrand and cultivated many gardens in France. Colin Lucas, an international figure in French historiographical circles and the catalyst of several of Maxwell's publishing ventures concerning the Revolution, recalls that Pergamon Press had agreed to provide up to a million francs for the Vovelle colloquium before the famous coordinating committee meeting in the dingy Sorbonne basement. Apparently the Mission was not aware of the precise terms of Maxwell's commitment or the exact moment it was formalized. If this chronology is correct, then Vovelle had assurance well before visiting Faure that, in a worst-case scenario, he would be able to hold a no-frills colloquium with the funds thus far pledged. Lucas to author, 16 December 1991. II. Interview with M. Vovelle, Le Monde, 6 July 1989; F. Aubert and H. Tison, "Entretien avec M. Vovelle," Historiens-Geographes, no. 324 (August-September 1989): 119; interview with Vovelle, January 1991. 12. F. Furet, letter to Le Monde, 12 July 1989; interview with F. Furet, 13 April 1991. 13. Interview with M. Agulhon, II April 1991; J.-N. Jeanneney, "Discours de cloture du Congres mondial," 12 July 1989, Mission papers, AN, 900506/carton "Congres." 14. F. Mitterrand, speech opening the Congres mondial, Sorbonne, 6 July 1989, Elysee press office. 15. M. Vovelle, "Discours d'ouverture," 6 July 1989, Mission papers, AN, 900506/937; Vovelle, "Conclusion," 12 July 1989, L'Image de Ia Revolution franyaise, ed. Vovelle (Oxford and Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989), 4:2699-701. 16. J.-N. Jeanneney, "Discours de cloture du Congres mondial," 12 July 1989, Mission papers, AN, 900506/carton "Congres." Cf. the published version, "Allocution de cloture," in Vovelle, L'Image de Ia Revolution franyaise, 4:2703-6. In his speech, Jeanneney put a curiously confining retrospective reading on Vovelle's Commission nationale de Ia recherche historique, whose "sole function" was to prepare the congress. Surely Jeanneney knew that Vovelle's mandate was far broader and that he was involved in literally hundreds of colloquia as well as other scientific projects.

225 Notes to Pages 189-96 17. Interview with C. Mazauric, 14 Aprill991; M. Vovelle in L'Humanite, 19 July 1989. 18. R. Chartier in Le Monde, 15 July 1989. Cf. Michel Peronnet, "Images de !'image de Ia Revolution fran~aise (Congres mondial, Sorbonne, 6-12 July 1989)," Historiens-Geographes, no. 324 (August-September 1989): lll-18. 19. How far can one carry this surprisingly masochistic analogy? Furet-Bush denouncing Boston Harbor-style pollution in the Augean stable of the Sorbonne? Robespierre-Stalin as Willie Horton? Vovelle garbed in an armored Phrygian bonnet descending the rue de la Sorbonne in a tank? One can imagine every scenario save one: Vovelle starting the campaign, like Dukakis, twenty points ahead of his rival in the polls. 20. Interview with M. Vovelle, Le Monde de Ia Revolutionfranfaise, no. 2 (February 1989); Vovelle, "Premiers Regards sur le Bicentenaire," Cercle Condorcet, no. 11 (March 1990): 13; interview with Vovelle, 15 January 1991; interview with D. Roche, January 1990; Vovelle in Revolution, 14 July 1989; Vovelle in Magazine litteraire, nos. 267-68 Ouly-August 1989): 58; filmed interview with Vovelle, S. Moati, Autour du 14 juillet; interview with F. Furet, 13 April 1991; Vovelle in L'Humanite, 19 July 1989.

Farewell l. On the use of political culture, see the luminous observations of Lynn Hunt, "Political Culture and the French Revolution." States and Social Structures Newsletter, no. ll (fall 1989), l-3. One should also profit from the wonderfully intelligent reflections in "History beyond Social Theory" (in David Carroll, ed., The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 95-111) in which she deals with some of the grave perils of disconnecting the symbolic from the social. 2. See M. Thatcher's article, a sort of political testament, in Newsweek, 27 April 1992.

Index

absolute monarchy, 94 Academie fran~ise, 148 Academie des sciences morales et politiques, 27 Action fran~aise, 92 Afanasiev, Yuri, 125 Aftalion, Florian, 48 Agulhon, Maurice, 73, 80, 89- 90, 93- 94, 109, !53; in defense of bicentennial congress, 183; on Furet's refusal to participate in congress, 185; on "republican consensus," 178 Aix-en-Provence, 144, ISS Algerian War, 53, ISO L'Alsace, 81, 131 American political system, as compared to French, 124; Furet's encounter with, 134 American Revolution. See revolution Andrieu, Claire, 181-84 Annales: economies, sociitis, civilisations, 57, 101, 111, 114 Annates historiques de Ia Revolution franraise, 155, 178 Annates school, 14, 15, 100, 131, 195; Vovelle and, 155 Anti-89, 92 Apostrophes, 61 · Arch Foundation, 184 Arendt, Hannah, 78, 87, 160 Aron, Raymond, 51, 117, 134 Aulard, Alphonse, 120, 167, 173

Babeuf, Gracchus, 105; Babouvisme, 71 Baker, Keith, 58, 185 Barbie, Klaus, trial of, 43 Bardet, Jean-Pierre, 182-83 Barnave, Antoine, 105, 112, 114 Barre, Raymond, 138 Barruel, abbe, 42, 47 Bastiat, Frederic, I 06 Bastille, 30, 91 Benoist, Jean-Marie, 93 Bensald, Daniel, 49, 92, 97, 108, 118, 128, 138, 177; on Furet's political itinerary, 140 Bergeron, Louis, 58 Bernstein, Richard, 131 Bertier de Sauvigny, Louis, 112 Besan~on, Alain, 96, 132 Besse, Dominique, 182 Betourne, Olivier, 76-79 bicentennial, 3, 17, 112, 131 archives, 7 Chaunu's impact on, 47 colloquia associated with, 178 Communist commemoration of, 95 debates about, 43, 111, 175, 190; Communist, 18; F uret's control of, 9; positions ofFuret and Vovelle in, 174-75 image of Condorcet in, 119, 128 involvement of Ministry of Research, 144- 46 Vovelle's strategy for· celebration of, 146

227

228 Index Bicentennial Commission, 166; establishment of, 148; Furet's relation to, 149; membership, 149; presence of Communists, 152; after return of right to power in 1986, 151; role in funding of colloquia, 181; Vovelle's role in, 166 Bicentennial, International Congress: as commemorative event, 188; funding for, 181-82; Furet's criticism of, 185; Vovelle's responsibility for, 179; Vovelle's vision of, 179-80 Bicentennial Mission, 7, 184, 188 Bien, David, 58 Billard, Pierre, 131 Blanc, Louis, 117, 120 Bloch, Marc, 16, 103 Bloom, Allan, 138 Bluche, Fran~ois, 48 Blum, Leon, 148 Bolsheviks, 36, 125; Bolshevism, 45 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 2, 64 Bourdieu, Pierre, 111 bourgeois revolution. See revolution bourgeois society, 109 Braude!, Fernand, 26, 51; Braudelian analysis, 125; influence on Chaunu, 26 Bredin, Jean-Denis, 87, 101 Brigneau, Fran~ois, 163 Bruhat, Jean, 96 Brunei, Fran~oise, 149 Brunswick Manifesto, 92 Buchez, Philippe, 112, 117 Burke, Edmund, 34, 40, 65, 68, 91, 94, 106, 136; Furet's use of, 94 Bush, George, 163

Cabouat, Jean-Pierre, 182, 184 Caen, 26, 155 Camisards, 39 capitalism, 23, 82, 133 Carnot, Lazare, 47 Carter, Jimmy, 140 Casanova, Antoine, 109, 149, 177 Cathars, 89 Catholic church, 124, 137; as resistant to celebration of bicentennial, 129; school system, 126 celebration vs. commemoration of Revolution, 166, 186, 194; Vovelle on, 173. See also commemoration centennial anniversary of the Revolution, 32,

146

Centre de recherche d'histoire quantitative, 26 Centre de recherches historiques, 51, 110 Centre national de Ia recherche scientifique, 27, 51, 58, 149, 184 Chartier, Roger, 59, 110-12, 183, 189 Chevenement, Jean-Pierre, 128, 144-46, 153, 181 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 29 Chirac, Jacques, 126 Christianity, 27, 29, 32, 40 Civil Code, 64, 65, 141 civil society, 32, 36 civil war, in France, 24, 29, 37, 39-40, 8384, 90, 123, 128; ideological role of, 130 class struggle, 14 Clemenceau, Georges, 175 CNN, 71 Cobban, Alfred, 162 Cochin, Augustin, 35, 42, 70, 77, 84, 91, 110 collective memory, Vovelle on, 178 commemoration, 6, 24, 43, 45-46, 103, 123, 142, 146, 153, 166; Chaunu's attitude toward, 43-45; debate over nature of, 8, 60; Furet's disdain for, 142; institutional, 11; official functions of, 129; as reflex, 62; Revolution as commemorative object, 80; Vovelle on, 173 Common Program, French government, 142 Communism, 112; disintegration of, 125; as failed political system, 132, 147; Furet's attitude toward, 88, 112; Furet on failure of, 132; Russian errors in, 99, Stalinist, 133. See also Marxism Communists, 52, 60, 88, 97, 124; French, 105; Communist party, 9, 27, 28, 45, 5152, 57, 96; Communists/Marxists, 161; See also Parti Communiste Fran~is Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 130 Conseil national de Ia recherche scientifique, 148 Constant, Benjamin, 68, 70, 83, 87, 114115, 119 Corday, Charlotte, 130 Council of Five Hundred, 2 counterrevolutionaries, 89, 91, 123, 130, 194; Vovelle's attitude toward, 153 counterrevolutionary movement, 15, 25, 82; Chaunu and, 29, 48; as historical school, 28, 39; as idea, 90-91, 142; and memory, 49; position of, 48; themes of, 29

229 Index Dagens, monseigneur, bishop of Poitiers, 124 Danton, Georges, 91, 168 Danton (film), 168 Daudet, Leon, 92 Daumard, Adeline, 100 Le Debat, 56-57, 59 Debray, Regis, 56, 80-81, 89, 92, 170 dechristianization: Chaunu on, 29-30 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 93-94, 171; Chaunu on, 40-41 de Gaulle, Charles, 64; Gaullism, 44 democracy, 22, 24, 40, 63-64, 70, 73, 117, 125, 133, 135, 170, 187, 193; American model, 125; French, 124; Furet's concern with, 73; modern, 114; practice of, 126; relationship to religion, 137 demography, 31, 32; and stagnation, 46 Depardieu, Gerard, 187 Derive vs. Derapage in Furet, 140-43 Desne, Roland, 149 despotism, 23, 127, 193; and popular sovereignty, 194 Dictionnaire critique de Ia Revolution franfaise, 56-59, 61-69, 73-74, 111; Furet's

treatment of Night of 4 August, 69, of Jacobinism, 69-70, of Terror, 70-71, of Vendee, 72 Diderot, Denis, 95 Die Zeit, 122 Directory, 2 discourse analysis, I 02, 196 discourse, Revolutionary, 123 Dosse, Fran~ois, 96, 139, 178; on Furet's understanding of the Revolution, 140-41 Duby, Georges, 73 Dukakis, Michael, 191 Durkheim, Emile, Ill Eastern Europe, 22-23, 125, 187; liberation of, 168-9 Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 8, 51, 55, 57-58, 110, 128, 132, 148, 151, 153, 191 Ecole nor male, Saint-Cloud, !51, !54 Ecole normale superieure, 50 Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, 51, 128 Eiffel Tower, 146 eighteenth century, 23, 29, 86, 102; corporate world, 75 Elias, Norbert, 111 English revolution. See revolution enlightened despotism, 33

Enlightenment, 33, 61, 63, 65, 74, 90-91, 95, 19, 136, 159; Chaunu's view of, 33; Furet's ideas on, 63; ideology of, 23; relation to public sphere, 117 equality, 20, 22, 41, 125-26, 135 Esprit, 49 ethnography, 17, 28 L'Evenement du Jeudi, 57, 60 Ewald, Fran~ois, 101, 119, 130 exceptionalism, French, 23, 122, 135, 16970; call for end of, 132; Furet on, 122; Vovelle's case for, 169, 172 execution, of the king, 2 Express, 131 Fabius, Laurent, !51 faubourg Saint-Antoine, 75 Faure, Edgar, 95, 125, 138, 182-84 Favier, Jean, 149 Fayard, 48 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 89 Febvre, Lucien, 103 Federalist revolts, 90 feudalism, 65, 67-69 Le Figaro, 29, 47, 56, 128; Figaro-Magazine, 93, 128 Finkielkraut, Alain, 57 Fleurus, battle of, 84 Fondation Saint-Simon, 56, 138 Foucault, Michel, Ill, !51 Foulon, Joseph Fran~ois, 112 French Orleanism, 57 Freppel, bishop of Angers, 32 Furetian galaxy, 56, 58, 63, 66, 78, 96, 103, 106, 117, 119, 120, 169 Furetian logic, 113; philosophical ideas in, 116 Galiani, abbe Ferdinando, 95 Gallimard, 57 Gallo, Max, 48, 88, 90-91, 109; as representative of Marxist left, 130 Gauchet, Marcel, 47-48, 117; attack on Vovelle, 151-52 genocide, 37, 38, 40, 45; Chaunu's ideas on, 9, 38-39; "Franco-French," 37, 38, 40; Vendeen, 42 Giesbert, Franz-Oiivier, 57, 128 Gironde, 114; Girondins, 2 Giscard d'Estaing, Valery, 57 Godechot, Jacques, 67, 149 Godelier, Maurice, 149, 182 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 102

230 Index Goude, Jean-Paul, 88, 188-89 Gournayites, 75 Goy, Joseph, 58 Great Fear, 22 Gregoire, abbe Henri, 67 Guardian, 143 Gueniffey, Patrick, 58 Guilbert, Paul, 80 guilds, 69; interests of, 75 Guilhaumou, Jacques, 119 Guizot, Fran~ois Pierre Guillaume, 87 Gusdorf, Georges, 93 Gut, Philippe, 67 Habermas, Jiirgen, 16, 24 habitus, 55, 10 Halevi, Ran, 48, 77-79 Hartig, Aglaia 1., 76-79 Hayek, Friedrich von, 106 Hegel, Friedrich, 112, 114 Henri IV, 154 Higonnet, Patrice, 58 Hildebrand, Klaus, 22 Hincker, Fran~ois, 149 L 'Histoire, 57, 153 historians: academic, 115; of ideas, 89; Jacobin, 72; Marxist, 91 historical materialism, 34, 68, 100, 164, 196 Historikerstreit: and bicentennial, 21; French version, 9, 12, 24; German, 80 historiography, 4, 6, 19-20, 23-24, 65-66, 72, 79, 89, 119, 134 Annates school, 14-15, 100, 131, 195 axioms of, 78 of bicentennial, 59 Braudelian, 30 Burkean, 32-33 "classical" Revolutionary, 131, 163, 179; Furet on, 65-66 criticism of, 8 Furet's use of, 19, 67-68 of ideas, 68 Jacobin, 62, 156, 162 Marxist, 48, 99-100, 102 and professional historical canon, 48 revisionist, 162 revolutionary grid of, 118 scientific, 193 socialist, 69 university, 121, 156 history: commemorative, 77; "critical school," 163; cultural, 154, 157; economic, 17, 21; Furet's conception of, I 0,

102, !54; of ideas, 68, 86, 91, 101, 104, Ill; "Jacobino-republican," 38, 57; Labrousseau, 89; Marxist, 15, 119; "New," 14, 15, 147; philosophical, 73; political, 73, 101, 116, 195-96; "republican~ scientific," 119; of the Revolution, 15; social, 9, 10, 14, 19, 21, 51, 86, 100-102, 104, 108, 110, 154, 195; Vovelle oneconomic, !59; Vovelle on political, 158-59 History of France, 73 Holocaust, 12, 37, 38 Huard, Raymond, 149 L'Humanite, 164-65, 168, 171, 180; Vovelle in, 189, 192 Hungarian revolt, 53 Hunt, Lynn, 59 Huntington, Samuel, 138

ideological terror, twentieth century, 115 ideology, 10, 24, 42, 60, 67, 71, 120, 132; of eighteenth century, 104; Franco-Russian creation of revolutionary, 97; Furet's beliefs, 129; Furet's construction of Revolution, 122; positivist, 121; revolutionary, 44, 129; socialist, 126 Institut d'histoire du temps present, 6, 48, 183 Institut Raymond Aron, 58, 138, 162 International revolutionary movement, 167 Invisible Hand, 135, 161 Jacobins, 2, 13, 22, 43, 45, 47, 68, 85, 9798, 140, 157; Furet on, 96-97; leaders of, 83; logic, as influenced by Rousseau, 85; model for historians, 75; modern day, 88; social policy, 101; as Vovelle's selfdescription, 166 Jacobinism, 33, 70, 93, 115, 147; detrimental effects on the Revolution, 125; outside France, 176; relation to Bolsheviks, 96 "Jacobino-Marxists," 15, 21, 70, 87, 114, 121, 187, 194-96 Janson-de-Sailly, lycee, 50 Jaures, Jean, 76, 120 "Jaures" Commission, 148 Jeanneney, Jean-Nod, 109, 129, 186, 188 Joffrin, Laurent, 56 John Paul II, pope, 129 Jospin, Lionel, 58 Julia, Dominique, 183 Julliard, Jacques, 54 July Monarchy, 112

231 Index Kant, Immanuel, 68 Khrushchev, Nikita, 133 Kiejman, Georges, 55 Kolakowski, Ledzek, 125 Kristol, Irving, 138 Kundera, Milan, 161 Labrousse, Ernest, 11, 26, 53, 67, 100, 109, 148, 179; Labroussean analysis, Ill Laicity, 137 Langlois, Claude, 40, 66 Lautman, Jacques, 182 law, 24; lawyers, 36 Law of the Maximum, 71, 72, 106-8, 113; socialist interpretation of, 108 Le Bon, Gustave, 35 Lebrun, Fran~ois, 39 Lefebvre, Georges, 15, 43, 67, 120-21 Lefort, Claude, 78, !51 Left Bank, 55 Le Goff, Jacques, 51 Lemarchand, Guy, 149 Lenin, 34; Leninism, 115 Leotard, Fran~ois, minister of culture !51 Lepape, Pierre, 56 ' Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 73, 96, 132 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 60 Levy, Jacques, I 09 liberal democracy, 116; ethos of, I 05; framework of Revolution, 140; and society, 109 liberalism, 23, 63, 70 75 90 93 108 117 ' 125, 147, 167; Fur~t o~, 108, 'm ' Liberation, 139, !51 liberty, 20, 22, 41, 125-26, 135; American 135 ' Linguet, Simon-Nicolas-Henri, 95 "linguistic tum," 195 Louis XIV, 32, 39 Louis XV, 74 Louis XVI, 32, 72; flight of, 91, 106 Louis-le-Grand, 154 Lucas, Colin, 185 Lustiger, Cardinal Jean-Marie, 129, 136 Lycee Carnot, 140 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 95 Maison des sciences de l'homme 148 Maistre, Joseph de, 136 ' Manceron, Claude, 128 Manent, Pierre, 117 Manin, Bernard, 58 Marat, Jean-Paul, 34, 130 Marchais, Georges, 150 La Marseillaise, 165

Marx, Karl, 14, 68, 102, 115, 117, 134 Marxism, 10, 114-15; Furet's view of, 10, 99; Marxist analysis, 60, 110; Marxists, 35, 62, 126 Mathiez, Albert, 15, 43, 47, 70, 96, 108, 120-21, 133 Maupeou, Rene Nicolas de, 74, 75 Mauss, Marcel, Ill Maxwell, Robert, 184, 189 May '68, 28, 39 Mazauric, Claude, 87, 90-91, 140; as member of bicentennial commission, 149; on success of bicentennial congress 189· on Vovelle, 151 ' ' means of production, 24 media, 9, 13, 16, 24, 28, 29, 45, 48, 57, 79, 133, 191; Chaunu's use of. 29· national 60; Vovelle's attitude towa~d 77 ' memory, 3, 24, national, 30; w~rkings of, 13 "mentalities," 35, 180; Vovelle's interest in 154, 159-60 , Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 1-3 metahistory, 64; insights of, 116 Metz, 26 Michelet, Jules, 43, 68-69, 102, 117, 120, 122; Furet's description of, 132 Mignet, Auguste, 76 Mine, Alain, 56 Ministry of National Education, 58, 183 Ministry of Research, 184 Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 77, 114, 123, 137 Mitterrand, Fran~ois, 45, 113, 127, 142, 184; inaugurates bicentennial congress, 186; political regime of, 126 monarchy, 74; monarchists 73 Le Monde, 56-57, 59-60, S9, 101, 131, 180; Roger Chartier on bicentennial congress, 189; letter by Furet published in, 185-86· interview with Vovelle 185 ' Le Monde de Ia Rivoluti;nfran[aise, 143 Montagnards, 75, 84, 107; policies of, 114 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de Ia Brede et de, 34, 58; idea of checks and balances, 135 moral philosophers, English, 95 Morin, Edgar, 133, 161 Mornet, Daniel, 59

l

Nation, 138 National Assembly, 36, 151; Chaunu's characterization of, 36-37 National Convention, 2, 29

232 Index National Front, 142 nationalized economy, Soviet model, 126 Nazis and Nazism, 13, 28, 38, 43 Necker, Jacques, 75, 95, 112 neoconservatism, 138 New York Times, 60, 131 Nicolas, Jean, 149 Nicolet, Claude, 57, 109, 129, 133 Night of 4 August, 64, 69, 75, 106 Night of 10 August 1792, 112 nineteenth century, 19, 21, 31, 87, 114-15, 132, 134; Furet's relation to, 114-16 Nipperdey, Thomas, 22 nobility, 74, 117-18 Nolte, Ernst, 22 Nora, Pierre, 56, 57 Le Nouvel Observateur, 21, 56, 58-60, 139, 142 objectivity question, 172-73 Occupation (World War II), 128 Old Regime, 4, 21, 23, 28-29, 39, 64-65, 71, 73-75, 86-87, 90-91, 94, 104, 107, 117, 136; Chaunu on, 32-35; Furet on, 74-75 Olin Foundation, 138 Ostrogorski, Moisei, 70 Ozouf, Jacques, 60, 132 Ozouf, Mona, 54, 58-63, 65-67, 81, 87, 121, 132 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 93, 131 El Pais, 191 Palmer, R. R., 162 Paris Commune, 65 parlements, 33, 74-75; politics in, 36 parliamentary democracy, 34 Parti Communiste Fran~ais, 15, 53, 101, 124, 132, 134, 145, 184, 186-87; Furet's break with, 53; Furet's membership in, 51-53, 96, 132; Vovelle's attitude toward, 171; Vovelle's membership in, 145, 150. See also Communists Parti Socialiste, 45, 53, 105, 168; Chaunu's comparison to Jacobins, 45; congress at Valence, 126. See also socialism Pasteur Institute, 182 patriotism, 1, 46 Penser I'histoire de Ia Revolution, 77 Penser Ia Rivolutionfran[aise (1978), 42, 95, 142 Pergamon Press, 184, 189

philosophical history. See history: philosophical philosophy, 115, 121; and break with history, 120; democratic, 127; Furet's concern with, 68 Physiocrats, 33 Pivot, Bernard, 59-60, 64 pluralism, 152, 161, 192; of bicentennial congress, 187-89 Podhoretz, Norman, 138 Le Point, 127, 131 Poland, 133 Pol Pot, 174 political, the, 20, 78, 105, 109-10 association of, with Furet, 157 Furet's conception of, 105-6; and its primacy, 108 Vovelle's idea of, 109 political correctness, 134 political culture, 64; Furet on, 71, 86 political discourse, 160 popular action, 68 popular culture, 35, 177 Popular Front, 50 popular sovereignty, 71, 75, 87, 112-13 popular violence, 70 positivism, 20, 68, 116; as political position, 129 Poupard, monseigneur, 129 Present, 92 Princeton University: Furet at, 51 Protestantism, 27, 34; failure of Reformation in France, 137 Prussian model of revolution. See revolution public, 56, 135 public debate, 9, 176; Furet's dominance of, 16 public opinion, 12, 44, 75, 122, 191; and consensus on commemoration of bicentennial, 129; Furet on, 96 public sphere, 24, 27, 53, 195 Pyramide du Louvre, 3 quai d'Orsay, 184 Q!iinet, Edgar, 68, 77-79, 106-107, 112, 115, 118, 120, 132, 136; Furet's use of, 82-83 Le Quotidien de Paris, 127 Radio Courtoisie, 46 rational action theory, 108 rationalism, 23, 75

233 Index Reberioux, Madeleine, 109; on Furet, 13840 regicide, 61 Reinhard, Marcel, 67, 162 relativism, 62, 161 religion, 14, 118; Chaunu's relation to, 27; discourse of, 180 representation, 24, 68, 82, 86, 106; Chartier on, 190; of social world, Ill; Vovelle on, !59 republic, 65, 87-88, 120, 124; as inseparable from the Revolution, 129; monarchical, 64; republicans, 72, 73, 76, 124, 170, 195 republican tradition, 64; Vovelle on republican consensus and discipline, 177, 178, 187 La Republique du centre, 112 Resistance, 50, 52, 128, 136, 171; maquis, 51; revisionist views of, 172; Vovelle's view of, 172 Reveillon riots, 75 Revel, Jacques, 57, 58, 183 revisionism, 41, 62-63, 147, 193-96; ideological dimensions of, 164; targeting of PCF, 171; revisionists, centrist, 13, 15; Vovelle on, 156-57, 160, 165, 173, 176 revolution: American, 49, 93, 118, 136, 170; American experience of, 135; AngloSaxon model, 135; bourgeois, 81, 94, 101, 104, 109, Ill, 164; bourgeois interpretation of, 102; of 1848, 39; of 1871, 39; English, 34, 136; Franco-Soviet model, 125; Furet on link between 1917 and 1793; of 1917, 10, 18, 43, 88, 95-96, 98, 105, 141, 174; Prussian model, 34; Soviet model, 127; and state despotism, 118; tradition, 127; Trotskyite conception of, 128 Revolution, 191 La Revolution franraise, 58 revolutionary discourse, 85; dynamic of, 174; events and, 119; festivals and, 43, 59; Furet on, 20, 81-82, 85, 97, 142; model, of 167, 171 La Revue generale (Belgian), 131 Richet, Denis, 58-59, 100, 132, 142, 175 rights of man, 126 Rioux, Jean-Pierre, 57 Rivarol, Antoine, 92 Robert, Frederic, 149 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 2, 34, 37, 45, 72, 84-85, 113-14, 118, 168; Furet on, 84,94 Rocard, Michel, 105, 127

Roche, Daniel, 132, 183, 190 Roman, Joel, 49, 119 Rouen,26 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 58, 81, 87, 90, 9495; Furet's misreading of, 141; Furet's reading of, 94 Russia, 133, 141 Sahlins, Marshall, 108 Saint-Bartholomew Day massacre, 89 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Leon, 34, 67, 76 Saint-Simonians, 56 sansculottes, 70, 114, 134 Schama, Simon, 118 Secher, Reynald, 39, 40 secular humanism, 34 Sedillot, Rene, 48 September massacres, 86 Sieyes, Emmanuel, 82, 114 Sledziewski, Elisabeth G., 67, 80, 90, 108, 131, 134, 139 Smith, Adam, 134 Soboul, Albert, 11, 15, 43, 53, 59, 62, 67, 76, 79, 107-8, 118, 121, 133, 144; Furet's critique of, 86; Vovelle's break with, 16364 social, the, 54, 78-79, 105-7; Furet's conception of, 100, 109 Social Contract, 93 socialism, I 00; socialists, 47, 88, 97, 124; Furet on, 88, 125-26. See also Parti Socialiste Societe des etudes robespierristes, 148, 183 sociology, 120; of knowledge, and production, 16; Marxist, 54; sociological analysis, 60 Solidarites modernes, !51 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 43, 95, 134, 136, 160 Sorbonne, 15, 26, 39, 48, 50, 52, 54, 67, 76, 145, 155-56, 191; Furet's attitude toward; 121; Institut d'etudes de Ia Revolution, 146, 153; Vovelle's position at, 145 Sorman, Guy, 128 sovereignty, 24, 106; king's, 107; Rousseauian inflection, 124 Soviet Union, 169, 187 Spiteri, Gerard, 127 Stael, Germaine Necker, baronne de, 68, 87, 115 Stalin, Josef, 53, 98 state administrative apparatus, 117 Sturmer, Michael, 22

234 Index subsistence crisis, 74-75, 84, 107; subsistence issue, 33, 86; social contract and, 7l Sud-Ouest, 131 Suffert, Georges, 130 Supreme Being, 41 Taine, Hyppolite, 92, 119 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 67 Talmon, Jacob, 90-91, 160; The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 112 Tamas, Gaspar, 125 technology, 24 television, 178 Terray, Joseph Marie, 29, 75 Terror, 13, 22, 24, 43, 45, 54, 64, 68, 70-72, 75, 80-88, 91-93, 96-97, 101, 103, 108, ll3, 126, 194 Furet's view of, 10, 81; on ideology of, 71, 82-88; on origins of, 75 Stalinist, 43 Thatcher, Margaret, 196 Thermidor, 83, 104 Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 39, 76 Third Reich, 12, 44 Third Republic, 120 Third World, 189 Tiananmen Square, 186 Tocqueville, Alexis de Cli:rel de, 30, 36, 68, 77-78, 91, 106, llO, liS, ll7-l8, 120, 125-26, 134, 136 Furet's use of, 74; relation to, ll7 Tocquevillean analysis, 71

totalitarianism, 14, 24, 44, 63, 90, 113, 170; and democracy, 64; reading of the past,

l33 transference, process of, 18 Trente glorieuses, 122 Tulard, Jean, 48, 109, 128-29, 149 Turgor, Anne Robert Jacques, baron de l'Aulne, 29, 33, 74, 75, 94-95; Furet's interpretation of, 9 5 Turreau, 38, 47 University of Chicago, 58; Committee on Social Thought, 138; Furet at, 51 University of Michigan: Furet at, 51 Valade, Jacques, 182 Valeurs actuelles, 92, 142 Vendee, 37, 38, 40, 43, 64, 90, 153; Chaunu on, 37-39; historians of, 76; and religion, 72 Verdun, 25 Villiers, Philippe de, 93 violence: against tyrannical regimes, 127; Vovelle on revolutionary, 174 Voltaire (Fran~ois Marie Arouet), 34 voluntarism, 71, 169, 194 Wajda, Andrzej, 168 Weber, Eugen, 14 Winock, Michel, 49, 57 World War II, 40, 90 Year II, 168