[lbo-talk] Re: French History

[Jacob Conrad]

To add to what others have recommended on the French revolution, a solid 
textbook-ish introduction is William Doyle's Oxford History of the 
French Revolution, which will give you both the historical narrative and 
a sense of the historiography of the subject ca. 1989 when it was 
published.  Like all works of its kind, it is a bit prosaic.  There are 
a great many more recent collections of essays dealing with FR 
histriography, if one wants to get so deeply into it.  Of the classic 
works, Tocqueville is indeed indispensible.  Few today, I think, would 
want to slog through Michelet, but his History of the French 
Revolution--romantic, republican, and anti-clerical--was enormously 
influential in its day, especially among the radicals and socialists of 
the Third Republic, including the admirable Jean Jaures.  Edmund Wilson 
gives Michelet a place among the precursors of Marxism.  Michelet's work 
has long been superseded as scholarship, and he lacks Tocqueville's 
depth and historical imagination, but I still think he's worth reading, 
though this is perhaps a matter of taste.  There was a convenient 
abridgement of his _History of the French Revolution_ in the old 
"Classic European Historians" series published by the U of Chicago Press.

As Justin pointed out, the most imposing Marxist monuments remain those 
of Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul.  Lefebvre's _Quatre-vingt-neuf_ 
(pub. 1939) was translated as _The Coming of the French Revolution_, and 
is a wonderful essay, but concentrated on the fateful year.  Lefebvre 
was an enormously producative scholar, who wrote a number of monographic 
studies of rural France in revolution; his grand-scale synthesis is in 
two volumes, translated under the arresting title _The French 
Revolution_ (ca. 1964).  Soboul's _A Short History of the French 
Revolution_ is, well, short, but more comprehensive in chronological 
scope than Lefebvre's 1789, taking the story up to the 18 Brumaire.  It 
was first published as part of the French "Que Sais-Je" series--student 
handbooks on a range of subjects likely to be given as examination 
topics.  Soboul's best-known monograph is _The Sans-Culottes_.  Among 
the brief surveys one should mention J.M. Roberts, _The French 
Revolution_, which has a fine bibliographic essay.

The views of Francois Furet, who like all his herd of ilk sings _molto 
lacrimoso_ about the Vendee, can be learned from his essay _Interpreting 
the French Revolution_ (Cambridge UP, 1981).  Hobsbawm, as Chris Brooke 
pointed out, is the corrective.

Finally, I can't forebear to put in a plug for an old favorite, R.R. 
Palmer's _The Age of the Democratic Revolution_, somewhat exhausting in 
2 long volumes, but a survey of the FR's pan-European and Atlantic 
impact that to my mind is still unsurpassed--good old-fashioned liberal 
scholarship.  It's a side issue here, but one recent trend among 
historians of the American Revolution (e.g., Edward Countryman, Linda 
Kerber, Gary Nash, Gordon S. Wood) is to underline its genuinely 
revolutionary character.  Palmer (who translated Georges Lefebvre's 1789 
into English) pointed out nearly 50 years ago that much of the 
bitterness that has always attended French debates over the meaning of 
their revolution can be traced to the fact that the French exiles were 
able to return after the restoration.  The American Tories, by contrast, 
were seen off and never heard from again.

Jacob Conrad