Historiography of The French Revolution - The Marxist/Classic Interpretation

The Marxist/Classic Interpretation

The dominating approach to the French Revolution in historical scholarship in the first half of the 20th century was the Marxist, or Classic, approach. This view sees the French Revolution as an essentially 'bourgeois' revolution, marked by class struggle and resulting in a victory of the bourgeoisie. Influenced by socialist politician Jean Jaurès and historian Albert Mathiez, historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul developed this view.

Lefebvre was inspired by Jaurès and came to the field from a mildly socialist viewpoint. His massive and reputation-making thesis, Les paysans du Nord (1924), was an account of the Revolution among provincial peasants. He continued to research along these lines, publishing The Great Fear of 1789 (1932, first English translation 1973), about the panic and violence which spread throughout rural France in the summer of 1789. His work largely approaches the Revolution "from below", favouring explanations in terms of classes. His most famous work was Quatre-Vingt-Neuf (literally Four-Twenty-Nine, the French way of saying the number 89, published in 1939 and translated into English as The Coming of the French Revolution, 1947). This skilfully and persuasively argued work interprets the Revolution through a Marxist lens: first there is the "aristocratic revolution" of the Assembly of Notables and the Paris Parlement in 1788; then the "bourgeois revolution" of the Third Estate; the "popular revolution", symbolised by the fall of the Bastille; and the "peasant revolution", represented by the "Great Fear" in the provinces and the burning of châteaux. (Alternately, one can view 1788 as the aristocratic revolution, 1789 the bourgeois revolution, and 1792/3 the popular revolution). This interpretation sees a rising capitalist middle-class overthrow a dying-out feudal aristocratic ruling caste, and held the field for almost twenty years. His major publication was La Révolution française (1957, translated and published in English in two volumes, 1962–1967). This, and particularly his later work on Napoleon and the Directory, remains highly regarded.

Some other influential French historians of this period:

• Ernest Labrousse, who performed extensive economic research on 18th-century France.
• Albert Soboul. Although his reputation has fallen in recent years under the weight of the revisionist school, Soboul performed exhaustive research on the lower classes of the Revolution. His most famous work is The Sans-Culottes (1968).
• George Rudé - another of Lefebvre's protégés, did further work on the popular side of the Revolution: The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959) is one of his most famous works.
• Daniel Guérin - an anarchist, he is highly critical of the Jacobins.

Some of the significant conservative French historians of this period include:

• Pierre Gaxotte - royalist: The French Revolution (1928)
• Augustin Cochin - a conservative historian working at the beginning of the 20th century, he found the origins of the Revolution in the activities of the intelligentsia
• Albert Sorel - diplomatic historian: Europe et la Révolution française (8 volumes, 1895–1904); introductory section of this work translated as Europe under the Old Regime (1947).

The following five scholars have served as Chairs in the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne:

• Hippolyte Taine
• Alphonse Aulard - 1891 (for more than thirty years)
• Georges Lefebvre - 1937-1959
• Albert Soboul - 1967-1982
• Michel Vovelle - 1982