Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface

Politics,

Culture, and Class

in the French Revolution

Politics,

Culture, and Class

in the French Revolution

LYNN HUNT

TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 1984, 2004 by

The Regents of the University of California

Twentieth anniversary edition 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunt, Lynn Avery.

Politics, culture, and class in the French Revolution / Lynn Hunt.—20th anniversary ed.

p. cm. —

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-24156-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

e-ISBN 978-0-520-930104-6

1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Social aspects.    2. Politics and culture—France—History—18th century.    3. Social classes—France—History—18th century.    I. Title. II. Series.

Chapter 1 is reprinted in expanded form from The Rhetoric of Revolution in France, History Workshop Journal 15 (1983): 78–94, by permission of the History Workshop Journal.

Chapter 3 is reprinted with changes from Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution, Representations 1 (1983): 95–117, by permission of The Regents of The University of California. © by The Regents of The University of California.

Tables 1, 2, 3, and the correlation matrix in Appendix A are reprinted from The Political Geography of Revolutionary France, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1984): 535–59, by permission of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The statistical analysis from which chapter 4 is drawn also appeared in this article. © 1984 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

To Peg

Contents

List of Tables

List of Plates

List of Maps

Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments to the 1984 Edition

Chronology

Abbreviations

Introduction: Interpreting the French Revolution

PART I: THE POETICS OF POWER

1. The Rhetoric of Revolution

2. Symbolic Forms of Political Practice

3. The Imagery of Radicalism

PART II: THE SOCIOLOGY OF POLITICS

4. The Political Geography of Revolution

5. The New Political Class

6. Outsiders, Culture Brokers, and Political Networks

Conclusion: Revolution in Political Culture

Appendix A: Correlation Matrix of Selected Political, Economic, and Demographic Variables

Appendix B: Occupational Analysis of City Councillors in Amiens, Bordeaux, Nancy, and Toulouse

Notes

Index

Tables

1. Political Divisions and Experience of the Revolution

2. Social Differences in Politically Grouped Departments

3. Socioeconomic and Political Statistics for Sample Departments

4. Occupational Representation on City Councils in Amiens, Bordeaux, Nancy, and Toulouse, 1790–1799

5. Amiens: Changes in Occupational Representation on the City Council, 1790–1799

6. Bordeaux: Changes in Occupational Representation on the City Council, 1790–1799

7. Nancy: Changes in Occupational Representation on the City Council, 1790–1799

8. Toulouse: Changes in Occupational Representation on the City Council, 1790–1799

9. City Councils During the Terror: Continuity with Other Revolutionary Municipalities

10. City Councils During the Directory: Continuity with Previous Revolutionary Municipalities

Plates

1. Festival of Liberty, October 1792

2. Festival of Federation, July 1790

3. Maximilien Robespierre

4. Orgy of the Gardes du Corps at Versailles, October 1789

5. Seal of the Republic, 1792

6. Festival of Reason, November 1793

7. Session of the Council of Ancients, 1798–99

8. Official Costumes, 1798–99

9. The Independent

10. The Exclusive

11. Henri Grégoire

12. Sketch of Hercules by Dupré

13. The French People Overwhelming the Hydra of Federalism, August 1793

14. Le Peuple Mangeur de Rois

15. Detail of the Festival of Supreme Being, June 1794

16. Sketch by Dupré for Hercules Coin, 1795

17. Official Vignette of the Executive Directory, 1798

18. Bonaparte in the Council of Five Hundred on 18 Brumaire

19. Napoleon’s Seal as Consul

20. Five-Centime Coin from the Year XIII

21. Napoleon’s Seal as Emperor

Maps

1. The Political Geography of Revolutionary France

2. Residences of Revolutionary Officials in Amiens

Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

BOOKS always reflect the moment of their composition, and this one is no exception. The moment was an especially propitious one for me, because my interests threw me into the thick of some of the most exciting developments in the study of history. I began the research in the late 1970s hoping to show that the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution still held water. Critics of the Marxist interpretation maintained that lawyers and officials, rather than merchants and manufacturers—the capitalist bourgeoisie of Marxism—had led the revolution. I focused on the people who made the revolution in the big cities because I suspected that many more merchants and manufacturers would emerge as revolutionary leaders on this local level. I did find those merchants and manufacturers, but the pattern was unpredictable: in some places, merchants gained influence over time, in some they lost influence, and in others they had very little influence at all. Similarly, when I undertook a quantitative analysis of the social and economic factors that might explain the political leanings of different regions, the results surprised me: left-wing politics had their most consistent appeal in faraway, relatively backward places, with virtually no large-scale manufacturing. This was not the pattern a Marxist analysis would predict: The most advanced industrializing regions were not consistently revolutionary. Other factors had to be taken into account: local political conflicts (opponents of Old Regime elites now gained), local social networks (marriages, Masonic lodges, and political clubs), and the influences of local power brokers (teachers, innkeepers, traveling salesmen). In short, political identities depended on more than social station; they had important cultural components.

Questions raised in my initial research echoed those posed more generally throughout the discipline. In the early 1980s, cultural history challenged the predominance of social history, and in French history, François Furet’s frontal assault on the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution swept the field. Cultural historians (often themselves converted social historians) argued that social identities could be grasped only through their linguistic and cultural representations; the identity of merchant meant one thing in one context and something else in another. In a parallel line of argument, Furet insisted that the French Revolution could not be explained as a conflict between social classes; it could be understood only as a political struggle over control of language and symbols. I became increasingly interested in revolutionary symbols after I went to an exhibition of French revolutionary prints at the Musée Carnavalet in 1977. Like most other historians of the French Revolution, I had automatically turned to verbal documents such as newspapers, memoirs, police reports, parliamentary speeches, tax returns, and membership lists for my sources. Once I saw that exhibit, I could no longer ignore the importance of the visual representations disseminated by revolutionary engravings, letterheads, calendars, playing cards, and plates.

Over time, as a consequence, I ended up with a peculiar mélange of documents, ranging from quantitative data about the various regions of France and hundreds of dossiers of individual officials to drawings proposed for the seal of the republic and engravings of revolutionary costumes. Could my conclusions from these disparate sources by synthesized? I believed that they could, but I agonized about the order of their presentation. Which should come first? What would my choice imply about my view of causation and significance? I could not endorse the standard Marxist schema of base and superstructure, with economics and social relations at the base as the most fundamental factor, and politics and culture as the superstructure, the automatic by-product of what lay beneath. But neither could I embrace a simple inversion of this formula with politics as progenitor of social divisions and economic change. I therefore focused on political culture. My account offered neither a political nor a cultural history in the usual sense of those terms but rather an analysis of the social patterns and cultural assumptions that shaped revolutionary politics. To get away from the metaphor of base-superstructure or levels, I fastened on the Möbius strip. Imagine society as one side of the strip, politics as the other; the two are inextricably intertwined, with no place where one stops and the other starts.

The Möbius strip works better as a visual metaphor than as the architecture for a printed book. Words in printed books must come in linear order; therefore, I had to choose whether to start with politics or society, cultural assumptions or social patterns. I opted to begin with the poetics of power, rather than the sociology of politics, not because I believed that poetics necessarily had causal priority over sociology but in order to shake up those readers who still thought of sociology as inevitably prior to poetics. Many believed that sociology (society) was supposed to explain the poetics (politics), not the other way around. When the book appeared in 1984, almost everyone seized upon the first half (poetics) as the most original and provocative. By then, historians had taken the linguistic turn, and the social history of politics seemed ho-hum in comparison to the study of rhetoric, ritual and imagery, the stuff of the new cultural history.

But what goes around comes around. Now that scholars have analyzed in detail the cultural, linguistic, visual, and poetic dimensions of the French Revolution, the second half of the book might begin to elicit more interest. Emphasis on the geographical and social patterns examined there may fit with new trends in scholarship since the 1980s. A sea change is under way in the study of the French Revolution. The Bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 marked the apogee of Furet’s influence and the nadir of the Marxist interpretation. Since then, however, many have criticized the reigning Furetian orthodoxy (everything is political) and sought new ways of analyzing the social meanings of the Revolution. To some extent, the criticism of Furet and concomitant rehabilitation of Marx ignore their underlying similarities; just as Marx himself never overlooked the political dimension of the French Revolution, neither did Furet neglect its social significance. Yet somehow the intertwining of the two got lost in the polemics about Marxism and communism. Since communism no longer provokes the do-or-die responses in the Western world that it once did, it may now be possible to look at the links between society and politics in a new light. You do not have to subscribe to Marxism lock, stock, and barrel in order to appreciate the social significance of the French Revolution, and you do not have to embrace Furet’s view of the French Revolution as the origin of totalitarianism to see that revolutionary political culture had a logic of its own. Just how society and politics connect remains as interesting a question as ever.

The second half of the book reflects most directly the limitations of the technology available in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although I composed it on one of the earliest personal computers (an Osborne the size of a sewing machine that could store thirty-three pages of text on a single-sided, single-density diskette), I did the quantitative analysis either with a simple calculator or with key-punched cards on a mainframe computer (with the indispensable help of research assistants). These laborious methods had none of the flexibility or speed afforded by today’s computers. It is not yet clear, however, whether the new technology would yield different results, for, despite the ease of data entry and manipulation it affords, no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to refute, revise, or extend the analysis offered here. Although much new information has appeared—in particular, studies of elections and maps of social and cultural factors—no one has integrated this material into a new, overarching interpretation.¹ If interest in the social meanings of the French Revolution continues to grow, it would benefit from a revival of quantitative methods and a systematic attempt to make use of this new information.

I did not undertake this systematic review myself, and so nothing substantive in the main body of this book has been altered. Countless books and articles have been published on related subjects since 1984, new information has appeared, sources once lost have been recovered, and no doubt I inadvertently passed over useful pieces of information when I undertook my research more than twenty years ago.² To undertake to incorporate all this now would entail writing a new and most likely a different book. Although I would not want to maintain that everything in this book remains completely valid, its basic approach—the balance between politics and society, between the poetics of power and the sociology of politics—still represents my understanding of the French Revolution. Readers will decide for themselves whether it convinces them.

Acknowledgments to the 1984 Edition

WHEN I began the research for this book in 1976, I had a different project in mind. At the time, I intended to write about the local structures of political power in four cities during the French Revolution. As I worked on the four cities, however, I found that my interests began to change in focus, in part because of the impact of my friends and colleagues at Berkeley, and in part because of the influence of new work in French history by François Furet, Mona Ozouf, and Maurice Agulhon. As a consequence, my original social history of Revolutionary politics turned increasingly into a cultural analysis, in which the political structures of the four cities became but one part of the story. Nevertheless, power has remained my central concern in this book, because I believe that power was the central concern of the revolutionaries of France, whether they worked in Paris, in the provincial capitals, or in villages far removed from the political mainstream.

Over the years, I have benefited from the help of many institutions and individuals. My research was funded by fellowships from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, the American Council of Learned Societies, and, most recently, the Guggenheim Foundation. The research assistance of talented graduate students was funded by the Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley, and by the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley. During several trips to France, I enjoyed the hospitality of many libraries and archives. I thank the staffs of the Archives nationales; the Archives départementales of the Gironde, Haute-Garonne, Meurthe, and Somme departments; the Archives municipales of Amiens, Bordeaux, Nancy, and Toulouse; the Bibliothèque nationale of Paris; the Musée Carnavalet of Paris; the Municipal Library of Bordeaux; and the university libraries in Amiens and Toulouse. In London, I worked at the Public Record Office.

Many friends, colleagues, and students have helped me in various ways. The graduate students who have worked with me often provided suggestions that proved fruitful. In France, I was fortunate to have help from two friends: Leslie Martin worked in local archives in 1976 when I was first studying marriage contracts and tax records, and Lizabeth Cohen provided data from Toulouse in 1980. Both maps were drawn by Adrienne Morgan. Colleagues at Berkeley and elsewhere read versions of chapters of the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for their comments. I want to thank in particular Randolph Starn, Reginald Zelnik, Thomas Laqueur, Jack Censer, and Victoria Bonnell for reading through the entire manuscript and offering precise suggestions for its improvement. Joyce McCann graciously read closely every portion of the book and offered ways of making it more readable. More than I perhaps can recognize, my friends have pushed me to think more broadly and more clearly, and this book shows many signs of their impact. Finally, I wish to recognize the less specific but no less real contribution of the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to money and time, the University has provided an invaluable setting of constantly stimulating colleagues and students.

Brief Chronology of the French Revolution 1789 – 1799

Abbreviations

Archives and Libraries

Journals

Introduction:

Interpreting the French Revolution

J’avais vu que tout tenoit radicalement à la politique, et que, de quelque façon qu’on s’y prit, aucun peuple ne seroit jamais que ce que la nature de son Gouvernement le feroit être; ainsi cette grande question du meilleur Gouvernement possible me paroissoit se reduire à celle-ci. Quelle est la nature de Gouvernement propre à former un Peuple le plus vertueux, le plus éclairé, le plus sage, le meilleur enfin à prendre ce mot dans son plus grand sens.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, Les Confessions¹

I saw that everything depended fundamentally on politics, and that, no matter how one looked at it, no people could ever be anything but what the nature of its government made it; thus this great question of the best possible government seemed to me to reduce itself to this. What is the nature of government suitable for forming a people that is the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest, in short the best, taking this word in its broadest sense.

WHEN Rousseau proclaimed that everything depended fundamentally on politics, he was making a provocative and ambiguous statement. In his view, politics, rather than custom, morals, or religion, was the root of social life. The character of a people depended on the nature of its government. By posing the great question of the best possible government, Rousseau indicated that government might well be different from what it was; it might be better. But where was this government to come from? How could any mortal determine what made a people the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest, the best? How could a government be more enlightened than the people it was meant to mold? French revolutionaries had to confront just these issues. They took Rousseau as their spiritual guide, but Rousseau was vaguest precisely where they faced the most momentous decisions. Given the unique opportunity to renegotiate the social contract, what form should it take? What was the general will in France in the 1790s? What was the best government possible, taking government, as Rousseau did, in its broadest sense?

The Revolution showed how much everything depended on politics, but it did so in ways that would have surprised Rousseau had he lived fifteen years longer. Revolutionaries did not just debate the classical questions of government, such as the virtues of monarchy versus republic or aristocracy versus democracy. They also acted on them in new and surprising ways. In the heat of debate and political conflict, the very notion of the political expanded and changed shape. The structure of the polity changed under the impact of increasing political participation and popular mobilization; political language, political ritual, and political organization all took on new forms and meanings. In ways that Rousseau prophesied but could himself only dimly imagine, government became an instrument for fashioning a people. As the deputy Grégoire proclaimed in January 1794: The French people have gone beyond all other peoples; however, the detestable regime whose remnants we are shaking off keeps us still a great distance from nature; there is still an enormous gap between what we are and what we could be. Let us hurry to fill this gap; let us reconstitute human nature by giving it a new stamp.²

Out of the remarkable experience shaped by this goal of reconstitution and regeneration came most of our ideas and practices of politics. By the end of the decade of revolution, French people (and Westerners more generally) had learned a new political repertoire: ideology appeared as a concept, and competing ideologies challenged the traditional European cosmology of order and harmony; propaganda became associated with political purposes; the Jacobin clubs demonstrated the potential of mass political parties; and Napoleon established the first secular police state with his claim to stand above parties.

Neither politics nor the concept of the political was invented by the French, but, for reasons that are still not well understood, the French managed to invest them with extraordinary emotional and symbolic significance. Step by step, sometimes with only a vague awareness of what was taking place, the French founded a revolutionary tradition that has endured down to our time. Paradoxically, while multiplying the forms and meanings of politics, the most revolutionary of the French acted out of a profound distrust of anything explicitly political. Leading political figures never called themselves politicians; they served the public good (la chose publique), not a narrow partisan spirit (esprit de parti). Politics and politicking were consistently identified with narrowness, meanness, divisiveness, factionalism, opportunism, egotism, and selfishness. While denouncing all these perversions of the ancient ideal of homo politicus, the revolutionaries crossed into the modern age: they opened up a new, internal political frontier and reaped the unforeseen fruits of democracy and authoritarianism, socialism and terror, revolutionary dictatorship and the guillotine. The unexpected invention of revolutionary politics is the subject of this book.

We have little sense now of how surprising revolutionary politics were in the 1790s. Almost every history textbook cites 1789 as the watershed of the modern era, and the French Revolution is one of the most written about events in Western history. Yet, as it has become commonplace, it has lost its freshness and novelty. In retrospect the turning point seems so obvious; what would our world be like without parties, ideologies, dictators, mass movements, and even antipolitical, political rhetoric? Recent scholarly debates about the Revolution also seem to take the event for granted. At issue in the controversies is not the character of the experience itself, but rather its long-term origins and outcomes. The Revolution merely serves as the vehicle of transportation between long-term causes and effects; as a result, the emergence of a revolutionary politics has become a foregone conclusion. The three major interpretive positions all share this preoccupation with origins and outcomes.

The Marxist interpretation of the Revolution has come under heavy fire in recent years, in part because it is the most theoretically developed account.³ Marx himself was passionately interested in the history of the French Revolution. In the mid-1840s, he gathered documentation and read widely in preparation for writing a history of the National Convention.⁴ Immediate political interests and then his more general study of capitalism kept him from pursuing this project to completion. Nevertheless, in all of Marx’s historical writings, the Revolution served as a touchstone; it fostered the development of capitalism by breaking the feudal stranglehold on production, and it brought the bourgeoisie as a class to power. These two, inseparable elements—the establishment of a suitable legal framework for capitalist development and the class struggle won by the bourgeoisie—have characterized Marxist historical accounts of the Revolution ever since. As the most recent defender of the classic historiography of the French Revolution, Albert Soboul maintained that the Revolution marked the appearance, the growth, and the final triumph of the bourgeoisie.⁵

In the Marxist account, the Revolution was bourgeois in nature because its origins and outcomes were bourgeois. Marxist historians trace the origins of the Revolution to the aggressive self-assertion of the bourgeoisie in the face of aristocratic reaction in the 1780s, and they consider the outcome to be the distinctly bourgeois triumph of the capitalist mode of production.⁶ The intervening variable—the revolutionary experience—is read in terms of its contribution to this scenario. The bourgeoisie had to ally with the popular classes in order to break the back of the feudal aristocracy; it had to break with the popular classes when the system of the Terror threatened to get out of hand; and it had to ally with Napoleon in order to ensure the consolidation of bourgeois gains in property and legal reform. The outcome (bourgeois economic and social hegemony) followed from the origins (class conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy) in seemingly inexorable fashion.

The revisionist position challenges the Marxist account on virtually every front, but for the most part revisionists implicitly accept the central premise of the Marxist argument, that is, that an interpretation of the Revolution consists of an account of social origins and outcomes. In the first, wide-ranging attack on Marxist orthodoxy, Alfred Cobban insisted that the Revolution was not made by the bourgeoisie in the interests of capitalist development but rather by venal officeholders and professionals whose fortunes were declining. In the end, their actions benefited landowners in general;