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Introduction, The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, Page 910, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz576
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Extract
Revolutionary moments arrive like a thunderclap. Or so it seems to those caught up in such monumental social upheavals, which may partly explain why they are understood and portrayed this way by historians. Yet perhaps social, economic, and political elites lose their power over the long haul; even while the “1 percent” appear to be masters of their society, the steady, barely visible erosion of the foundations of their dominion makes it possible for a single push to bring the whole rotten edifice crashing down around them.
In this AHR Exchange, Jonathan Dewald revisits the classic case of the French Revolution, arguing that historians of this event should pay more attention to the long-term liabilities of the French nobility that fatally undermined its ability to defend its interests in 1789. Nicolas Tackett, Timothy Tackett, and Gail Bossenga each offer an essay challenging Dewald’s approach. They argue that we should continue to attend to the suddenness with which an apparently powerful ruling class can be unseated, and that this remains a viable model for understanding the collapse of the eighteenth-century French nobility. At the same time, however, they call attention to the post-revolutionary era to suggest that, in the French case, at least, the nobles managed to adapt to new circumstances and survive. As a young member of the Sicilian nobility observes in Lampedusa’s great novel of the Risorgimento The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” It is worth noting that in Lampedusa’s book, nobles and republicans alike draw on their French predecessors for inspiration.
