Foreword

Although the demise of the French Revolution as a field of active study has sometimes been prophesied, and in recent years cautioned against if a new ‘paradigm’ is not found to revive it, in practice it is an area prone to recall the biblical injunction that: ‘Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh’ (Ecclesiastes 12:12). A recitation of the edited collections that have appeared in French, English and other major languages devoted to the events and antecedents of the 1790s, even limited to those after the flood of bicentennial celebrations of the 1990s, would absorb more space than is available here.¹

One of the challenges of producing a major collection on the French Revolution is thus to avoid the thought ‘Oh no, not again!’ in the mind of the prospective, yet potentially already jaded, reader. This was particularly the case with this collection, as it began construction when a volume under Peter McPhee’s editorship, A Companion to the French Revolution, was already underway, and a second text, The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, was in formation.² As this editor is not alone in having contributions to all of these volumes, the challenge is only redoubled.

This volume seeks to be an original, complementary, and engaging contribution by looking both backwards and forwards in ways which are unlike the parallel offerings mentioned. Global contexts and perspectives, for both the French Revolution and the Age of Revolutions in general, are a significant and fruitful development in current historiography.³ Understandings of the French Revolution as part of an ‘Atlantic world’, and writings about events in the French Antilles, have flourished in recent decades.⁴ Indeed, while the first generation of scholars to write of the ‘Atlantic Revolution’ did so without mentioning Haiti, the events which overtook people of all colours on French Saint-Domingue now merit, quite rightly, treatment as one of the major revolutions of the era.⁵

It is precisely for that reason—that the French Revolution in its Atlantic dimension now represents an entire field of historiography in itself—that this collection chooses to return its focus, thematically at least, on to new developments in historiographies of events within European France. This is not to say that wider perspectives are neglected: our very first chapter on economic and demographic developments in the eighteenth century points clearly to the significance of colonial trade in understanding the state of the nation in the years before 1789. The chapters immediately following, though, show that on very ‘traditional’ questions of the role of the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the monarchy itself in that situation, there are still important new debates, and as-yet unanswered key questions to be posed.

In general, this is the pattern for the whole volume. Individual authors were asked to write about what made their particular area still an active field of debate, to review the ‘state of the art’ in current understanding, and to suggest ways forward for future research. Some chapters offer in themselves striking new interpretations—Lauren Clay on the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie is one such, as is Simon Burrows on the extent to which the pre-revolutionary literary sphere was simply not what a previous generation of historians assumed it was. Contributions such as those of Ambrogio Caiani, Charles Walton, Marisa Linton, and Ronen Steinberg represent significant new work as well as opening spheres of exploration for the future. But to name those is only to give examples of one kind of valuable approach here.

Kirsty Carpenter, Marc Belissa, and Mike Rapport draw together strands of their own and others’ work on still relatively neglected areas of the border-crossing impact of the Revolution. Manuel Covo demonstrates that we do not need to look to the Caribbean to see the direct impact of slavery and race, for it penetrated to the heart of debates in Versailles and Paris. Michael Fitzsimmons, Jeremy Popkin, and Peter McPhee are among those who take superficially straightforward topics and add an original and thought-provoking twist of chronology, setting or conclusion. And thus I have named only a third of what is on offer here. The rest is for the reader to discover.

In aiming to put a twist on existing debates, there may appear to be some surprising absences: contributors have, for example, tended to write around the question of actual violent conflict with counter-revolution, rather than zoom in on it as an issue. Perhaps even more disconcertingly, there is no ‘gender chapter’ in this collection.⁶ Contributors were asked to consider the place of gender within the various topics they were discussing, and to treat it as a mode of analysis wherever appropriate. This is visible, for example, in Kirsty Carpenter’s chapter on emigration, in Jean-Luc Chappey’s discussion of elite reconstruction in the later 1790s, and as part of my own understanding of the sans-culotte phenomenon and crowd activity in general. Jeremy Popkin’s treatment of revolutionary identities addresses what some women tried, and failed, to get from the determinedly masculine political sphere of the 1790s. Jennifer Heuer’s wide overview of revolutionary legacies discusses gendered issues from contests over women’s perceived ‘place’ in post-revolutionary society to the mutilated masculinity of injured war veterans. Marisa Linton’s reading of the personal stakes of terrorist politics is a study, among other things, of the construction of a certain form of public and private masculinity. I hope readers will agree, ultimately, that the absence of gender from the contents page has produced an enhanced sense of the integration of such issues into the wider landscape of thematic debate.

Such continuing debate is the ultimate goal of this volume. We have, as contributors, set out to ask more questions than we answer, or at the very least, to reframe old answers and new understandings in a way that will point others to new and better questions of their own. We offer new opportunities for reflection on the revolutionary past, in a decade that has already seen more than its share of upheavals in the name of revolutionary futures. Many of those recent events have run out of the control of their more optimistic advocates in ways that might seem very familiar to a French émigré in 1794, or an exiled regicide a generation later. It is not the historian’s job to preach solutions—and indeed the history of beliefs about revolution over the last 200 years illustrates the problem of trying to do so all too neatly.⁷ But if history does have a role in the public sphere, it is surely to promote a more reflective approach to the kind of very vexed questions—of social justice, of power in its manifestations both subtle and violent, of freedom and its limits, and of the intersection of all these things with the two contemporary shibboleths of identities and rights—that the French Revolution allows us to discuss. If this volume makes a small contribution to such a large and urgent goal, we will be more than satisfied.

It remains only for me to thank all my fellow contributors, with a special mention for Manuel Covo, who stepped in as a very-close-to-last-minute replacement. Thanks also to Christine Baycroft for her translation work, to Christopher Wheeler for commissioning this volume originally, and to Cathryn Steele and Michael Dela Cruz for taking it forward through production. If I use my editorial privilege at this point to name my own family, Jessica, Emily and Natalie, as the ones that keep me going, I will also gladly note that they stand among a crowd of those who do the same for all of us who have written here.

David Andress