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David Andress, 1789: The French Revolution Begins, French History, Volume 34, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 115–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/craa008
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This work is not, as the title might imply, an overview of the momentous year that overthrew the French Ancien Régime. Instead, it offers a close reading of debates within the Estates-General of 1789, as it moved towards first declaring itself a National Assembly, and then, as Blackman centrally argues, evolving over a period of some months until finally accepting the full implications of a constituent role towards the end of the year. The result of such a close analytical focus is sometimes a little peculiar—the Night of 4 August and its dramatic renunciation of privilege is passed over in a few lines—but what emerges is an intriguing new portrait of a political body far less radical, at least in intentions, than has often been thought.
Blackman offers two innovations in his account. The first is a quantitative and thematic analysis of almost 275 ‘general cahiers’ embodying the summarized grievances of noble and Third-Estate electors from the districts which chose the final deputies to go to Versailles. This produces a range of findings on the relative conservatism and cautious reformism expressed in these documents. The author pushes this analysis further into questions of statistical significance by rating the observed frequency of ‘clusters’ of demands against their expected frequency if all such demands were randomly distributed. It is not always clear whether this adds anything to the substance of analysis, especially as the process whereby grievances have been clustered is somewhat opaque. Some other intriguing results might have merited more consideration: why, for example, do only 65% of the Third-Estate cahiers mention any form of free election to local or national bodies, when 82% of them want the restoration or establishment of provincial estates (but only 33%, specifically, want these to be elective bodies)? This rereading of the cahiers underpins a point that much of the rest of the book seeks to demonstrate: the deputies (barring a few committed radicals) were deeply concerned to honour the wishes of their electors, even (and especially) as it proved difficult to discern ways forward through the swelling crisis.
