They advocated a liberal s… The last 40 years have also seen feminist contributions to the historiography of the French Revolution. Paine’s 1776 essay Common Sense used plain but forceful language to rationalise ideas like republicanism, representative government and American independence. François Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was a French socialist much admired by Marx. A Tale of Two Cities begins with its famous opening line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” before going on to paint a grim picture of both the Ancien Régime and revolutionary France. Lefebvre was the main and most revered of all Marxist historians. In order to answer this question adequately it will be necessary to identify what the Marxist historians feel were the causes of the French Revolution. Orczy demonstrates a negative view of the revolution, based on her portrayals of class. During the 19th century, the best known British historian of the French Revolution was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). One of the most notable revisionists was Alfred Cobban (1901-1968). Francois Furet ... ldkennedy62. The founder of positivism was Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He obtained a position at the Collège Sainte-Barbe while still in his early 20s and later tutored the daughters of French royalty. Majority of historians and students of the French revolution hold the notion that this insurrection was a bourgeois revolution, fueled by class conflict. HUM 212 Final 59 Terms. B. Shank finds that 21st century trends include a broader range of topics regarding the effects of the Revolution, and a more global perspective. Born in Scotland and trained as a mathematics teacher, Carlyle turned his hand to philosophy and history in his late 20s. The present republication therefore requires no particular justification. Recent French Revolutionary Historiography," French Historical Studies, Volume 23, Number 1, Winter 2000, pp. Another novelist who influenced public perceptions of the French Revolution was Emma Orczy, later Baroness Orczy (1865-1947). Essentially an adventure story, The Scarlet Pimpernel tells of an English playboy who rescues endangered aristocrats from France during the Reign of Terror. Foremost among the opponents of positivism was Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), the founder of Communism. Consequently, he was a supporter of the French Revolution, rather than a critic of it. It was delayed by several years when a housemaid accidentally used Carlyle’s first draft to start a fire, forcing him to rewrite it from scratch. Conservative-liberal. The French Revolution offered a universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, which consciously reached beyond the borders of France, as a challenge to every single crowned head of Europe. Despite Marx's personal dislike of Frenchmen, all three of his daughters fell in love with French men: Jenny Marx married Charles Longuet, Laura Marx married Paul Lafargue and at age 16, Elenaor fell in love with Henri Lissagary but was forbidden by Marx to marry him, later marrying the Englishman Edward Aveling ! After the fall of the Paris Commune, France became the centre of opposition to Marx within the International from Anarchists. Paine argued that before 1789 France was a despotic aristocracy, wedded to inequality and privilege, addicted to war and stifled by its disregard for ordinary people. All historians possess a mind, personality, and outlook that affect their work so that everything they write is to some degree autobiographical. Lefebvre’s view of the revolution was echoed by other historians of the 1900s. It's principal figures in the twentieth century were: Anarchism can be said to have originated in France (though Spain would have a claim as well). Another prominent historian of the 19th century was Jules Michelet (1798-1874). A Short History of the French Revolution for Socialists. For historical detail, Dickens relied on Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (he later admitted reading this book “five hundred times” as preparation). This work is sure to be compared to two other recent publications: John Paxton's Companion to the French Revolution (LJ 1/88) and Samuel F. Scott and Barry Rothaus's Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789-1799 ( LJ 2/15/85). The French Revolution, and the execution of the Bourbon King, threw up yet another question mark over the English Constitution. See also the archives for:
Another Marxist writer, Albert Mathiez, was of the notion that the French revolution stemmed from class conflict (Duvall 13-14). Mignet’s 1924 text Histoire de la Révolution Française (‘History of the French Revolution’) was determinist in its approach (“the revolution was impossible to avoid”) and liberal in its political perspective. In the last half of his life, he produced several significant historical works including The History of France (1844) and History of the French Revolution (1847). Neo-Marxist. Published in 1859, A Tale of Two Cities was a bleak, humourless historical novel. methods that shed a new light on the French Revolution. He trained as a lawyer but turned to history, beginning a study of the revolution in his mid-20s. To Marxist historians, the tumult in France began as a bourgeois revolution. Late 18th century France was already a rising capitalist economy, Cobban argued; many Third Estate deputies had grown rich from capitalist enterprises long before 1789. The economist Léon Walras (1834-1910) was one of the founders of modern economic science (as opposed to “political economy”) by applying the ideas of the ‘second positivism’ to economy, and the positivist mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was one of the first to deal with the problems of epistemology being thrown up by modern physics (the subject of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism). The arrest of Robespierre and the end of the Terror marked the return to the bourgeoisie to political power. Pierre Bourdieu, the most eminent of recent French Marxists, died in 2001. George Rude. The bourgeois revolutionaries sought two things: access to government and political power, and economic reforms amenable to their business interests. Laniipops. This is a list of a few historians during the French Revolution. Alfred Soboul. The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat—the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 … See also: Revolutionary France Subject Archive. The Paris Commune History Archive, including: The Civil War in France, includes Marx's major writings on these events. Marxist historians agree in viewing the causation of the Revolution as materialist: the Manifesto claims that the Revolution represented the growth of capitalism and the triumph of “bourgeoisie” since the ancien régime’s “feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed (bourgeois) productive forces.” The general consensus is that the revolution did little for French women and in some respects pushed them backwards. Honors World History French Revolution Final 70 Terms. The sans culottes demanded price controls, action against hoarders and speculators, production quotas and a stable currency. For more info, visit our FAQ page or Terms of Use. Later the French section expanded and was a participant in the Commune. It was driven by class struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and marked France’s transition from feudalism to capitalism. The articles reproduced below were written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Great French Revolution. French Marxists (though some do not really warrant the name) were among the first to outline the views which became known as “post-modernism”. Politically, Schama is a liberal whose perspectives of the revolution align with those of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. For clearly, no one view qualifies as 'the Marxist interpretation' of the French Revolution. See
Andrew Marr tells the story of the French Revolution. As a consequence, the historiography of the revolution is complex and contains many different perspectives or schools of thought. The PCF remains to this day a major force in French politics. Albert Soboul’s “The French Revolution in the History of the Contemporary World” is an example of a Marxist interpretation of the revolution, while Colin Lucas’ “Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution” is an example of a Revisionist interpretation of the revolution. When the workers of Paris seized power in 1871, this was the first working class revolution in history to succeed in gaining power, albeit for only a few weeks.