Lynn Hunt, a leading historian of the French Revolution, tells us what the events of 1789 and later years really meant, and what relevance they have for us today. Tocqueville just had all these incredibly brilliant insights about how this worked, and part of it was because, frankly, he didn’t write in the historical mode. 5 Read Edmund Burke, in 1790, is already expressing this kind of wonderment: It’s so incredible what’s happening, I’m thinking about it, I’m trying to figure it out, and there’s still some way in which I just can’t believe it. It’s just they don’t have time to totally take root. It’s completely different from the other books. He was afraid of what the war would do to the revolution. The opening essay in this book, “The Revolutionary Catechism”, is just devastating and no other approach would probably have had the decisive impact it had. There’s immediate writing about why this is making a point. He also gives you a sense that these were actually real people. The French don’t invent that. He’s incredibly good at giving you a sense of what these people are confronted with, the incredible difficulty of their situation and the unbelievable stress of the circumstances they find themselves in. He’s extremely critical of the revolution isn’t he? People study it, in part, because it is a kind of laboratory model of the really striking event and it takes place over years, instead of being condensed in time the way more recent revolutions, perhaps, are. One fact he mentions that surprised me, given the number of people he sent to their death, is that Robespierre started out as an opponent of capital punishment. There’s a growing gap between the rich and poor,” but figuring out what we’re going to do about it. Yes, they limit the vote, but there is no way that you’re not going to have a constitutional form of government from that time onwards. This is an older book, from 1941, but very readable. For him it’s still a great and incredibly important event, but it’s one with extremely problematic implications. He points to the fact that it’s not a France that’s in misery, it’s a France that’s getting better and better off. But he adds a twist that will remain influential to this day, which is that he points to the weakness of democracy as a form of government. No. This is an incredible corrective, because what he shows you is that everything changes. That’s a great story. What the revolution does is create a staggering rupture in people’s ideas in that regard, because a centuries-old monarchy just collapses, and is replaced by something that France had never had, a republic. Why do revolutions in the name of democracy – we see them happening at this very moment – end up having a problem institutionalising themselves as true democracies? Top subscription boxes – right to your door, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. The French Revolution (French: Révolution française; 1789–1799) was a period of radical social and political upheaval in French and European history. They are completely serious and sincere and authentic about wanting to do that. by RR Palmer Eric Hobsbawm was also very critical about Citizens wasn’t he, saying it continued an English tradition (including popular books like Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities) of focusing on the negative side of the French Revolution? They want to make something of it, and come up against a lot of obstacles. So he’s taking the Tocqueville argument even further: Democracy can lead not just to despotism, but to totalitarianism. What Tocqueville loves about the United States is that they have this infrastructure already, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke from Great Britain. Read. My problem with most of the stories is that they tend to be fairly negative. Tocqueville’s book had an incredibly wide influence in a variety of fields, with a variety of readerships. Because it’s all ideology it doesn’t actually set up democratic forms of government, it veers off into terror and totalitarianism instead. He does precisely what I was just talking about. Was it going to be towards a kind of neoliberalism that many people associated Furet with in the 1970s and 1980s? The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. And as much as one tries to tie that down with rational explanations – social causes, demographic causes, economic causes, political causes, ideological causes – there is a way in which the experience that goes on in an event is very hard to completely explain. That’s because Schama is really not interested in an extremely important part of it, which is that there are thousands of people who get involved in the revolution. The United States is developing it also. Yes, in the sense that Occupy Wall Street is about not just sitting around saying, “Oh! He comes to it, in part, because he is involved in the 1848 revolution, and he’s unbelievably disappointed by the rise of Louis Napoleon [Napoleon’s nephew, who became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852]. They hold office, they go to meetings, they are sincerely motivated by the idea of establishing a democratic and republican form of government, because it will lead to more equality, more political freedom and more social justice. So we have to figure out how you make this transition. But there was a way in which, in the French case, they celebrate having done it. The Ancien Régime and the Revolution It’s not a good idea. Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dea Meaning In Texting, Ducktales 2 Walkthrough, Every Picture Tells A Story Meaning, Ernst Fuchs, Polish Mentality, Brenda Blethyn Net Worth 2020, Maria Tiktok,