A Concise History of the French Revolution Book

Great introduction and overview. See ACs review.

Filled in many gaps in my understanding and made clear to me why certain things are unclear to me. Whatever my personal failings, in fact it's because they're largely unclear to everyone.

When I think of the Russian revolution, certain things come immediately to mind along with a rough narrative. Lenin, 1917, Marxism-Leninism, the Winter Palace.

The French revolution is much more blurry with no real narrative. A few names: Robespierre, Danton, Marat. 1789. Les Lumières. The Bastille.

In fact what I took from this book (which may not be what Neely intended) is that the revolution was organic, contingent, unplanned and took place at two distinct levels: the political and the popular.

At a political level, European wars led to government debt which the government tried to finance by levying extortionate taxes. Attempts to force through these taxes led to increasing involvement and empowerment of the representatives of the Third Estate (the first two being the nobility and the clergy; the third being everyone else). The Third Estate subsequently declared itself the National Assembly and forced the clergy and nobility to submit to it. There was no intention at this time to abolition nobility or monarchy, simply to install constitutional rather than absolute monarchy. One reason no single figure dominates the history of the period is that the National Assembly - fearing the concentration of power - passed a "self-denying ordinance" preventing its members from being re-elected. Power trickled from the hands of Louis XVI to the people. (One has the distinct impression that if he had been a more brutal man, history would have been very different).

At a popular level, taxes, poverty and two consecutive years of catastrophic harvests and famine led to bread riots culminating in crowds storming the Bastille on July 14th 1789.

This pattern repeats itself. The King's flight to Varennes was halted by crowds; crowds stormed Tuileries Palace; constitutional monarchy collapsed and the Convention declared the Republic in 1792.

In 1793 a crowd converged on the Convention demanding "war on tyrants, hoarders and aristocrats." The Committee of Public Safety rose to power and The Terror began.

Who forms these crowds? Who leads them? What are their aims? Not clear. But Robespierre is not standing there, neither is Danton. It seems a pure eruption of Rousseau's General Will. Hard to read all this without a Tolstoyan feeling that history is being made by dark and deep oceanic currents while we point at spume and flotsam and impute motive power to it. The ideas of the philosophes well up here and there but no clear ideology directs the revolutionary period from 1789-92; rather theory and praxis arise from one another and from contingent events. A young Tübingen seminarian named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel watched this history unfold and began to think.