Politics, culture, and class in the French Revolution Book

Author Lynn Hunt argues for the centrality of the process of the French Revolution and its impact on politics and culture demonstrated by the formation of a new political society. Rather than focus on deterministic causes leading to revolution, Hunt investigates the development of a new political culture complete with its own language, symbols, images, and gestures. This is a book about the interplay of politics on culture and of society on politics. Hunt provides a complete overview of the historiography of the French Revolution in the introduction and throughout the work. The author comments that she relied on the work of three French historians who have pioneered in the study of revolutionary political culture and then asserts that politics can not be separated from culture. Primary sources are used throughout the work and discussions of other schools of interpretation are examined through the work of other important historians.

The book is divided into two parts, “the symbolic sources of unity” and “the social sources of coherence”. The first section discusses political symbolism as expressed through language, images, and gestures. Hunt contends that the political culture of the revolution was made of these symbolic practices; the repetition of key words and principles, the use of symbols like the Liberty Tree, as well as shared attitudes towards politics. She answers how society represented their political goals and finds that the revolutionary symbolism provided a unifying force for the French revolutionary society. In the second part, Hunt concentrates on the geography of the revolution and the similarities of the people involved in revolutionary politics. The author finds that the revolutionary rhetoric appealed to the same types of people who came to believe that political activism could change their everyday lives. Hunt concludes that the “chief accomplishment of the French Revolution was the institution of a dramatically new political culture”.