Reviews for Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

The average rating for Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-21 00:00:00 Steven Dornacker Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt, 2004. This is an intellectual examination of the process of revolution and Hunt is less interested in the origins and consequences of revolution; instead, she pursues a systematic discussion on the means by which revolutionary rhetoric propagates revolutionary themes. Distinctive from the traditional Tocquevillian or Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, which emphasizes origins in terms of mass or economy, Hunt's revisionism distinguishes the praxis of revolution itself. She begins by dividing her book into two parts, the first of which looks at the role of poetics'that is, the rhetoric of power. The second she calls the sociology of politics. She devotes her first chapter to the rhetoric of politics, examining the role of revolutionary words in their context. She follows by analyzing the symbols of power, which she asserts mobilized the exercise of power. By the third chapter she has finished her argument with radical imagery, the dress and style of personal presentation used to create and identify with political movements. The fourth chapter begins the second division and deals primarily with identifying geographical distribution of politics. By distinguishing the geographical spread, she emphasizes the "center" of her cultural frame. (87) The emerging cultural class finally helps define her thesis, drawing upon sociological break-downs to demonstrate a radically different interpretation of the French Revolution than either Tocqueville or Marx could provide. What differentiates Hunt from previous historical interpretations is her emphasis upon the emergence of a distinct political class within France. Their "[belief] that they could establish a new national community" identifies for Hunt a distinctly original hand-hold by which to grasp the Revolution. (213) The sources of that identity were the methods of rhetoric, imagery and symbolism used to divorce the Revolutionaries from the Ancien Regime. Thus for Hunt, the creation of a new national myth was not the unconscious desires of burgeoning public opinion, or the rise of the bourgeoisie but rather the conscious application of myth-making and narrative-creation to build an heretofore unprecedented experience. Acknowledging the role of Furet in revivifying the historiography of the French Revolution, Hunt is indebted to the work of Mona Ozouf and Maurice Agulhon who "[showed] that cultural manifestations were part and parcel of revolutionary politics." (15) Drawing on primary sources and utilizing the much-maligned numerical analysis, Hunt is nevertheless able to demonstrate the role of emerging social and political consciousness within Revolutionary France. Ably weaving dry statistics into a cohesive historical argument places her on an empirical level sometimes lacking in previous historical interpretations of the Revolution. Put another way, she can put her money where her mouth is. Where that approach fails, however, is her sometimes oblique references to rhetorical methods'what she calls the poetics of politics. Oftentimes as much art criticism as historiography, her conclusions lack the conviction of her sociological studies. Thus, when she says that "power came from the Nation . . . to 'have' power . . . meant to have . . . control . . . over the articulation and deployment of outward manifestations of the new nation," one has the sense that much of her arguments follow the same pattern. She is attempting to wield power over Revolutionary interpretation through manipulating those same manifestations. Though well-researched and well-plotted, it nevertheless feels unwieldy. It would be helpful had Hunt allowed the words of the Revolutionaries themselves to make her argument for her, rather than drawing upon nebulous critiques of artistic expression. Nonetheless, Hunt provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of how politics shapes society, and how the manifestations of society'its images, theater and spectacle'elaborate and articulate the demands of politics.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-28 00:00:00 Robert Booton 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".