Interpreting the French Revolution

"Yes. Tocqueville’s book had an incredibly wide influence in a variety of fields, with a variety of readerships. Furet’s book, on the other hand, was very much a book for people who already knew something about the subject. It had a staggering impact on the way historians viewed the French Revolution, because he was an extremely effective polemicist. 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. It’s written in a drippingly ironic and satirical mode of rhetoric. It’s just punch after punch, and it was incredibly undermining of the whole Marxist social interpretation of the revolution because he made fun of it. He didn’t just say it’s wrong, he derided it. This was incredibly effective. Needless to say it led many people on the other side to develop a visceral hatred of Furet. It’s hard for people to understand that today – how an interpretation of the French Revolution could lead to this level of personal vituperation. It was partly because he wrote it in a mode that would be much more common in internal debates within the Communist Party, rather than in an academic article. Yes, and he’d been a member of the same cell as the leading communist interpreter of the French Revolution. He knew the people he was talking about really well, and that added to the whole atmosphere that this was more than a difference of interpretation. It did in the sense that it shifted the gravitational pull away from Marxism at the very moment when Marxism was coming under much greater fire because of political events. This was in the 1970s, before the collapse of communism, and it seemed part of a general pulling away from a Marxist position, towards, and the question then was, what was the towards going to be? Was it going to be towards a kind of neoliberalism that many people associated Furet with in the 1970s and 1980s? It got caught up in the Mitterrand versus Thatcher debate, a general political shift towards the centre and the right in the 1970s and 80s, and to a certain extent the 90s. It was not just an academic question, but a general political question in the West. What he argued in the book is this: It’s not that you have a crisis in feudalism that leads to the rise of capitalism and that this is a bourgeois revolution in Marxist terms. He’s suggesting it’s a broader problem, that it’s really about internal contradictions in the political system. “It’s hard for people to understand, today, how an interpretation of the French Revolution could lead to this level of personal vituperation.” These internal political contradictions drive the revolution in an increasingly radical direction until it falls under its own weight, because the radicals don’t have enough of a support base. So he emphasises politics above all else, rather than the socio-economic environment in which politics takes place. To a certain extent that was a devil’s advocate position. He doesn’t actually believe that social factors were completely unimportant, but he wanted to shift the emphasis towards ideology. He wanted to argue that the problem with communism was that it was a false and contradictory ideology, and that you can’t change the world through ideology. You have to change the world through concrete political programmes. Absolutely. For him it’s still a great and incredibly important event, but it’s one with extremely problematic implications. It reveals that if you try to push for democracy without having an adequate institutional basis for it, you will end up with terror, violence, and the suppression of dissent. In short, you will end up with totalitarianism. So he’s taking the Tocqueville argument even further: Democracy can lead not just to despotism, but to totalitarianism. For him, what’s wrong with the revolution is that it’s all ideology and fighting over who is going to represent the general will of Rousseau and who is supposedly going to represent the people in democratic terms. Because it’s all ideology it doesn’t actually set up democratic forms of government, it veers off into terror and totalitarianism instead. So he’s quite negative, but as I said, there is a way in which many of his arguments came from a devil’s advocate position – he first and foremost wanted to combat the Marxist position, and he was less clear about what exactly his own position was."