The historiography of the French Revolution stretches back two hundred years to the event itself. Issues of causation became a contested issue in academic circles from the 1960s onwards in particular, and new research and interpretation continues to inform on the unanswerable question of what the Revolution means. As the first premier of the People's Republic China, Zhou Enlai, quipped when asked what the impact of the French Revolution was: "It's too early to tell". The French Revolution (1789–1799) was a pivotal period in the history of French, European and Western civilization. ...

Contemporary and nineteenth-century historians

The constant stream of books could be said to begin with English politican Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In it he established the conservative stream of opinion, wherein even the revolution of July 1789 went "too far". His book is not so much studied today as part of Revolution studies, but rather as a classic (the classic) of conservative political philosophy. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a work of political commentary written by Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, first published on 1 November 1790. ...

A simplified description of the liberal approach to the Revolution was typically to support the achievements of the constitutional monarchy of the National Assembly but disown the later actions of radical violence like the invasion of the Tuilieres and the Terror. French historians of the first half of the nineteenth century like the politican and man of letters François Guizot (1787-1874), historian François Mignet (published Histoire de la Révolution Française in 1824), and famous philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (L’Ancien Régime et la révolution, 1856) established and wrote in this tradition. The National Assembly is the name of either a legislature, or the lower house of a bicameral legislature in some countries. ... On August 10, 1792, during the French Revolution, a mob – with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the insurrectionary Paris Commune – besieged the Tuileries palace. ... The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794) or simply The Terror (French: la Terreur) was a period in the French Revolution characterized by brutal repression. ... François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (October 4, 1787 -September 12, 1874) was a French historian, orator and statesman. ... François Auguste Alexis Mignet (May 8, 1796 - March 24, 1884) was a French historian. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Other French historians in the nineteenth-century (listed in rough chronological order):

• Jules Michelet - his Histoire de la revolution française, published after the Revolution of 1848 is one of the lesser works of a generally highly esteemed writer. To quote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "in actual picturesqueness as well as in general veracity of picture, the book cannot approach Carlyle's; while as a mere chronicle of the events it is inferior to half a dozen prosaic histories older and younger than itself." More recently, though viewed still as a flawed work, it has seen renewed influence for its appraisal of the Revolution in its own terms. Michelet has, with Carlyle, disciples in several schools of modern history, whose common aim is to approach the subject matter through involvement rather than objectivity.
• Louis Blanc - Blanc's 13-volume Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–1862) displays utopian socialist views, and sympathizes with Jacobinism.
• Théodore Gosselin (1855-1935) Writing under the name "G. Lenotre",
• F.A. Aulard - Founded the Société de l’Histoire de la Révolution and the bimonthly review Révolution française. Numerous works develop his republican, bourgeois, and anticlerical view of the revolution.
• Edgar Quinet - Late Romantic anti-Catholic nationalist.
• Pierre Gaxotte - Royalist: The French Revolution (1928)
• Hippolyte Taine - Taine's 3-volume The French Revolution constitutes volumes 2-4 of his The Origins of Contemporary France. [1] Among the more conservative of the originators of social history.
• Albert Sorel - diplomatic historian; Europe et la Révolution française (8 volumes, 1895–1904); introductory section of this work translated as Europe under the Old Regime (1947).

One of the most famous English works on the Revolution remains Thomas Carlyle's two-volume The French Revolution, A History (1837) [2]. It is a romantic work, both in style and viewpoint. Passionate in his concern for the poor and in his interest in the fears and hopes of revolution, he (while reasonably historically accurate) is often more concerned with conveying his impression of the hopes and aspirations of people (and his opposition to ossified ideology—"formulas" or "Isms"—as he called them) than with strict adherence to fact. The undoubted passion and intensity of the text may also be due to the famous incident where he sent the completed draft of the first volume to John Stuart Mill for comment, only for Mill's maid to accidentally burn the volume to ashes, forcing Carlyle to start from scratch. He wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson that the writing of the book was the "dreadfulest labor [he] ever undertook".^[1] Jules Michelet (August 21, 1798–February 9, 1874) was a French historian. ... —Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections The European Revolutions of 1848, in some countries known as the Spring of Nations, were the bloody consequences of a variety of changes that had been taking place in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. ... Supporters contend that the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910-1911) represents the sum of human knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century; indeed, it was advertised as such. ... Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc (October 29, 1811 - December 6, 1882), was a French politician and historian. ... 1847 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... 1862 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... Utopian socialism is a term used to define the first currents of modern Socialist thought. ... In the context of the French Revolution, a Jacobin originally meant a member of the Jacobin Club (1789-1794). ... Théodore Gosselin (October 7, 1855 - February 7, 1935) was a French historian who wrote under the pen name G. Lenotre. ... François Victor Alphonse Aulard (July 19, 1849 - October 23, 1928), was a French historian. ... Edgar Quinet (February 17, 1803 - March 27, 1875) was a French historian and man of letters. ... Pierre Gaxotte (1895-1982) is a French historian. ... 1928 (MCMXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... Portrait of Hippolyte Taine on French postage stamp of 1966 Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (April 21, 1828 - March 5, 1893) was a French critic and historian. ... Å…Social history is an area of historical study considered by some to be a social science that attempts to view historical evidence from the point of view of developing social trends. ... Albert Sorel (August 13, 1842 - June 29, 1906), was a French historian. ... The most familiar view of Carlyle is as the bearded sage with a penetrating gaze. ... The French Revolution: A History was written by the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. ... | Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom (1837 - 1901) 1837 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ... John Stuart Mill (May 20, 1806 – May 8, 1873), an English philosopher and political economist, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. ... Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) was an American author, poet, and philosopher. ...

The twentieth century

The three French figures who dominated Revolution scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century were Jean Jaurès, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre. Jean Jaurès Jean Léon Jaurès—full name Auguste-Marie-Joseph-Jean-Léon Jaurès—(September 3, 1859 – July 31, 1914) was a French Socialist leader. ... Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) was a French historian, known for his work on the French Revolution. ... Georges Lefebvre (1874-1959) was a French historian, who was considered in his day to be the leading authority on the French Revolution, with a formidable scholarly reputation, editing the most respected journal on the subject, Annales historiques de la Révolution française and holding the position of Professor...

Jaurès was an eminent socialist politician in the Third Republic, and historian, assassinated on the eve of the First World War by a young nationalist. The French Third Republic, (in French, Troisième Republique, sometimes written as IIIème Republique) ( 1870/ 75- 1940/ 46), was the governing body of France between the Second French Empire and the Fourth Republic. ...

Mathiez, who died prematurely in 1932, published La Révolution français (3 volumes, 1922–1927, translated 1928, reprinted 1962) giving a socialist perspective on the revolution; he worked closely with Jaurès and was one of the more outspoken partisans of Robespierre. 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will take you to a full 1932 calendar). ...

Lefebvre, his successor and a secondary school teacher for many years before turning to university lecturing, was inspired by Jaures and came to the field from a mildly socialist viewpoint. His massive and reputation-making thesis, Les paysans du Nord (1924), was an account of the Revolution among provinicial peasants. He continued to research along these lines, publishing The Great Fear of 1789 (1932, first English translation 1973), about the panic and violence which spread throughout rural France in the summer of 1789. His work largely approaches the Revolution "from below", favouring explanations in terms of classes. His most famous work was Quatre-Vingt-Neuf (1939, translated into English as The Coming of the French Revolution, 1947). This skilfully and persuasively argued work interprets the Revolution through a Marxist lens: first there is the "aristocratic revolution" of the Assembly of Notables and the Paris Parlement in 1788; then the "bourgeois revolution" of the Third Estate; the "popular revolution", symbolised by the fall of the Bastille; and the "peasant revolution", represented by the "Great Fear" in the provinces and the burning of chateaus. (Alternately, one can view 1788 as the aristocratic revolution, 1789 the bourgeois revolution, and 1792/3 the popular revolution). This interpretation sees a rising capitalist middle-class overthrow a dying-out feudal aristocratic ruling caste, and held the field for almost twenty years. ^[2]. His major publication was La Revolution francaise (1957, translated and published in English in two volumes, The French Revolution from its origins to 1793, 1962, and The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799, 1967). This, and particularly his later work on Napoleon and the Directory, remains highly regarded.^[3] The Assembly of Notables was an assembly convened on 1787-02-22 by Charles Alexandre de Calonne, the minister of finance of France. ... The National Constituent Assembly (French: Assemblée nationale constituante) was formed from the National Assembly on July 9, 1789, during the first stages of the French Revolution. ...

Another influential French historian of this period was Ernst Labrousse, who performed extensive economic research on eighteenth-century France.

One of his pupils who carried on his work was Marxist historian Albert Soboul. Although his reputation has fallen in recent years under the weight of the revisionist school, he performed exhaustive research on the lower classes of the Revolution. His most famous work is The Sans-Culottes (1968). Albert Marius Soboul (April 27, 1914–September 11, 1982) was a French historian of the French Revolution of 1789–1799 and of Napoleon. ...

George Rude, another of Lefebvre's proteges, did further work on the popular side of the Revolution: The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959) is one of his most famous works.

Perhaps one of the most respected historians of the Revolution is the Francophile Englishman Richard Cobb, who has produced a number of immensely detailed studies of both provincial and city life, avoiding the revisionism debate by "keeping his nose very close to the ground".^[4] Les armees revolutionnaires (1968, translated as The People's Armies in 1987) is his most famous work.

Revisionism and modern work

In 1954, Alfred Cobban used his inaugural lecture as Professor of French History at the University of London to attack what he called the "social interpretation" of the French Revolution. The lecture was later published as "The Myth of the French Revolution", but his seminal work arguing this point was The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964). The main point he made was that feudalism had long since disappeared in France; that the Revolution did not transform French society, and that it was principally a political revolution, not a social one as Lefebvre and others insisted.

Although dismissed and attacked by the mainstream journals at first, Cobban was persistent and determined, and his approach was soon supported and modified by a flood of new research both inside and outside of France. American historian George V. Taylor's research established that the bourgeoisie of the Third Estate were not quite the budding capitalists they were made out to be; John McManners, Jean Egret, Franklin Ford and others wrote on the divided and complex situation of the nobility in pre-revolutionary France. The most significant opposition to arise in France was that of Annales historians Francois Furet and Denis Richet. Furet's works include Interpreting the French Revolution (1981), a historiographical overview of what has preceded him; Revolutionary France 1770-1880 (1995), which is a sweeping attempt to realign the Revolution in a "long" nineteenth century of revolutionary France; and A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989).^[5] The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales dhistoire économique et sociale (later called , then renamed in 1994 as ) where it was first expounded. ... François Furet (27 March 1927 - 12 July 1997) is an influential French historian who attacked the way the French Revolution is interpreted by Marxist historians. ...

Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) is a popular, generally moderate/conservative history of the period. It is ostensibly a narrative of "Persons" and "Events", and more in the tradition of Carlyle than Tocqueville and Lefebvre.^[6] Its narrative- while massive- focuses on the most visible leaders of the Revolution, even through its more "popular" phases. The book's allegiance is to historical literary styles rather than schools. Thus Schama is simultaneously able to deny "any imagined" bourgeois revolution; reserve apotheoses for Robespierre, Louis XVI, and the sans-culottes alike; and utilize historical nuance to a degree usually associated with more liberal historians. Borrowing from the Romantics for imagery (the introduction closely follows that of Michelet's "History...") and a less violent use of their polemics, "Citizens" also refutes the Romantics' belief in the necessity of the Revolution. Though not an all-encompassing work, it is a solid, engaging interpretation that serves unusually well, for its depth, as an introduction. 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Louis XVI, also called Louis August, Duke of Berry (born August 23, 1754 in Versailles; died January 21, 1793 in Paris) was King of France and Navarre from 1774 until 1791, and then King of the French from 1791 to 1792. ... Painted rendition of a sans-culottes. ...

William Doyle, professor at Bristol University, has published The Origins of the French Revolution (1988) and a somewhat revisionist history, The Oxford history of the French Revolution (2nd edition 2002).

Lynn Hunt, though often characterized as a feminist interpreter of the Revolution, is a consumate historian working in the wake of the revisionists, often in an unusual and innovative way. Her major works include Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), both interpretative works. The former focuses on the creation of a new democratic political culture from scratch, assigning the Revolution's greatest meaning here, in a political culture.^[7] In the latter study she works with a somewhat Freudian interpretation, the political Revolution as a whole being seen as an enormous dysfunctional family haunted by patricide: Louis as father, Marie-Antoinette as mother, and the revolutionaries as an unruly mob of brothers. This novel approach has attracted more reserved reviews, described as "nervy and daring".^[8].

References

1. ^ Quoted in John Hall Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, Macmillan, 1951.
2. ^ William Doyle. The Origins of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 8-9
3. ^ Paul H. Beik, foreword to Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from its Origins to 1793, Columbia University Press, 1962
4. ^ David Troyansky. Review of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution by Lynn Hunt. The History Teacher, 20, 1 (Nov 1986), pp. 136-137
5. ^ Doyle, "Writings on Revolutionary Origins since 1939", in Origins
6. ^ Simon Schama, "Prologue", Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Knopf, 1988
7. ^ William H. Sewell. Review of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution by Lynn Hunt. Theory and Society, 15, 6 (Nov 1986), pp. 915-917
8. ^ Jeff Goodwin. Review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution by Lynn Hunt. Contemporary Sociology, 23, 1 (Jan 1994), pp. 71-72; quote from Madelyn Gutwirth. "Sacred Father; Profane Sons: Lynn Hunt's French Revolution". French Historical Studies, 19, 2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 261-276