Lectures on the French Revolution
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This collection of the lectures of Lord Acton on the French Revolution comprises a disciplined, thorough, and elegant history of the actual events of the bloody episode. It is as thorough a record as could be constructed in Acton’s time of the actions of the government of France during the Revolution.Delivered at Cambridge University between 1895 and 1899, Lectures on the French Revolution is a distinguished account of the entire epochal chapter in French experience by one of the most remarkable English historians of the nineteenth century. In contrast to Burke a century before, Acton is not concerned with condemning the Revolution, but in providing an accurate history of its advent, its bloody action, and its aftermath.There are twenty-two essays in the collection, commencing with “The Heralds of the Revolution,” in which Acton presents a taxonomy of the intellectual ferment that preceded and prepared the Revolution. An important appendix explores “The Literature of the Revolution,” offering assessments of the accounts of the Revolution written during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by, among others, Burke, Guizot, and Taine.Stephen J. Tonsor is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Michigan. He is a longtime student of the history of Germany and of Lord Acton. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
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LECTURES ON
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
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De Tocqueville and Acton had explained the French Revolution as a continuity with the ideas and politics of the past: the philosophical Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary consolidation of political centralization that characterized the pre-Revolutionary French monarchy. By contrast, Marxist historians read the Bolshevik Revolution back into French history. Causal analysis gave way to dogmatic ideological statement. Bolshevism and Jacobinism were equated, and the French Revolutionary Terror was, looking backward, a replication of Leninist and Stalinist terror. Albert Mathiez, George Lefebvre, and Albert Souboul were the chief architects of what François Furet calls “the revolutionary catechism.”
This “history,” as a weapon of class-warfare, served its purpose well, but nothing, not even a wrong historical idea in the service of an evil cause, lasts forever. In 1978, François Furet published his decisive Pensir la Revolution Française (the English translation being Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1981). Furet, who had been a member of the French Communist Party, rejected the “revolutionary catechism” root and branch and demonstrated in detail its intellectual impoverishment. Not content to simply display the catechism’s lack of historical analysis, Furet insisted that the Revolution could be explained through a history of its ideas and a description of the political dynamic that carried it forward. Thus the historical paradigm ceased to be socio-economic and class-engendered and became once more intellectual, political, and forcefully narrative. Furet recommended a return to the Revolutionary historiography of de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin.
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