of the nation, men united in the desire to realize the wishes of philosophy.
Convinced of its rights, it had prevailed heroically over its enemies ‘by the simple
expression of its will’. In this lay the first and most noble act of the Revolution.
Never, Thiers contended, ‘had a nation acted with more justice or more danger’.
However, the fundamental error of the National Assembly was to believe that the
king would resign himself to his loss of sovereignty and that the people, recently
awakened, would be content with only a share of it. Herein, Thiers conjectured,
was to be found a tension and dynamic that would drive the Revolution forward
towards its final resolution.
To understand this, Thiers argued, it was sufficient to reflect upon the differ-
ences between revolutions that had occurred among subject and free peoples. In
Rome and Athens, the nation and their leaders had argued about who held
authority. In modern societies, by contrast, the first signs of awakening were
evident in ‘the most enlightened classes’, only for it progressively to spread
throughout the entire population. Soon satisfied with the share of power they
had obtained, the enlightened classes sought to bring the revolution to an end, but
they could not do so and were ceaselessly harried by those who followed them. For
the latter, those who had preceded them were the enemy. ‘The simple bourgeois’,
Thiers explained, ‘is called an aristocrat by the manual worker and is pursued as
such.’93
The National Assembly, being the first to challenge an all-powerful authority,
being wise enough to recognize what was owed to those who had had everything
and to those who had had nothing, had wished to leave to the former some of its
power and provide the latter with learning and rights. Yet, from the one they
encountered resentment, from the other ambition; as a consequence, ‘a war of
extermination’ was set in motion. The members of the National Assembly were,
thus, ‘the first men of good will who, shaking off slavery, attempted to found a just
order . . . but who succumbed through wanting to commit a few to concede
something and others not to want everything’.94
The stage was now set for the descent of France into ‘murderous war’. A
revolution that pitted the base of society against the upper classes was driven by
envy and violent passions; and, in the case of Robespierre, by a combination of
purity, vanity, and ‘habitual egoism’. As for Marat, Thiers described a fanatic
gripped by hatred and obsession, intent on destruction and extermination.95 The
result, vividly described over several volumes, was a society where the prison and the
scaffold were a daily reality; where one feared to express an opinion or to see one’s
friends and family; where merchants were forced to sell goods at ‘fictitious prices’;
where to display wealth or luxury was dangerous; and where women and the old
were denied the right to practise their religion. ‘Never’, Thiers wrote, ‘did power
more violently overturn the habits of a people.’96 Nonetheless, Thiers gave full vent
92 Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française, ii. 3–12.
93 Ibid. 7–8.
94 Ibid. 8.
95 Ibid. 217–21.
96 Ibid. v. 471.
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259
to the argument that ‘destiny’ had given the Jacobins and their supporters ‘a unique
and terrible mission’: that of ‘defending the revolution against Europe and the
Vendée’. ‘Sublime and atrocious’ at one and the same time, of their ‘bloody
dictatorship’ only ‘the glory of defence’ would remain.97
The ‘happy catastrophe’ of Robespierre’s fall and execution brought the ‘ascend-
ing march’ of the Revolution to an end. What followed, in the form of the
Directory, was a regime which sought to restore order and prosperity and to
combine this with continued military success. No more glowing account of its
achievements could have been provided. By the summer of 1796, and following
one of the ‘most beautiful and extraordinary’ military campaigns in history, France
was ‘at the height of her power’. She was ‘resplendent in her immortal glory’. The
storms of the Revolution appeared to have calmed. Commerce and agriculture were
flourishing. All voices were free to be heard. A government, ‘composed of the
bourgeoisie, our equals’, ruled the republic with ‘moderation’. Let us not forget,
Thiers wrote, these ‘immortal days of liberty, greatness, and hope’.98 The decline
which followed was attributed to continued internal opposition and the plotting of
the European powers. The repression of the royalists in September 1797, achieved
through the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor, was viewed by Thiers as ‘a sad but
inevitable necessity’. Legality was an illusion in times of revolution.99 But, little
by little, the regime became ‘decayed’ and ‘worn-out’. The government was
disorganized; factions were ungovernable; everywhere there were signs of social
collapse and brigandry; military defeat occurred against the Austrians and in Italy.
In these circumstances, the Republic again seemed in mortal danger. To save the
situation a ‘force’ was required and that force could only be found in the army. A
sword was necessary.100 It was to belong to Napoleon Bonaparte. The Revolution,
therefore, having been in turn monarchical, republican, and democratic in charac-
ter, finished up by being military and this was so because, ‘in the midst of this
perpetual struggle with Europe’, it needed to establish itself on a ‘solid and strong’
foundation.101
What sense could be made of this turbulent decade? Were the republicans right
to deplore the immolation of liberty by one of the heroes born of the Revolution?
According to Thiers, the Revolution, ‘which was to give us liberty, and which
prepared everything for us to have it one day, was not itself and could not be
liberty’.102 Rather, it was ‘a great struggle against the old order of things’. Having
defeated that order in France, it was necessary to defeat it in Europe but such a
‘violent struggle’ was not compatible with either the forms or spirit of liberty. Thus,
if during the period of the National Assembly there had been a brief period of
liberty, all too quickly it had been replaced by ‘passions and heroism’. With
97 Ibid. iv. 5. Thiers did not spare his readers the details of the ‘murderous’ repression that took
place. See his account of the infamous noyades in Nantes: ibid. vi. 399–402.
98 Ibid. viii. 572–4.
99 Ibid. ix. 333.
100 Ibid. x. 409–10.
101 Ibid. 527.
102 Ibid.
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victories won and danger receding, Thiers argued, liberty had returned under the
Directory, but war with Europe could only be suspended temporarily. The coup
d’état of 18 Brumaire had therefore been ‘necessary’. Napoleon’s ‘mysterious task’,
of which he was the ‘involuntary agent’, was not to pursue the cause of liberty—as
it could not be pursued in the circumstances—but to continue the Revolution
‘under monarc
hical forms’. He had done this by mixing his ‘plebeian’ blood with
the oldest blood of European monarchy. He had blended the peoples of Europe
together and had carried French laws to Germany, Italy, and Spain. Everywhere he
had contradicted and shaken what had existed before. In this way, Thiers pro-
nounced in conclusion, ‘the new society was consolidated under the protection of
his sword such that liberty would come one day. It has not come, it will come.’103
In summary, Mignet and Thiers were successful in formulating what might be
termed a liberal catechism of the Revolution. Seen from this perspective, the
Revolution was not accidental, but inevitable, with roots deep in French history.
It was not a conspiracy but had popular support. Its causes were political, rather
than social and economic. At the outset the Revolution had possessed a purity of
intention but this had been undermined by the emigration of the aristocracy,
foreign intervention, and the passions of the people. Circumstances explained the
resort to terror and the existence of Jacobin dictatorship. Despite its crimes,
the Revolution established the foundations of a new society upon the ruins of the
ancien régime and the conditions in which liberty, if not actually realized, could one
day be attained. To that end, any future liberal revolution had to avoid involvement
in a foreign war, as it had been war above all that had unleashed the popular
passions that had ultimately produced despotism.104
Nevertheless, Mignet and Thiers provided an interpretation of the Revolution
that was not without ambiguity or even, as Linda Orr has suggested, a ‘basic
schizophrenia’.105 If the notion of inevitability could serve to vindicate the Revolu-
tion, it was not at all clear—beyond some vague idea of the movement of civiliza-
tion—what the determining factors in this history were. Next, while both authors
were without hesitation in their condemnation of despotism, their critique was
undoubtedly weakened by an enthusiasm for national glory and an admiration for
the military achievements of the 1790s and the Empire. It is interesting to note that
Thiers later felt the need to refute the criticism that, by fostering the image of
Napoleon’s greatness, he had contributed to the 1851 coup d’état by Louis Napo-
leon.106 More fundamentally, to the horror of their conservative opponents,
Mignet and Thiers appeared to be suggesting that the crimes of the Revolution
could be justified in terms of its positive achievements. Just as importantly, to judge
that the Revolution would come to an end with the victory of the bourgeois
representatives of the Third Estate was to imagine and hope that the people
103 Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française, 530.
104 This view was restated by Thiers following the revolution of 1830 when he affirmed that it was
in the interest of the revolution to want peace: see Thiers, La Monarchie de 1830 (1831), 101.
105 Linda Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca,
NY, 1990), 19.
106 See J. P. T. Bury and R. P. Tombs, Thiers 1797–1877: A Political Life (London, 1986), 151.
History, Revolution, and Terror
261
would acquiesce to their exclusion from the political processes of the new order.
This was to prove recklessly optimistic.
All the same, it was to the creation of such an order that Mignet and Thiers were
to devote their political energies over the next decade, the two friends from the
south of France playing a leading role in the agitation that led to the final departure
of the Bourbon monarchy in July 1830. The central political objective was now to
transform the relegitimated ideas of 1789 into a set of stable and regular represen-
tative institutions. In those circumstances, as Guizot rallied the liberal cause to the
defence of moderate constitutional government and the new regime turned its back
on the populist uprisings across Europe, royalist attempts to discredit the Revolu-
tion appeared to have been largely vanquished. However, as François Furet has
observed, ‘the opponents of the new Orleanist regime suddenly began to fly the
banner of 1793: they clamoured for the Republic and the Montagnard Constitu-
tion, not for the bastard regime offered by the Constituent Assembly’. In short, the
battle grounds of the historiography of the Revolution were about to be redrawn.
I I
Much of this new historiography was socialist in inspiration. The ‘dominant idea’,
according to Michel Winock, was that ‘after the defeat of the Jacobins, the
bourgeoisie had profited from the Revolution; and therefore that it was necessary
to reclaim it for the people, in the name of equality and fraternity’.107 What the
liberals had both excused and deplored in the Revolution was now to be celebrated
and praised. No longer was the grand narrative of the Revolution to be the struggle
between the aristocracy and the Third Estate but that between the bourgeoisie and
the people. The tyrant Robespierre was to be recast as the very incarnation of the
Revolution’s emancipatory message of earthly salvation. Rather than bringing the
Revolution to a close, the goal was to reverse its betrayal and to allow it to be seen as
a prefiguration of a new social order. Bourgeois sensibilities were to give way before
proletarian messianism.
Broadly representative of this new interpretation of the Revolution was the
monumental forty-volume Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, written
and compiled by Philippe Buchez and his friend Pierre Roux and published in
instalments between 1834 and 1839.108 Unlike many nineteenth-century histories,
it is not one that has withstood the test of time, but, in its day, it was both widely
consulted and deeply influential.109 For the most part, each volume consisted of
primary documents gleaned from official reports, parliamentary sessions, bro-
chures, newspapers, and so on, but interspersed among these was a running
107 Michel Winock, Les Voix de la Liberté: Les Écrivains engagés au XIXe siècle (2001), 287.
108 Buchez had earlier set out the philosophical and religious basis of his ideas in his Introduction à la
science de l’histoire (1833). At the end of the 1820s he had broken with the Saint-Simonian movement
and at this point had abandoned science for religion.
109 Buchez and Roux imagined that their collection of material might act as a ‘guide for future
historians’: Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, xvii. 186.
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interpretative commentary. In addition, the early volumes provided a preface
loosely summarizing the broader philosophical and religious themes underpinning
the argument. What makes this account especially intriguing was the ambition to
wed the Revolution to Catholicism, Jacobinism to religion.110 The ‘beginning and
the end of the Revolution’, Buchez and Roux declared, ‘are contained in these
words: liberty, equality, fraternity, or, in other words, in this goal: the realization in
society of Christian morality’.111
This was made evident in the very first sentence. ‘The French Revolution’, it
declared, ‘is the most
advanced and final outcome of modern civilization, and the
whole of modern civilization derives from the Gospels’. This was a fact both
‘irrefutable’ and ‘incontestable’.112 The error, Buchez and Roux claimed, was to
have continued to see the Revolution as an accident, as the product of financial
insolvency, governmental mistakes, aristocratic insolence, royal scandal, and per-
sonal ambition. Indeed, they went so far as to suggest that ‘this profound ignorance
of the goal of humanity’ was not only the cause of all the Revolution’s misfortunes
but also why, in 1833, it could still be dismissed only as disorder rather than as the
foundation of right. But, they next argued, to be perceived in this way the
Revolution had to be located upon a ‘Christian soil’. Then it would be seen that
the ‘axioms’ of the Revolution were ‘laws long taught, long pursued, and approach-
ing realization’. To claim, therefore, that the people had given themselves over to
revolution in order to secure material well-being was to insult those ‘dead martyrs’
who had ‘sacrificed themselves’ to ‘the great ideas of equality and fraternity’. It was
also to fail to understand that it had taken fourteen centuries of constant effort to
produce ‘this proud nation’ which, of itself and without a leader, had risen up as
one. Thus, Buchez and Roux affirmed in their introduction, ‘the revolutionary idea
has a history which is that of the world, and where we learn, at the same time, why
each people occupies the place it does and why our nation is the first among
modern nations’.113
Like their predecessors, Buchez and Roux prefaced their history with a précis of
French history. Resting firmly upon the conviction that France was not the result of
Frankish conquest, they unhesitatingly asserted that the French nation emerged as a
consequence of the desire to protect the Gauls and to defend and strengthen
Catholicism. The whole of European history, they claimed, could be understood
in just two words: France and the Church. With this historical preface to the
Revolution completed, Buchez and Roux lost no time in setting out their argu-
ment. From the summer of 1789, ‘the bourgeoisie sought to confiscate the
Revolution for its own benefit’.114 To protect its newly acquired dominance it
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