Politics, Epistemology and Revolution

Abstract

It has now been more than 20 years since the appearance of Francois Furet's groundbreaking collection of essays Interpreting the French Revolution. In that slim volume, Furet laid out an extraordinarily clever rebuttal to the prevailing Marxist paradigm in studies of the French Revolution. Rather than attributing the escalation of the revolutionary struggle to class conflict, Furet blamed competition among political discourses that had become detached from social interests. As he memorably put it, the peculiarity of the Revolution stemmed from the fact that, in the hands of the Jacobins, 'language was substituted for power'. And rather than describing the ultimate consequence as the triumph of the bourgeoisie, Furet proposed that historians find in the Revolution the sources of a distinctive national political culture.1 Furet's argument resulted in a profound shift in mainstream historians' approach to the study of the French Revolution. Indeed, it may not be an exaggeration to say that this book reshaped the study of modern French history as a whole. In conjunction with a burgeoning (and largely distinct) Anglo-American philosophical trend commonly referred to as the 'linguistic turn', Furet's work of the late 1970s and 1980s reoriented research in the Held towards the realm of intellectual history. But what followed was not precisely a return to an older history of ideas. The claims of Furet, along with those of Lynn Hunt, Keith Baker, and small number of other distinguished historians on both sides of the Atlantic, launched a seemingly endless series of books, articles, and dissertations concerned with the nature of French revolutionary discourse. These ranged from explorations of the literary tropes and styles of expression employed in key revolutionary texts to studies of the way specific terms, images and symbols from the