William Doyle - The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in 15 languages worldwide.

Very Short Introductions available from Oxford Paperbacks:

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas

THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair

ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn

ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes

AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick

THE BIBLE John Riches

BUDDHA Michael Carrithers

BUDDHISM Damien Keown

CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson

CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley

COSMOLOGY Peter Coles

DARWIN Jonathan Howard

DESCARTES Tom Sorell

DRUGS Les Iversen

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford

THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle

FREUD Anthony Storr

GALILEO Stillman Drake

GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh

HEGEL Peter Singer

HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood

HINDUISM Kim Knott

HISTORY John H. Arnold

HUME A. J. Ayer

INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton

INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary

ISLAM Malise Ruthven

JUDAISM Norman Solomon

JUNG Anthony Stevens

KANT Roger Scruton

THE KORAN Michael Cook

LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler

LOGIC Graham Priest

MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner

MARX Peter Singer

MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths

MUSIC Nicholas Cook

NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew

PAUL E. P. Sanders

POLITICS Kenneth Minogue

PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus

ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway

ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler

RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just

SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce

SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor

STUART BRITAIN John Morrill

THEOLOGY David F. Ford

THE TUDORS John Guy

TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan

WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling

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A Very Short Introduction

William Doyle

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William Doyle 2001

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To produce a very short book about a subject on which one has written at varying lengths before is more of a challenge than it might seem. We can all think of people who have written the same book several times over in different forms; and we all dread becoming like them. So I have not set out primarily to retell a familiar story, although anything calling itself an introduction must to some extent do that. My concern has been much more to discuss why the French Revolution mattered, and has continued to matter in innumerable ways in the two centuries since it occurred. The whole story of the Revolution, both as a series of late eighteenth-century events and as a set of ideas, images, and memories in the minds of posterity, is a powerful argument for the importance of history, as well as a striking example of its complexity. Whether it will remain as relevant for understanding the twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth and twentieth is perhaps, as a Chinese sage is reputed to have observed, too early to say.

The first time I studied the French Revolution seriously was in my final year as an undergraduate. It was lit up by the providential appearance of Norman Hampsons Social History of the French Revolution. I am not surprised that it is still in print as its author enters his eightieth year. Later it was my privilege to be Normans colleague at York. In gratitude for that, and the years of friendship since, I dedicate this book to him. I hope he will not find association with a work slighter than any of his own the least welcome of what are sure to be many birthday presents.

William Doyle, Bath, 8 April 2001

Chteau Versailles/Giraudon

Muse de la Ville de Paris, Muse Carnavalet/Giraudon

Mary Evans Picture Library

Muse de la Ville de Paris, Muse Carnavalet/Lauros-Giraudon

Mary Evans Picture Library

Photo RMN-Michle Bellot, Muse du Louvre, Paris

Mary Evans Picture Library

IRPA-KIK, Brussels

Photo RMN, Muse du Louvre, Paris

Paris, Bibl. Nationale de France-Inv: Imprims/Lauros-Giraudon

Richard Cole

1. Louis XVI: The absolute monarch in all his glory

Mr Worthing, says Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?

Presumably Mr Worthing did. Every person of good general knowledge in the nineteenth century knew something about the great upheaval which had marked the last years of the eighteenth. Serious Victorians would have felt it a duty to instruct themselves about what had happened in France, and why, in and after 1789; and how the ensuing turmoil had been brought to an end only by the generation-long Great War against Napoleon which had marked the lives of their parents or grandparents. Mr Worthing, nibbling his cucumber sandwiches and dreaming of marrying Lady Bracknells daughter, would not have been so curious. But probably even he would have had some idea of what the worst excesses of the French Revolution had been, and of how they had affronted lifes ordinary decencies. He would have known that there had been a popular uprising leading to mob rule, the overthrow of monarchy and persecution of the nobility. He would have known that the chosen instrument of revolutionary vengeance was the guillotine, that relentless mechanical decapitator which made the streets of Paris run with royal and aristocratic blood. The creator of Mr Ernest Worthing and Lady Bracknell (her ancestors, had they been French, could scarcely have hoped to avoid the dread instrument ) ended his days in morose exile in Paris. There, Oscar Wilde was surrounded by symbols and images deliberately designed by the rulers of the Third Republic to evoke the memory of the First, the Revolutions creation. The coinage and public buildings were emblazoned with the slogan