Volume 46, Number 6 · April 8, 1999
Tocqueville's Lament
By P.N. Furbank
The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume 1
by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited by François Furet, by Françoise Mélonio, translated by Alan S Kahan
University of Chicago Press, 451 pp., $32.50
Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution
by Patrice Higonnet
Harvard University Press, 397 pp., $24.95 (paper)
It is now thirty years since, in Penser la Révolution française,[1] the late François Furet offered a revisionist explanation of the French Revolution; but, if I am not mistaken, it is still the reigning orthodoxy. Which it well deserves to be. For it is simple but profound and is, before anything else, a theory not so much about the Revolution as about what a historian should be doing when writing about that infinitely significant event. His duty, above all else, Furet argues, is to keep his distance: to cling, as a working assumption, to the old adage that 'men make history but do not know the history they are making.' For the historians have, for very understandable human reasons, come to treat 1789 as a sort of 'zero' date, presenting it in their books and syllabuses as the key to what, historically speaking, lies both upstream and downstream.
Review, 5477 words
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