Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/24/1948
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Australian
https://www.coursera.org/instructor/petermcphee * https://www.ft.com/content/ea81b282-0580-11e6-9b51-0fb5e65703ce * http://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/historian-peter-mcphee/ * https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/display/person13254
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 24, 1948, in Victoria, Australia.
EDUCATION:University of Melbourne, B.A. (honors, first class), Dip.Ed., M.A. (honors, first class), and Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, faculty member, 1975-79; Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, faculty member, 1980-86; University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1986-2009, Personal Chair in History, 1993-2009, emeritus professor, 2009–.
MEMBER:Centre d’histoire contemporaine du Languedoc-Méditerranéen et du Roussillon; Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations; Société d’Études Robespierristes; Société d’histoire de la Révolution de 1848; Society for the Study of French History; Australian Historical Association; History Institute of Victoria;
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (chair).
Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1997; inaugural “Universitas 21” Teaching Fellow, 1997; Fellow, Academy of Social Sciences, 2003; Centenary Medal for services to education, 2003; Member, Order of Australia, 2012.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to books, including Rural Communism in France, 1920-1939, edited by Laird Boswell; Fraternity among the Peasantry: Socialibilty and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815-1914, by Alan R.H. Baker, 2001; L’Histoire à travers champs. Mélanges offerts à Jean Sagnes, Les Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2002; Revolutionary France, 1788-1880, Oxford University Press, 2002; Agriculture, Prosperity, and the Modernization of French Rural Communities, 1870-1914: Views from the Village, Edwin Mellen Press, 2004; New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France: French Historians 1900-2000, edited by Alain Corbin, 2010; Strategic Curriculum Change: Global Trends in Universities, Routledge, 2012; Robespierre: Portraits Croises, edited by Armand Colin, 2012; The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, 2015; and Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World, 2015.
Contributor to journals, including French History, Australian Journal of Politics and History, American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, French Historical Studies, Social History, and European History Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter McPhee, an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, has written extensively on the social and political history of the French Revolution. A graduate of the University of Melbourne, McPhee began his teaching career at La Trobe University, later taking a faculty position at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, before joining the University of Melbourne Department of History in 1986.
The Politics of Rural Life
In The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852, McPhee examines rural dynamics in the Second Republic. He argues that the peasantry were not dupes; they understood what they had to gain or lose in voting for Louis-Napoleon, whom they saw as a leader capable of instituting the radical social reforms most important to them as farmers and rural artisans. Rational actors, the peasantry understood the particular problems they faced, and they worked to effect suitable changes in opposition to local elites and government, both of which sought to impose their own controls on economic production.
“McPhee puts his argument with great cogency,” said Ralph Gibson in the English Historical Review. Gibson went on to praise The Politics of Rural Life as a “splendid book, lucidly written and widely informed,” adding that “it enriches our perceptions of a pivotal period in modern French history, and indeed of peasant society in general.”
Revolution and Environment in Southern France
The focus of Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords and Murder in the Corbières, 1780-1830 is the commune of Corbières, located in the country’s southern department of Aud. The book analyzes the political and social effects of the Revolution on this rural backwater, far removed from the capital and its energetic activity. Some changes, such as the requirement that priests swear allegiance to the new regime, met with little opposition; but peasants in Corbières were angered at the reluctance of the national assembly to abolish the system of feudal dues and resented the high taxes they were required to pay.
McPhee devotes several chapters to the issue of land use. New legislation allowed for the commons to be divided into private plots. Disputing the theory that the larger landowners had supported this move, which the poorer peasants had opposed, McPhee argues that the landowners were the ones who had stood to benefit from keeping the commons, on which they could graze their flocks of sheep. Indeed, landowners complained when the poorer peasants claimed plots for their private use, and they challenged the legality of these actions. The peasants’ appropriation of the commons, says McPhee, was a true peasant revolution.
Living the French Revolution, 1789-1799
In Living the French Revolution, 1789-1799, McPhee focuses on the ways in which the French Revolution affected the lives of ordinary people. The author explains that, though revolutionary fervor took rapid hold in cities, the vast majority of the French population, who lived on remote farms or in small villages, also played active roles either supporting or opposing the cause. McPhee writes that the rural population felt only distantly connected to the monarchy and to legislation emanating from the central government. But rural people cared deeply about local matters and made their concerns emphatically known. They pushed for an end to the system of seigneurialism, which had oppressed them, and also advocated for changes in regulation of common lands and property rights.
Legislative and administrative changes affected the peasantry in significant ways. Offices were opened up to nonelites; laws regulating inheritances undermined traditional family dynamics; land reform resulted in environmental changes. Though violence was not uncommon, officials in charge of small villages and towns were often able to meet the requirements of the new regime while also ensuring adequate supplies of essential goods for the local population.
Writing in the Journal of Social History, Laura Mason described Living the French Revolution as a book “rich with insight and detail.” Pointing out that the author does not advance an original thesis in the book, the reviewer said that McPhee’s purpose is to illuminate the aspirations and activism of the mass of citizens drawn–willingly or not–into a maelstrom that was truly popular for having left no one untouched. Engaging dialogue with several generations of historians, he makes a powerful case for the Revolution’s importance in the short and long term, eloquently describing how it overturned an old order to alter fundamentally the public and private lives of ordinary men and women throughout France.”
Robespierre
Maximilien Robespierre, subject of McPhee’s biography Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, is considered the principal architect of the French Revolution. Born in Northern France and trained as a lawyer, Robespierre was an idealist who abhorred violence, was opposed to capital punishment, and held radically egalitarian beliefs. Yet he came to accept violence as a necessary means of protecting the Revolution from its enemies. Fearing treason at every turn, he clashed with more moderate leaders and began ordering the arrests of perceived traitors, condemning them to death without trial. Soon, the streets of Paris were running red with the blood of perceived class enemies executed in public by guillotine. After a few months of this reign of terror, as it came to be called, Robespierre himself was arrested and put to death.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed that McPhee “strives to rehabilitate Robespierre somewhat” by arguing that the use of violence had been necessary, and that Robespierre’s image as a bloodthirsty despot had been created at least in part by others who deflected blame from themselves by exaggerating his abuses. The Kirkus Reviews writer did not find this argument entirely convincing but nevertheless praised the biography as a “solid contribution to the scholarship of this key figure of the French Revolution.” Also noting the author’s sympathetic view of Robespierre, New Criterion reviewer Gerald J. Russello stated that “despite McPhee’s conscientious historiography, the shadow of the guillotine still obstructs the view. McPhee’s subject remains something of a monster.” On the other hand, Historian contributor Paul R. Hanson observed that McPhee presents a portrait of the revolutionary that is “sensitive, balanced, and nuanced.”
Liberty or Death
“After more than 225 years, the fundamental questions posed and probed by the French Revolution remain at the heart of all democratic political life everywhere,” writes McPhee in Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. Societies are still struggling to balance the individualistic desire for liberty with the quest for equality, and to ask whether governments should promote the social good by abridging liberties or by promoting unfettered individualism. Analysis of the French Revolution, according to McPhee, can shed valuable light on questions that remain relevant into the twenty-first century.
McPhee presents a comprehensive account of the context in which the Revolution arose and developed, clearly explaining the factionalism that drove leaders apart and that threatened the Revolution’s ideals. He also discusses the ways in which the Revolution directly affected the lives of workers and peasants who were far removed from the center of government power. The Revolution wreaked tremendous economic, social, and cultural changes; exacerbated religious divisions; and threatened traditional power structures throughout Europe, leading to the Napoleonic Wars. “In trying to chart this seismic event,” said Marisa Linton in Reviews in History, “Peter McPhee has set himself a seemingly impossible task, yet it is one that he brings off with aplomb.”
Many reviewers expressed similar admiration. Library Journal contributor David Keymer found the book refreshingly current and lucid and observed that it would present readers with cause to rejoice. In a starred review, a Publishers Weekly writer said that the book “is destined to be the standard account of the French Revolution for years to come.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
McPhee, Peter, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Biography, summer, 2o13, Noelle Plack, review of Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, p. 632; winter, 2013, Alan Forrest, review of Robespierre, p. 323.
Canadian Journal of History, August, 2002, Liana Vardi, review of Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords and Murder in the Corbières, 1780-1830, p. 358.
Choice, December, 2012, C.A. Gliozzo, review of Robespierre, p. 747; October, 2013, G.P. Cox, review of A Companion to the French Revolution, p. 341.
Contemporary Review, September, 2012, review of Robespierre, p. 396.
English Historical Review, June, 1995, Ralph Gibson, review of The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852 , p. 781.
Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2012, Patrice Higonnet, “Robespierre’s Rules for Radicals: How to Save Your Revolution without Losing Your Head,” p. 140.
Historian, autumn, 1994, Nancy Fitch, review of The Politics of Rural Life, p. 175; summer, 2013, Paul R. Hanson, review of Robespierre, p. 394.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, autumn, 2000, Tamara L. Whited, review of Revolution and Environment in Southern France, p. 267.
Journal of Social History, spring, 1994, Gregor Dallas, review of Politics of Rural Life, p. 629; summer, 2001, Peter Sahlins, review of Revolution and Environment in Southern France, p. 998; winter, 2008, Laura Mason, review of Living the French Revolution, 1789-99, p. 514.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2012, review of Robespierre.
Library Journal, March 1, 2012, David Keymer, review of Robespierre, p. 102; May 1, 2016, David Keymer, review of Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, p. 81.
New Criterion, December, 2012, Gerald J. Russello, review of Robespierre, p. 86.
Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2016, review of Liberty or Death, p. 72.
Spectator (London, England), March 10, 2012, “Patriot or traitor?,” p. 41.
ONLINE
Dallas Morning News Online (Dallas, TX), http://www.dallasnews.com/ (July 14, 2016), David Walton, review of Liberty or Death.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (April 22, 2016), Ruth Scurr, review of Liberty or Death.
Herald Scotland, http://www.heraldscotland.com/ (June 17, 2016), Jonathan Wright, review of Liberty or Death.
H-France, http://www.h-france.net/ (March 12, 2017), Edward J. Woell, review of Living the French Revolution, 1789-1799.
Reviews in History, http://www.history.ac.uk/ (August 18, 2016), Marisa Linton, review of Liberty or Death.
Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), http://www.smh.com.au/ (July 14, 2016), Phillip Dwyer, review of Liberty or Death.
PROF PETER MCPHEE
Positions
Honorary, Melbourne Graduate School of Education
History of modern France (French Revolution)
Overview
Professor McPhee was educated at Colac High School, Caulfield Grammar School, and the University of Melbourne, where he completed a BA (Hons 1st Class), Dip.Ed., MA (Hons 1st Class) and PhD. He taught at La Trobe University 1975-79 and the Victoria University of Wellington 1980-86 before returning to the University of Melbourne, where he has held a Personal Chair in History since 1993.
He has published widely on the history of modern France, notably A Social History of France 1780-1880 (London, 1992), Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830 (Oxford, 1999), Living The French Revolution 1789-1799 (Basingstoke, 2006), and Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life (2012). In 1999 he published a biography of the former Chancellor Roy Douglas ('Pansy') Wright. His most recent book is Liberty or Death. The French Revolution (2016)
Professor McPhee was Deputy Dean and Acting Dean of the School of Graduate Studies in 1994-96, then Head of the Department of History in 1996-99. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997. In the same year he became an inaugural 'Universitas 21' Teaching Fellow. In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was an Officer of the Academic Board 1999-2003 and its President in 2002-03. He became Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) in 2003 before being apointed the University's first Provost in 2007. He retired in 2009, but remains an active researcher and teacher. He received a Centenary Medal for services to education in 2003 was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012.
Affiliation
Member of
Centre d'histoire contemporaine du Languedoc-Mediterranien et du Roussillon (Montpellier, France). Member, Centre d'histoire contemporaine du Languedoc-Mediterranien et du Roussillon (Montpellier, France) 2000 -
Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations. Member, Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations 2000 -
Societe d'Etudes Robespierristes (Paris). Member, Societe d'Etudes Robespierristes (Paris) 2000 -
Societe d'histoire de la Revolution de 1848 (Paris). Member, Societe d'histoire de la Revolution de 1848 (Paris) 2000 -
Society for the Study of French History (England). Member, Society for the Study of French History (England) 2000 -
Australian Historical Association. Member, Australian Historical Association 1997 -
History Institute of Victoria. Member, History Institute of Victoria 1997 -
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Chair, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority Board 2006 - 2009
Publications
Selected publications
2016
Books
The French Revolution. Melbourne University Publishing. 2016
Authored Research Books
Liberty Or Death The French Revolution 2016
2015
Research Book Chapters
The Revolutionary Century? Revolts in Nineteenth-Century France. Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. 2015
Book Chapters Other
A Social Revolution? Rethinking Popular Insurrection in 1789.. The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. 2015
Journal Articles Unrefereed Letters or Notes
A Show of Hands for the Republic: Opinion, Information, and Repression in Eighteenth-Century Rural France 2015
The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy.. Australian Journal of Politics and History. 61. 2015
2014
Book Chapters
La jeunesse de Maximilien Robespierre et ses attitudes envers la famille pendant la Révolution. Robespierre: portraits croisés. Armand Colin. 2014
Journal Articles Unrefereed Letters or Notes
Robespierre: the oldest case of sarcoidosis?. The Lancet. 383. 2014
2013
Authored Research Books
160 Years 160 Stories: Brief biographies of 160 remarkable people associated with the University of Melbourne. Melbourne University Press. 2013
Journal Articles
‘‘Mes forces et ma santé ne peuvent suffire‘‘. Crises politiques, crises médicales dans la vie de Maximilien Robespierre, 1790-1794 2013
2012
Authored Research Books
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Yale University Press. 2012
Edited Books
A Companion to the French Revolution. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. 2012
Book Chapters
Case study: The whole-of-institution curriculum renewal undertaken by the University of Melbourne,2005ߝ2011. Strategic Curriculum Change: Global Trends in Universities. 2012
Research Book Chapters
La jeunesse de Maximilien Robespierre et ses attitudes envers la famille pendant la Revolution. Robespierre: Portraits Croises. Armand Colin. 2012
The Economy, Society, and the Environment. A Companion to the French Revolution. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. 2012
The whole-of-institution curriculum renewal undertaken by the University of Melbourne, 2005-2011. Strategic Curriculum Change: Global Trends in Universities. Routledge. 2012
2011
Journal Articles Unrefereed
Maximilien Robespierre et Les Politiques De Commemoration 2011
2010
Research Book Chapters
Alain Corbin (1936-). New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. French Historians 1900-2000. 2010
Albert Soboul (1914-1982). New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. French Historians 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. 2010
Maurice Agulhon (1926-). New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. French Historians 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. 2010
Michel Vovelle (1933-). New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France. French Historians 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. 2010
2009
Conference Papers Refereed
The Making of Maximilien: Robespierre's Childhood, 1758-69 2009
2008
Journal Articles Refereed
Revolution or Jacquerie. Socialist History. 33. 2008
2006
Authored Research Books
Living the French Revolution, 1789-99. Palgrave Macmillan. 2006
Journal Articles
The French revolution and the people. European History Quarterly. 36. 2006
Journal Articles Unrefereed Letters or Notes
David Andress: The French Revolution and the People.. European History Quarterly. 36. 2006
No.4. Forum review of Jan Goldstein: The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850.. H-France Forum Review. 1. 2006
Major Reference Works
Committee of Public Safety. Edition. 1 2006
French Revolution. Edition. 1 2006
Jacobins. Edition. 1 2006
2005
Journal Articles
Cock and bull stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the invention of the Camargue.. American Historical Review. 110. 2005
Social structures and cultural practices: Michel Vovelle as a historian of rural society. French History. 19. 2005
Journal Articles Refereed
Social Structures and CuturalPractices: Michel Vovelle As a Historian of Rural Society. French History. 19. 2005
Journal Articles Unrefereed Letters or Notes
Book Review: "The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France" by Desan, S. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Unversity of California Press, 2004 2005
Book Review: Cock and Bull Stories: folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue by Zaretsky, R. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. American Historical Review. 110. 2005
Conference Papers Refereed
Frontiers, Ethnicity and Identity in the French Revolution: Catalans and Occitans 2005
2004
Revised Books
A Social History of France, 1780-1914. Palgrave Macmillan. 2004
Book Chapters
Preface. Agriculture, Prosperity, and the Modernization of French Rural Communities, 1870-1914: Views from the Village. Edwin Mellen Press. 2004
Journal Articles
Liberty and locality in revolutionary France: 6 villages compared, 1760-1820. History. 89. 2004
Journal Articles Unrefereed Letters or Notes
Review of A French Genocide: The Vendee by Reynald Secher, Translated by George Holoch 2004
Review of Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France: Six Villages Compared, 1760-1820. History. 89. 2004
Review of The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France by Sudhir Hazareesingh 2004
Conference Papers Unrefereed
Il n'y a Rien d'Aussi Horrible a Voir: Reflections on Collective killings in the French Revolution 2004
2003
Authored Books Other
150 Years/150 Stories. Brief biographies of one hundred and fifty remarkable individuals associated with The University of Melbourne. History Department, The University of Melbourne. 2003
Journal Articles
Soldier and peasant in French popular culture, 1766-1870.. American Historical Review. 108. 2003
Journal Articles Unrefereed Letters or Notes
Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766-1870 By David M. Hopkin. American Historical Review. 108. 2003
Conference Papers Unrefereed
La Seconde République et la résistance au coup d'État de 1851 dans les Pyrénées- Orientales: vues de prés et de lon, et d'Elne'òò 2003
2002
Authored Research Books
The French Revolution1789-1799. Oxford University Press. 2002
Edited Books
The French Revolution and Napolean: A Sourcebook. Routledge. 2002
Research Book Chapters
Autour du cent cinquantenaire de la résistance coup d'Etat de 1851: les tendances historiogra et le cas de Gabian (Hérault). L'Histoire à travers champs. Mélanges offerts à Jean Sagnes. Les Presses Universitaires de Perpignan. 2002
Town and Country. Revolutionary France, 1788-1880. Oxford University Press. 2002
2001
Fraternity among the peasantry: Sociability and voluntary associations in the Loire Valley, 1815-1914, by Alan R.H. Baker 2001
Rural Communism in France, 1920-1939, by Laird Boswell 2001
Authored Research Books
Gabian 1760-1960. Lacour. 2001
Journal Articles
Fraternity among the French peasantry: Sociability and voluntary associations in the Loire Valley, 1815-1914. Social History. 26. 2001
Rural Communism in France, 1920-1939.. Journal of Social History. 35. 2001
Journal Articles Refereed
'The misguided greed of peasants'? Popular attitudes to the environment in the Revolution of 1789. French Historical Studies. 24. 2001
2000
Journal Articles
Symbols, myths and images of the French Revolution. Essays in honour of James A. Leith.. Australian Journal of Politics and History. 46. 2000
Conference Proceedings
Max Crawford's School of History - Proceedings of a symposium held at the University of Melbourne - 14 December 1998 - Introduction 2000
1997
Journal Articles
Peasants in revolution - Land, power, and jacquerie, 1789-1974 1997
1996
Journal Articles
Forest rites: The war of the demoiselles in nineteenth-century France - Sahlins,P 1996
History of industry in France since the 16th century - French - Woronoff,D 1996
1993
Journal Articles
Counter-revolution in the pyrenees: Spirituality, class and ethnicity in the haut-vallespir, 1793-1794. French History. 7. 1993
PEASANTS AND PROTEST - AGRICULTURAL-WORKERS, POLITICS, AND UNIONS IN THE AUDE, 1850-1914 - FRADER,LL 1993
THE LAND AND THE LOOM - PEASANTS AND PROFIT IN NORTHERN FRANCE 1680 1800 - VARDI,L 1993
1991
Journal Articles
ECHOES OF THE MARSEILLAISE - 2 CENTURIES LOOK BACK ON THE FRENCH-REVOLUTION - HOBSBAWM,EJ. Australian Journal of Politics and History. 37. 1991
1989
Journal Articles
RETHINKING THE FRENCH-REVOLUTION - MARXISM AND THE REVISIONIST CHALLENGE - COMNINEL,GC. Australian Journal of Politics and History. 35. 1989
THE CONTENTIOUS FRENCH - 4 CENTURIES OF POPULAR STRUGGLE - TILLY,C 1989
THE FRENCH-REVOLUTION, PEASANTS, AND CAPITALISM. American Historical Review. 94. 1989
1988
Journal Articles
RECENT WRITING ON RURAL SOCIETY AND POLITICS IN FRANCE, 1789-1900 - A REVIEW ARTICLE. Comparative Studies in Society and History: an international quarterly. 30. 1988
Research
Investigator on
Grant
National identity, historical narrative and violence: a comparative study of contemporary catalonia and the basque country in France and Spain (Discovery Projects) awarded by AUST RESEARCH COUNCIL 2005 - 2009
Awards
Education and training
MA, Institution not known
PhD, Institution not known
BA, University of Melbourne
DipEd, Institution not known
Awards and honors
Member of the Order of Australia, AM, 2012
Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2003
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1997
Linkages
Geographic focus
France
HISTORIAN: PETER MCPHEE
peter mcpheeName: Peter McPhee
Lived: 1948-
Nationality: Australian
Profession(s): Academic, historian
Books: Revolution and Environment in Southern France (1999), The French Revolution 1789-99 (2001), A Social History of France 1780-1914 (2003), A Companion to the French Revolution (2012), Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2012).
Perspective: Neo-Marxist, social historian
Peter McPhee is an Australian historian and academic who specialises in French history. McPhee was born in Victoria’s western districts and educated in Colac and Melbourne. He studied history at the University of Melbourne, graduating with a doctorate in 1973. McPhee lectured at La Trobe University and in New Zealand, before accepting a professorship at the University of Melbourne in 1987. He has since held several administrative positions there, including the university’s inaugural provost. McPhee is a recognised expert in the French Revolution, having researched and written about it since the early 1990s. He is primarily a social historian who has revived classical and Marxist interpretations of revolutionary events and forces. His writing echoes and defends the earlier work of Lefebvre and Rude, while criticising revisionist histories from the likes of Cobban.
Quotations
“Only recently have historians – and almost exclusively Marxist historians – begun to reexamine the general nature of the peasant movement and the impact of the revolution on rural life.”
“The Revolution of the Bourgeois deputies had only been secured by the active intervention of the people of Paris.”
“While proclaiming the universality of rights and civic equality of all citizens, it [The Declaration Of Rights of Man and Citizen] was ambiguous on whether the propertyless, slaves and women would have political say as well as legal equality.”
“In the end, it proved impossible to reconcile a church based on divinely ordained hierarchy… with a revolution based on popular sovereignty.”
“Ultimately, the social changes wrought by the revolution endured because they corresponded to some of the deepest grievances of the bourgeoisie and peasantry in 1789: popular sovereignty, civil equality, careers open to talent and the abolition of the seigneurial system. Whatever the popular resentments expressed towards conscription and the church, there was never a serious possibility of mass support for a return to the ancien regime.”
“No French adult alive in 1799 was in any doubt that they had lived through a revolutionary upheaval, willingly or resentfully, and that the society in which they lived was fundamentally different.”
Peter McPhee
Professor
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
The University of Melbourne
Peter McPhee has taught and written about the French Revolution since his graduate student days. His teaching has received university awards. He has published widely on the history of modern France, most recently Living the French Revolution 1789-1799 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life (Yale University Press, 2012); and (ed.) A Companion to the French Revolution (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
He was appointed to a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne in 1993. He was appointed to the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) in 2003 and was the University's first Provost in 2007-09. He is a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences. He became a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012.
McPhee, Peter. Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
David Keymer
Library Journal. 141.8 (May 1, 2016): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Listen
Full Text:
* McPhee, Peter. Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. Yale. May 2016. 488p. illus. maps. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780300189933. $35. HIST
McPhee (emeritus, history, Univ. of Melbourne; Robespierre: A Life) has written on many aspects of the French Revolution but never more beneficially than in this articulate and perceptive volume. McPhee's revolution is truly national in scope; Paris interacting with the hinterlands rather than a case of Paris playing the dog and the rest of France the tail. The author also makes solid use of primary source materials from outside France. How did the uprising play out, not just in western Europe, but in Haiti, India, Egypt? Lastly, McPhee carefully and clearly delineates crisis points from start to finish during the decade of 1789-99, showing how decisions and actions in each year altered the course of subsequent events. His skillful employment of journals and memoirs gives the account a personal side that complements the structural analysis which is its backbone. VERDICT Numerous histories of the French Revolution exist; while many are good, none is so current on the literature and lucidly presented as this. Scholars and history lovers will rejoice.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA
Keymer, David
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
Publishers Weekly. 263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
* Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
Peter McPhee. Yale Univ., $35 (488p) ISBN 978-0-300-18993-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
McPhee (Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life), emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, skillfully and with consummate clarity recounts one of the most complex events in modern history. It is difficult to see another single-volume history of the French Revolution surpassing this one. The work of a top-notch scholar, it avoids all the snares that have for so long encumbered accounts of the subject. McPhee moves majestically along his narrative path with balance, comprehensiveness, and grace. He also brings specific developments brilliantly alive with relevant anecdotes, illustrations, and quotations. Covering (as any such volume must) the revolution's political, institutional, and military events, the book also puts changing ideas, social attitudes, and cultural norms in the foreground. Best of all, McPhee makes clear the extent to which chance determined the course of history from before 1789 until Napoleon Bonaparte effectively ended the French Revolution around 1800. This book fits into none of the schools of history that have for so long vied for supremacy over this vast subject. Its great achievement is to show how people trying to create a new world in France revolutionized all Western history. McPhee's extraordinary work is destined to be the standard account of the French Revolution for years to come. (June)
Robespierre's rules for radicals: how to save your revolution without losing your head
Patrice Higonnet
Foreign Affairs. 91.4 (July-August 2012): p140.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Listen
Full Text:
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life.
By Peter McPhee.
Yale University Press, 2012, 352 pp. $40.00.
Revolutionary France in 1794 was a crucible, combining all the elements that would embody Western politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All eyes were on Paris. Depending on who was looking, Maximilien Robespierre was either a hero or a villain. Robespierre, once an obscure lawyer from northern France, had in four short years transformed himself, or so it seemed, into the chief architect of the transition from the hated ancien regime to an uncertain new order. That new order was threatened by invading armies from neighboring countries, counterrevolutionaries in the Vendee region, and intense divisions within the revolutionary ranks, including the Jacobin faction to which Robespierre belonged. The Catholic and conservative right feared the idea of a republic and desired a return to stability. The left wanted to create a virtuous society--but also simply wanted more bread. Welcome to modern politics.
Unrelenting in his attacks on all those whom he accused of wanting to stop the revolution, and fearless in his denunciation of corruption, Robespierre secured a place on the 12-member Committee of Public Safety, which served as the executive branch of government from 1793 to 1794. In that position, he wielded tremendous power. But his maneuvering space was, in fact, quite narrow. Robespierre faced the same dilemmas that have troubled all democratic revolutionaries ever since: how to uphold the defense of property while also pursuing universal rights, how to balance individual rights with those of the wider community, and how to achieve an outcome consonant with revolutionary ideals without resorting to means that would reproduce the sins of the old order. Fatefully, Robespierre chose to resolve this problem by trying to impose virtuous citizenship on French society by force.
Robespierre's response to resistance (real or imagined) was, in Hegel's formulation, to chop heads off as if they were cabbages. During the Reign of Terror, some 17,000 people were condemned to death by guillotine. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned. And all told, hundreds of thousands died during the civil wars that followed the revolution and which only ended with Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power in 1799.
Why did Robespierre take the path of terror, or "terrorism," a term that was first used in a political context by Robespierre's enemies to describe his methods? Peter McPhee's new biography aims to untangle the personal and psychological motivations that shaped Robespierre's actions. But it also reminds readers that the Terror resulted from quandaries faced by all revolutionaries--including those attempting to construct brave new worlds today.
THE REVOLUTION MADE ME DO IT
To understand Robespierre, one must see the French Revolution in tragic terms. The revolution did not devolve into the Terror owing to the revolutionaries' zealous pursuit of liberte, egalite, andfraternite. To the contrary: it devolved because by July 1794, the overwhelming majority of the revolutionaries no longer wanted to reach those goals, whose immediate effects for them, they feared, might be the confiscation of their property, or the guillotine, or both. Indeed, once in power, the Jacobins proved completely incapable of resolving the contradictions of their own revolutionary program.
But it is also true that the revolution was influenced by Robespierre's internal conflicts. Robespierre detested violence and was opposed to capital punishment. Yet he persisted, against all evidence, in believing that smashing invisible (and usually imagined) conspiracies and executing his opponents would solve his problems and those of the revolution.
McPhee concedes that Robespierre was ultimately paranoid and made grave errors of judgment. He was not, however, "the emotionally stunted, rigidly puritanical and icily cruel monster of history and literature." For McPhee, it wasn't Robespierre who ruined the French Revolution: it was the revolution that brought a decent, sincere, and hard-working democrat to his doom.
But McPhee has little to say about why there was a French Revolution in the first place, or about why it proceeded so relentlessly. Most historians have relied on deterministic explanations of the revolution's deeper causes to explain its trajectory. For some on the left, such as the writer Jean Jaures and the historian Albert Mathiez, 1789 was a critical step in a proletarian advance that would build strength in the European revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian revolts of 1905, before finally coming to fruition in 1917, when the East was Red and the West was ready. For others, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, the nature of the French Revolution was revealed more by its continuity with the past, rather than its discontinuity. In 1789, the Old Regime died, never to be reborn. But the revolution that destroyed it nonetheless failed miserably because the French were incapable of self-government, corrupted as they were by bad habits born of centuries of absolutist monarchy.
In this debate, McPhee's softly stated preference is to see the revolution--and, by extension, Robespierre--as an enduring model for all those who yearn for civic republicanism. To this effect, McPhee quotes the French historian Georges Lefebvre, who wrote that "Robespierre should be described as the first who defended democracy and universal suffrage ... the intrepid defender of the Revolution of 1789 which destroyed in France the domination of the aristocracy."
Subscribing to this view, McPhee claims that the revolution shifted from the fraternal celebration after the fall of the Bastille in 1789-90 to the murderous terror and civil war of 1793-94 because Robespierre's dedication to the principles of republican democracy were unfortunately unshared. "Throughout the Revolution," McPhee writes, Robespierre "had seen those whom he had trusted betray that trust by compromise or treachery." Thus, to save the revolution from itself, Robespierre had to act as he did.
FOR IT BEFORE HE WAS AGAINST IT
But McPhee has frustratingly little to say about Robespierre's moral responsibility for the executions and bloodshed of the Terror. It might be true, of course, that if Robespierre wanted to retain his authority, he had no choice but to embrace violent repression. That, however, does not explain why he did it so brutally. Prior biographers have proposed all sorts of psychological explanations. But McPhee finds these unconvincing. "There is nothing in the evidence we have of Robespierre's actions and beliefs before May 1789 that would enable one to predict that, in particular circumstances, he would find repression and capital punishment the answer to dissent," he writes.
McPhee does nevertheless delve into Robespierre's troubled childhood, the signal events of which were the death of his beloved mother when he was seven years old and his derelict and shameful father's abandonment of the family soon after, which left young Maximilien, his younger brother, and their sister to be raised by various relatives. Although McPhee does not do so, it is possible to conclude that this childhood turmoil helped turn Robespierre into a man who both loved and hated bourgeois life and authority and tended to resolve his personal and professional problems by abstracting them as best he could, raising them from an insoluble, quotidian, and material context to a higher plane, on which he was never wrong. Politically, the most obvious instance of this psychological habit was his unvarying insistence that something that might at first have looked like the criminal act of a faction--for example, the Jacobins' seizure of power--was in fact a national and universalistic movement. The reverse was the case, of course, when it came to the actions of his enemies. In practice, this kind of self-deception allowed Robespierre to oppose authorities of all kinds until it became necessary to transform himself into a murderous authoritarian. But the revolution posed a number of contradictions that he could not resolve through mental abstraction. In the spring of 1794, leading the Jacobin revolution required Robespierre to be for the rule of law and for its suspension, to defend and attack private property, to support and reject nationalism, to embrace feminism and antifeminism, and to promote religion and irreligion.
Likewise, although McPhee makes a persuasive case that Robespierre was totally dedicated to the ideal offraternite, there is no denying that he was often viscerally opposed to applications of that ideal. In February 1793, when the Parisian sans-culottes rioted for food and soap, Robespierre scolded these cold, hungry, desperate foot soldiers of the revolution. "I am not saying that the people are guilty," he complained, "but when people rise, must they not have a goal worthy of them? Must paltry goods be of concern to them? ... The people must rise up, not to collect sugar, but to bring down the tyrants."
In late July 1794, some of "the people" did just that, and Robespierre's failure to determine where bourgeois democracy might find its true limits finally led him to the guillotine. Afraid that they would be the next ones to be purged and sentenced to death, a number of Robespierre's former allies on the Committee of Public Safety and in the National Convention, the legislative assembly, ordered him to be arrested. Captured some hours later, and after having probably tried to shoot himself, he was guillotined the next day.
GOD, GUNS, AND GUILLOTINES?
In the contemporary era, Robespierre is often held responsible for the birth of terrorism. McPhee rejects this as unfair. "The Terror," he writes, "was not [Robespierre's] work but a regime of intimidation and control supported by the National Convention and 'patriots' across the country." It is true that Robespierre did not dictate policy to the Committee of Public Safety. But he was nonetheless its most dedicated member, and he was rightly seen as its first spokesperson. Had he not been in power, the Terror might well have been less fierce and quite probably would not have lasted as long as it did.
But were Robespierre's ideas, and not just his actions, also to blame for the Terror? That is the contention of some on the contemporary American right, eager to link liberalism with authoritarian overreach. According to Rick Santorum, the erstwhile Republican candidate for president and a current standard-bearer of American conservatism, the godlessness of 1789 inevitably led to state terrorism. "What's left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you'll do, and when you'll do it," Santorum declared while campaigning. "What's left in France became the guillotine," he concluded, warning that if Americans "follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road." In that prediction's broad outlines, Santorum might incidentally be surprised to find himself in the company of some former Marxist historians, who resoundingly and approvingly believed that the circumstances of Paris in 1794 were likely to be repeated someday.
Of course, both the right-wing and the left-wing versions of that prediction are unlikely to be borne out, at least in the West. The French in 1789-94 were the first modern nation forced to choose between political universalism and the realization of populist or utopian goals, and what happened to them has generally chastened their successors. Americans did not face that choice after 1776, and their descendants probably will not have to face it anytime soon. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party might represent steps toward that type of conflict. But short of a major economic collapse, it is hard to imagine that these two movements could capture the American political imagination as Jacobinism did for the French, and their enemies, in 1789-94.
But a situation closer to that of revolutionary France now exists in the nascent democracies of the Arab world. When confronted by the rise of Islamist parties, liberal revolutionaries in countries such as Egypt might be tempted to bracket their universalistic, democratic goals and resort to force and military rule to secure order. Of course, illiberal forces can face a version of Robespierre's dilemma, as well, and Salafi hard-liners might prove willing to put aside their commitment to genuine theocracy to seek accommodation with the wholly secular military. But perhaps the most salient lesson Robespierre can offer today's Tea Partiers and Occupiers, Salafists and secularists, is that, contrary to what they might sometimes wish, economic, political, and social problems cannot be solved by simply cutting off somebody's head.
Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University and the author of Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution, among other titles.
Higonnet, Patrice
Patriot or traitor?
Spectator. 318.9576 (Mar. 10, 2012): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Listen
Full Text:
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life
by Peter McPhee
Yale, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 299, ISBN 9780300118117
The mighty convulsion that was the French Revolution has stirred the blood of historians from Thomas Carlyle to Simon Schama and consideration of it still inflames opinions. At its centre stood Maximilien Robespierre--5' 3", stern, unaffacted in manner or dress, Spartan in his domestic habits--deified by his followers as the 'Incorruptible' and vilified by his opponents as a traitor to the ideals of 1789, bent on dictatorship. Peter McPhee spares us speculation (Robespierre left no memoirs or diaries) on his subject's 'inner life'. Relying chiefly on Robespierre's voluminous speeches and articles for the press, he calmly follows his progress, from crisis to crisis, in an austere prose and at a steady pace that are somehow in keeping with his subject's character.
Born at Arras, to the north-east of Paris, into the provincial bourgeoisie of Artois, Robespierre spent 12 years at France's premier school, Louis-le-Grand, in Paris. There his high intelligence and industry won him golden opinions and prizes. There, too, drenched in the Roman classicists, especially Cicero, he imbibed the creed of republican virtue, while on the streets of the Latin Quarter he was introduced to the fierce pamphlet war against the scurrility and self-interestedness of the clergy and nobility, the First and Second Estates of the realm. Robespierre left Louis-le-Grand in 1781 and returned to Arras, where he made a modest income at the bar, plunged himself into the political controversies of the last days of the ancien régime and, as a colleague put it, 'arrested the gaze of his compatriots'.
He arrived back in Paris in 1789 as a deputy to the Estates General summoned by Louis XVI. At the age of only 31, with almost no political experience and little oratorical skill, he made himself within months the most prominent spokesman of the left in the Third Estate, the uncompromising champion of the oppressed and advocate of liberty and democracy. He also showed himself to be one of the most radical, insisting, almost alone, that punishments for officers and rank and file in the army be made equal, that the law taking away the rights of family members of a convicted criminal be abolished and that the suffrage based on taxation be replaced by full manhood suffrage.
As the Revolution deepened and the gulf between the radical Mountain and the moderate Girondins widened, he remained ice-calm amidst the torrent of venomous, personal abuse directed at him. He was far from headstrong: he was brought only reluctantly to support the overthrow of the monarchy; he opposed the declaration of war against Austria in April 1792, on the ground that the infant republic was not ready for the task of exporting freedom beyond its borders; and in September of that year he spoke against the expulsion of 60 or more Girondins from the Convention.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The duty of rulers, Robespierre said in 1789, was 'to lead men to happiness, through virtue, and to virtue through legislation'. He acknowledged that the revolutionaries were 'embarked on a project which may be beyond human capacity'. The enduring question is whether, by prosecuting the so-called 'Terror' of 1793-94, he and the Committee of Public Safety betrayed that project. The question is essentially whether foreign invasion, in combination with counter-revolution at home, so imperilled the Revolution as to render executions by summary justice defensible.
An old acquaintance, who believed that Robespierre had 'long walked the path of the most incorruptible patriotism', concluded that 'in a free country he is a traitor if he employs means contrary to liberty, even if it is to save the homeland'.
McPhee does not agree. He allows that, at the end, when he was physically and intellectually exhausted, Robespierre's good judgment abandoned him. Accustomed to divide the world into good patriots and evil counter-revolutionaries, he could no longer distinguish between dissent and treason. That was a form of corruption, insidious and undetectable by the corrupted.
McPhee counts it an error not to have seen, after the defeat of the Austrians at Fleurus in June 1794, that the crisis was over and the Terror could subside. But the Terror, he also argues, was never a policy. It was a series of 'rigorous government measures to win a civil and foreign war', a 'visceral and successful response to its enemies' which ultimately bequeathed to France the great objects of the Revolution--popular sovereignty, constitutional government, legal and religious equality and the end of seigneurialism.
Even in a short biography McPhee might have explored more deeply the moral, legal and political ambiguities of the Terror. But nothing alters the fact that wars cost lives. Lincoln sent thousands of southerners to their death in a war fought to deny them the right to self-determination. The French revolutionaries fought for justice and freedom under a republic. Would the Mountain's opponents have behaved less violently? It was a Girondin who, with the Jacobins in mind, told the Convention that it was 'time for the traitors and slanderers to go to the scaffold'.
Stewart, Robert
McPhee, Peter. Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life
David Keymer
Library Journal. 137.4 (Mar. 1, 2012): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Listen
Full Text:
McPhee, Peter. Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Yale Univ. Mar. 2012. c.352p, illus. bibliog, index. ISBN 9780300118117. $40. BIOG
As head of the French Revolution's Committee of Public Safety, did Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) save the republic with draconian measures or was he merely the first in a long line of modern dictators to justify rule by reference to a public will that only the leader could interpret? In this admirable biography, McPhee (professorial fellow, Univ. of Melbourne; Living the French Revolution, 1789-1799) dispassionately describes the steps by which Robespierre came to accept violence as a response to increasingly dire events. Robespierre's model for governing was always Rousseau's: government should promote virtue. His identification with the people sometimes seemed excessive--"I am the people myself"--but he tempered revolutionary ardor with pragmatism. Near the end, these instincts failed him. When he did not specify who might yet come to trial before revolutionary tribunals,
he threatened too many people. The next day, he was arrested. The virtues of this biography are many: McPhee knows his sources, writes clearly, and, recognizing that his subject died in his 30s and left scant personal records, never attempts answers based on insufficient evidence. VERDICT Readers interested in the French Revolution will love this wise book about an important and enigmatic figure. Highly recommended.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA
Keymer, David
McPhee, Peter: ROBESPIERRE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Listen
Full Text:
McPhee, Peter ROBESPIERRE Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $40.00 3, 13 ISBN: 978-0-300-11811-7
A meticulous but limited treatise on the life of one of France's most notorious revolutionaries. Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) was a young provincial lawyer who came to Paris as a representative of the Third Estate, and he remained to become a leader of the leftist Jacobins in the revolutionary National Convention. A spellbinding orator, he was immensely controversial, revered by many as "the Incorruptible" genius of the revolution, reviled by others as a would-be tyrant, and his popularity underwent wild swings. Robespierre began his career as an opponent of capital punishment but ended it obsessed with omnipresent treasonous conspiracies and meting out death without trial to perceived enemies of the state, declaring that "the mainspring of popular government-is at once virtue and terror." He has thus long been popularly execrated as the bloodthirsty architect of the "reign of terror" of 1793-94. McPhee (Living the French Revolution 1789-1799, 2006, etc.) strives to rehabilitate Robespierre somewhat, arguing that the sanguinary excesses of the period were necessary to sustain the revolution against attacks from without and within, and that Robespierre's role in them was later exaggerated by other deputies seeking to minimize their own culpability. Given Robespierre's savage rhetoric and his influence at the time, McPhee's attempts at exoneration are less than thoroughly persuasive. The author also gives more attention to Robespierre's formative years and pre-revolutionary activities than has been customary in previous biographies. This is a thorough and well-written account of Robespierre's life, but nothing more. It is not a history of the French Revolution, and readers without a general familiarity with the events of that upheaval will have difficulty placing Robespierre's activities in a larger context. Similarly, while Robespierre's every political shift and maneuver is set forth in careful detail, no other leaders or personalities stand out in this narrative; even giants like Georges Jacques Danton and Jean-Paul Marat have only walk-on roles. A solid contribution to the scholarship of this key figure of the French Revolution.
A Companion to the French Revolution
G.P. Cox
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 51.2 (Oct. 2013): p341.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Listen
Full Text:
51-1098
DC147
2012-22352 CIP
A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. by Peter McPhee. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 544p bibl index ISBN 9781444335644, $199.95
The great historian Francois Furet once opined that the "French Revolution is over," suggesting that the revolutionary decade had at last left the realm of contemporary politics and graduated to collective historical memory. If the passions engendered by the revolution have indeed cooled, this volume makes clear that 1789 has left much to ponder. Under the editorship of Peter McPhee (Univ. of Melbourne), 29 international scholars have contributed a wide-ranging, well-researched collection of articles. They span the revolutionary experience from the inevitable "gender, race, and class" analyses, to speculative reconstructions of the period's culture, to deft reappraisals of such crucial questions as origins, violence, and long-term impact. A major strength of the volume is bibliography: every essay provides extensive references of its topic's major secondary literature. Space limitations preclude extensive comments on the individual essays, but the always-intriguing work of Alan Forrest, David Andress's "Course of the Terror," and Stephen Clays treatment of the "White Terror" are among the works that grace the volume. Of greatest interest to specialists and graduate students, this will be an important acquisition for collections serving this readership. Summing Up: Essential. **** Upper-division undergraduates and above.--G. P. Cox, Gordon State College
Cox, G.P.
Robespierre, Maximilien Isidore de: Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life
Noelle Plack
Biography. 36.3 (Summer 2013): p632.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Listen
Full Text:
Robespierre, Maximilien Isidore de
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Peter McPhee. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. xx + 299 pp. $40.00.
"With over one hundred biographies of Robespierre published to date one might ask is there anything new to say about this divisive figure? The short answer is yes. Peter McPhee's telling of this extraordinary life is like watching Robespierre in 3D as he moves through the drama, violence and exhilaration of the French Revolution. In a sense, much of what has been written about Robespierre before now seems like a stereotype as McPhee's narrative presents a more human portrait of the man. Far and away one of the most complete and complex pictures of Robespierre ever produced, McPhee's biography will stand as the definitive account for many years to come."
Noelle Plack. European History Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 568-70.
Plack, Noelle
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life
Paul R. Hanson
The Historian. 75.2 (Summer 2013): p394.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Listen
Full Text:
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. By Peter McPhee. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. xx, 299. $40.00.)
It is virtually impossible to consider the history of the French Revolution without contemplating the life of Maximilien Robespierre, and more biographies have been written of "The Incorruptible," as he was known to contemporaries, than any other revolutionary. And yet there is more to be learned about this complicated, and in some ways obscure, figure. Peter McPhee, who has written four previous books on the French Revolution, was drawn to the task both because his own fascination with the Revolution began with Robespierre and because previous biographies, some of them quite fine, have left unexplored certain aspects of this fascinating and controversial figure. McPhee's book is firmly rooted in archival sources and the relevant historiography, and the portrait he offers is sensitive, balanced, and nuanced.
McPhee's aim in this book is to bridge the private and the public in Robespierre's life and in particular to pay greater attention to his early years, generally neglected by past biographers. This was a goal made difficult by the fact that Robespierre left behind no diaries, nor are many family letters available to the researcher. But whereas most biographies devote a short chapter to Robespierre's prerevolutionary life, McPhee devotes four chapters to his youth and education. Maximilien's mother died in childbirth when he was just six, and his father abandoned the family shortly thereafter. He and his brother, Augustin, were brought up by their maternal grandparents, with two pious aunts also playing an influential role. In his teen years, Robespierre grew close to his sister, Charlotte, who would live with him in Paris for a time during the Revolution. Thus, although Robespierre never married, women were a formative influence upon him. McPhee writes that his "mother in the first place, then his aunts and sisters, especially Charlotte, and his teachers in Arras and Paris had equipped the young man with a backbone of steel" (71). McPhee describes him as possessing a "remarkable determination" (65).
Robespierre left his native Arras for Paris at the age of eleven to attend the prestigious Louis-le-Grand college as a scholarship student. McPhee notes that the boys "were taught to be respectful of all, but close friendships were discouraged" (20). McPhee is careful not to draw too much from evidence like this, but it is hard not to think that this, along with the absence of his father and the early death of his mother, was responsible for the fact that those around him found Robespierre to be aloof and cold. He certainly did not have many friends among his fellow revolutionaries. And yet the author also quotes from a poignant letter that Robespierre wrote to Georges Danton at the death of Danton's first wife, in which he pledged his "love and devotion" to the man who less than two months later he would help send to the guillotine (191). Clearly, for Robespierre, whatever value he placed on friendship was trumped by commitment to his revolutionary principles.
Robespierre is often compared to Vladimir Lenin as a masterful revolutionary tactician. As noted, McPhee emphasizes his will and determination. But the stress of revolutionary politics also wore on his mental and physical health. As early as May 1793, he announced at the Jacobin Club that he intended to resign as a deputy. He did not resign and within months found himself appointed to the Committee of Public Safety, the group of twelve deputies who ruled France as the executive branch of government during the year of the Terror. But at several points in the spring and summer of 1794, Robespierre again grew weak and withdrew from public life for extended periods, making several serious miscalculations that ultimately cost him his life. Many, including some biographers, have blamed Robespierre for the Terror. McPhee does not exonerate him on that account, but he would certainly count him among the Revolution's victims.
Paul R. Hanson
Butler University
Hanson, Paul R.
Robespierre, Maximilian: Robespierre: a Revolutionary Life
Alan Forrest
Biography. 36.1 (Winter 2013): p323.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Listen
Full Text:
Robespierre, Maximilian
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Peter McPhee. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. 300 pp. $40.00.
McPhee "offers valuable new insights into the man himself, his mouvauo and his psychology, through a highly analytical study of his life and political development." "McPhee goes beyond the purely political to offer a refreshing down-to-earth portrait of the Jacobin leader which helps to humanize him."
Alan Forrest. TLS, Oct. 5, 2012.
McPhee, Peter. Robespierre: a revolutionary life
C.A. Gliozzo
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 50.4 (Dec. 2012): p747.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Listen
Full Text:
50-2298
DC146
2011-27640 CIP
McPhee, Peter. Robespierre: a revolutionary life. Yale, 2012. 299p bibl index afp ISBN 0300118112, $40.00; ISBN 9780300118117, $40.00
Many works examine only Robespierre's role as the revolutionary leader of 1793-94. In this tour de force, McPhee (Univ. of Melbourne, Australia) studies his early life, beginning in 1758, and the events that influenced his personality, including his childhood, living in Arras, and as a scholarship student at the Parisian College of Louis-le-Grand, learning the importance of civic responsibility and law. McPhee rejects the portrayal of Robespierre as a hypocrite and dictator or as perceived by his enemies as the genocide creator of the Terror. The author depicts Robespierre as "the people's lawyer" who opposed social inequality and prejudice and supported the rights of women, children, and property. He was the spokesperson of the peasants, the sansculottes, and popular sovereignty. As a Rousseauist and classicist, Robespierre advocated that "all men have equal rights," and that a democratic republican government based on virtue was the Spartan ideal. McPhee attributes Robespierre's demise to his ill health, which impacted his judgment and made him "vulnerable." The slanderous attacks personifying Robespierre as the pontiff of the Cult of the Supreme Being and equating him with the Terror (which, in reality, was "controlled by the National Convention") led to his downfall. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper-division undergraduates and above.--C A. Gliozzo, Michigan State University
Gliozzo, C.A.
The incorruptible dictator
Gerald J. Russello
New Criterion. 31.4 (Dec. 2012): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Foundation for Cultural Review
Listen
Full Text:
Peter McPhee
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life.
Yale University Press, 352 pages, $40.00
One is tempted, almost, to pity poor Robespierre. In The Conservative Mind , Russell Kirk squarely identifies Robespierre as the political fruit of the sanguinary philosophy of Rousseau, which separated intellectual virtue from moral virtue, a "loathsome thing." This "defecated rationality" lead directly to, first, the overthrow of the ancien régime , and second, to the Terror, and from then to a greater or lesser degree to every lesser revolution in the subsequent bloody century.
Robespierre's France is, for some, the model for murderous dystopia, Orwell's Oceania avant la lettre . Robespierre himself has been a metonym for faceless tyranny, his life a metaphor for how revolutions eat their own; he was executed in 1794 by orders of the very National Convention he had ruled. But perhaps it is time for a reassessment. The Terror, the show trials, the suppression of half-remembered prison plots, the repeated executions: surely these atrocities were not solely his fault, the revisionists would say. The overheated and anxious atmosphere of France in 1793 and 1794 was more complicated than that. In any event, the horrors were worth the cost--just look at France now (ok, maybe not).
Peter McPhee's book seems to provide just such a reassessment. He asks, was Robespierre, "the first modern dictator" or a "principled, self-abnegating visionary"--although one can of course be both. McPhee, a former provost at the University of Melbourne, aims to bring the private Robespierre into a light equal to that of his public career, although the first three decades of his life before he burst on the scene in 1789 are obscure and Robespierre left little in the way of private papers, preferring speeches and pamphlets. McPhee writes with clear mastery of the material, and his Robespierre is a more complex figure than some of his critics have thought him. In the tumultuous years following his death, from the restoration of the monarchy in 1815 to the Second World War, his name has gotten caught up with contemporary French disputes and co-opted by various factions for their own purposes.
Alas, despite McPhee's conscientious historiography, the shadow of the guillotine still obstructs the view. McPhee's subject remains something of a monster.
The beginning is inauspicious enough. Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) was a scholarship boy in Arras, a small town in the north of France. The boy lost his mother when he was six, and his father disappeared. Maximilien, his brother Augustin, and his beloved sister Charlotte lived among relatives. Arras, although a provincial town, was prosperous enough, though like all of France organized under fairly clear hierarchical lines. The Church and the large noble landowners held the social and political power, and McPhee carefully paints the picture of a society on edge, even though most of its inhabitants did not know it. For the middle class, there was trade and some wealth, but no real social mobility; for boys like Robespierre, of questionable family backgrounds and more straitened circumstances, there was even less room. He came to chafe under its strictures.
In 1769 Robespierre saw the wider world, receiving a scholarship to the Lycée Louisle-Grand in Paris, where he was to remain for the next thirteen years. Once done, he returned home a lawyer. Robespierre practiced in Arras, with some success, for a few years, although he alienated most of his peers and the professional classes with strident positions over various real and perceived injustices. He never married, and McPhee notes the irony of a Robespierre speech in which he argued that "bachelorhood seems to encourage rebelliousness." If he had done nothing more, Robespierre would still be the unacknowledged inspiration for countless "social justice" lawyers seeking to remake society through law, though with less justification than Robespierre.
But that was not to be: after a grueling campaign (during which he was said to have rediscovered disdained country relatives in order to attract rural votes and engage in rabble-rousing), Robespierre was elected to represent his town in a meeting of the Three Estates being called by the king. His first speech of note in Paris: attacking the Church when an archbishop asked for a quick start to proceedings organized to help the poor.
So, an unmarried lawyer with a chip on his shoulder and a penchant for making grand pronouncements against his society: not a recipe for a stable political outlook. And so Robespierre spent 1789-91 solidifying his radicalism. More specifically, he identified the actions of the Third Estate--almost half of which were lawyers like himself--as representatives of the "people" whose will could not be broached without betraying the nation. Against the people, Robespierre arrayed the church, the nobility, and anyone else who might traduce their will. In his last years, this ideological fervor became little more than conspiracy-mongering.
After a brief stay in Arras in 1791, Robespierre returned to Paris as a member of the National Assembly, writing to a friend that he expected to stay in the city for merely "a few months." He soon took to making nightly speeches at the Jacobin Club, and quickly became known as "incorruptible" due to his devotion to the principles of the revolution and his personal probity. His success and popularity were undeniable, as were the enemies he created along the way. He was repeatedly accused of conspiring to overturn the law and take the revolution for himself and his friends, including the young Jean-Paul Marat and Saint-Just.
Although rhetorically abjuring the death penalty, he gave a speech in December 1792 arguing that "Louis must die because the homeland must five," without even the benefit of a trial, because the "people" had already found him guilty. By then Robespierre had already been complicit in the massacres of imprisoned Swiss Guards (the protectors of the king) and thousands of others and had called for the creation of an "extraordinary tribunal" to try counterrevolutionary conspirators. Thus, the precursors of the first show trials that would become so familiar in twentieth-century tyrannies were born in revolutionary France.
His calls on behalf of the "people" won him admiration when his Jacobins struggled against the Girondins and other factions; McPhee ably explains the endless plots, schemes, betrayals, accusations, and internecine violence that characterized chaotic Paris at the time. But when Robespierre and his faction finally gained the upper hand in early 1793, Robespierre was forced to look for other sources of the people's discontent--when there was popular unrest in Paris about obtaining certain foods, the people themselves could not be at fault. Robespierre instead blamed conspirators and the influence of British bribes. By April 1793, he was promoting the death penalty not just for the king, but for anyone who rose up "against the security of the State or the liberty, equality, unity, and indivisibility of the republic." In the event, this meant all those with whom Robespierre disagreed and whom he could arrange to punish. By June 1793, the hapless Girondins were arrested or in hiding, and the "people" represented by the Jacobins and their allies were alone.
In July 1793, Robespierre became a member on the Committee of Public Safety, his first position of real political power; like many later shadowy "party leaders" without official titles, Robespierre's true power was not reflected in his public positions. Among his first acts there, he proposed a new national education policy that would "create a new people," the existing one apparently not revolutionary enough; McPhee only calls the plan "bold and wide-ranging." When the killings started (again), McPhee tries to make the case that Robespierre was not as involved as later generations thought. But ultimately he fails to convince. Robespierre turned against his friends, such as Georges Danton, curtailed freedom of the press, prevailed against bringing sections of the "old" Constitution back into operation, and ordered enough people to death--including old comrades and colleagues--that McPhee's attempts to justify Robespierre fall flat. This horrific course of action resulted in the Law of 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794), which almost eliminated evidence for trials of "enemies of the people."
The end came swiftly. Robespierre's creation of the festival of the Supreme Being, though praised by some, smacked too much of omnipotence to others. Robespierre essentially personified the revolution in these cult rituals, which rendered everyone else a potential enemy. As even McPhee admits, by this point Robespierre had become unable to distinguish "dissent from treason," and his long-held conspiratorial sentiments had clearly overwhelmed him long before. Moreover, the arrests continued and the sight of so many heads separated from their bodies spurred the diminishing number of survivors into action. Robespierre himself was arrested and put to death at the end of July 1794-, along with his brother Augustin and other allies, and buried in a common grave.
Kirk wrote about Robespierre that his particular type of ideological furor "is a kind of delusory ethical snobbery, ferocious and malicious, annihilating ordinary human beings because they are not angels." McPhee's sympathetic account does not change this verdict.
Russello, Gerald J.
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life
Contemporary Review. 294.1706 (Sept. 2012): p396.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
Listen
Full Text:
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Peter McPhee. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. xx + 299 pages. ISBN 978-0-300I 1711-7. The aim of this new biography is to take a fresh look at the man whose name is most often associated with the horrors of the Terror and the establishment of the short-lived first French Republic. The French Revolution and its attendant atrocities contained all the elements of the revolutions that followed: grand statements followed by regimes which of necessity had (and have) always to be more repressive and stronger than the ones they replace, from Paris to Cambodia and from Petrograd to Tehran. But what of Robespierre? Was he the cold-blooded prototype of Lenin and Pot Pot or the strong-willed Cromwell who only killed out of national interest? The answer, Prof. McPhee argues in this incisive study, lies in the years between his birth in 1758 and 1789 although he wisely avoids over-interpreting his childhood with post-facto psychological analysis. He also navigates deftly among the half-truths, legends and attacks made on him during the Revolution and afterwards. Robe-spierre's actions before and during his membership of the Committee of Public Safety are always related to the actions of other major players, thereby shedding new light on these terrible years. Most important of all he shows that Robespierre was human--'a passionate man', not 'the emotionally stunted, rigidly puritanical and icily cruel monster of history'. To Prof. McPhee the Revolution's achievements were 'enormous' and pari passu so were the achievements of Maximilien Robespierre. The jury will always be out on this case but we have here a new portrait of a man and an era that resonate, and will continue to resonate, for centuries to come. (M.J.A.)
Living the French Revolution, 1789-99
Laura Mason
Journal of Social History. 42.2 (Winter 2008): p514.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Oxford University Press
Listen
Full Text:
Living the French Revolution, 1789-99. By Peter McPhee (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. x plus 319 pp. $74.95).
It is not uncommon to hear historians of the French Revolution lament the absence of a reigning paradigm for the 1989 bicentennial marked the last moment of true interpretive synthesis. Afterward, the historiography fragmented as sweeping analyses of the Revolution's causes and consequences gave way to monographs and narrative. That this has heen a positive development is attested by Living the French Revolution, which highlights how multifaceted is our knowledge of common people's lives at the end of the eighteenth century. Mining the riches of two generations' scholarship to wed with his own prodigious research, Peter McPhee has produced an account of the French Revolution in the countryside that is both far-reaching and sharply detailed.
The French Revolution was not, McPhee insists, "irrelevant" to ordinary men and women, as historian Richard Cobb famously argues and as others have since repeated. Nor was the Revolution the work of urban militants overcoming the atavism of their rural peers. Rather, the roughly 90% of the population who lived on isolated farms or in the small towns and villages that dotted the French countryside played an active part on both sides of the revolutionary divide. "The local experience of the Revolution is best understood as a process of negotiation and confrontation with distant governments" McPhee argues; and, one might add, within rural communities themselves. Provincials were subjects in their own right, not. mere rabble "being acted upon, and only occasionally lashing out in violent retribution." (5)
Dismissing the traditional priority given to legislation and revolutionary milestones, McPhee focuses on what mattered in the countryside. Thus, he makes short work of the abolition of the monarchy (the republican revolution of 1792 merits but a single paragraph) because rural people themselves had so little to say about it: "it was as if the aura of monarchy had evaporated with the King's attempt to flee fourteen months earlier." (110) Instead McPhee highlights local conflicts over resources, status, and responsibilities to the revolutionary state, tracing the changing rhythms of rural life and using vivid quotation to evoke provincials' hopes and disappointments: a nameless peasant springs to life when complaining bitterly, on the eve of revolution, that "the Seigneur treats us like slaves." (16)
As McPhee makes clear, it was competition over reform as much as resistance to it that gave the revolutionary dynamic such energy. The attack on privilege, for instance, was initiated and broadened at the local level well beyond what Parisian deputies intended. The August 4 legislation of 1789, abolishing seigneurial dues in exchange for compensation, initially appeared to be a successful answer to the rural insurrections known as the "Great Fear." But peasants, emboldened by "the revolutionary shift in relations of power," (76) renewed resistance--through violence, legal challenges, and the time-honored practice of foot-dragging--when the National Assembly attempted to set the value of compensation. Legislators finally acquiesced with decrees that "changed forever the economic structures and social and political relationships of the countryside" (135) by striking down almost all forms of seigneurialism without compensation. Not all competition was, however, equally clear-cut or equally successful. If the battle against seigneurialism was won largely by and for peasants who had borne its weight for generations, the struggle over common lands left no one satisfied as successive governments sought vainly to balance the interests of the poor, protection of the environment, and the guarantee of property rights.
Moving fluidly between social and cultural history, McPhee reminds us that the Revolution's impact is not to be found strictly in adherence or resistance to norms established in Paris at the time or retrospectively by historians. Rates of electoral participation, for instance, do not tell us all we need know about the Revolution's reach into the countryside. New systems of administration, new ideas of sovereignty, and new kinds of association integrated some citizens into revolutionary political culture, just as requisitioning or atheism drove others from it. McPhee describes, with an exhaustiveness remarkable in just over two hundred pages of text, the many issues that touched rural lives: the local consequences of opening government and administration to "new men," the extent to which legislation on divorce and inheritance altered the distribution of wealth and power within families, the divisiveness of religious change and war, and--in some of the book's most original sections--the environmental impact of land reform.
This view from the periphery permits, among other things, a more nuanced portrait of revolutionary violence and the Terror. Violence, McPhee argues, was not endemic to the revolutionary mentality, as conservative commentators from Edmund Burke to Simon Schama have claimed. Some episodes of violence were rooted in the "ritualized cruelty" of the old-regime execution (11.3); others were temporally and geographically specific; none elicited universal approval. Nor was the Terror as "authoritarian and doctrinaire" as critics charge. In many towns and villages "local officials were able to implement the controls necessary to meet military requisitions and to ensure an equitable distribution of scarce foodstuffs." Elsewhere, citizens "were able to manoeuvre for advantage, or even to disobey." (142)
This is a rewarding book, rich with insight and detail. Although Peter McPhee does not advance a new interpretation of the French Revolution, that is not his purpose. Rather, he illuminates the aspirations and activism of the mass of citizens drawn--willingly or not--into a maelstrom that was truly popular for having left no one untouched. Engaging dialogue with several generations of historians, he makes a powerful case for the Revolution's importance in the short and long term, eloquently describing how it overturned an old order to alter fundamentally the public and private lives of ordinary men and women throughout France.
Laura Mason
University of Georgia
Mason, Laura
Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords and Murder in the Corbieres, 1780-1830
Liana Vardi
Canadian Journal of History. 37.2 (Aug. 2002): p358.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
Listen
Full Text:
by Peter McPhee. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999. xi, 272 pp. $80.00 U.S. (cloth).
Regional studies are perilous enterprises. Regional studies of the French Revolution are even more perilous, lacking the inherent fascination of national histories that relate the dramatic events unfolding in the capital or the appeal of local studies peppered with lively characters and colourful detail. Writing them requires a constant to-and-fro between national events and the local responses of a "region" whose homogeneity and even existence is a sleight-of-hand. Regions, such as the Corbieres in the department of the Aude in Southwestern France, which is the subject of this book (the lack of proper maps in the book is extraordinarily frustrating), can be said to exist as either geographic entities (the argument here), historical accidents (medieval fiefdoms folded into French provinces), or as administrative conveniences, such as the departments and their various subdivisions created during the French Revolution. Peter McPhee has therefore set himself a difficult task. For the first four chapters, he stumbles and falls. Arguing that the rough mountainous terrain, relative isolation, and consequent poverty of the Corbieres lent it a real unity in the period straddling the Revolution, McPhee proceeds to an overly long summary of Old Regime tensions between peasants and their lords, the peasants' poverty and their eagerness therefore to be rid of feudal dues and especially to gain control over the wastelands which village communities were forced to rent from their seigneurs. In Peter McPhee's defense, his thorough research shines on every page. There are population figures, rates of taxation, numbers of sheep, extent of woodlands, social composition of parishes, and the social origins of priests, all the product of painstaking work.
In this region, wasteland (locally known as garrigues) was presumed to belong to the lords unless the community could show proof of ownership of these "commons." McPhee has told the reader that book will focus on the battle over the commons, but it is slow in coming. Instead McPhee takes a long detour to describe the effect of revolutionary legislation on the region: the requirement that priests swear an oath to the revolutionary regime (which meets with little resistance); the reluctance of the national assembly to abolish feudal dues without compensation (which the peasants in Corbieres combat); and the continued high rate of taxation (which they pay, although reluctantly). The consequences of the declaration of the Republic and the outbreak of war, the levies of men to defend the Republic get full treatment, as do the changes in regimes. McPhee's enthusiasm for the peasants' cause is palpable, and this explains, in part, the materialist bent of his argument. He does not doubt that peasants rebel because of economic duress, that they want land and free access to the commons.
In three chapters covering the period 1790-1830, McPhee finally turns to the issue of the commons and what he dubs a "battle over the environment." Revolutionary legislation allowed the division of the commons into private plots and here, as in other regions, it is averred that it was the poor peasantry that wanted this division and not the richer, better endowed landowners, who theoretically supported private property. Quite the contrary, the latter wanted to maintain the garrigues as communal grazing grounds for sheep. Appropriating part of the commons either legally or illegally, the local poor peasantry cleared and tilled this soil. Landlords and administrators complained, contesting the legality of the takeover, bewailing deforestation, and, most interestingly, arguing that the latter caused dangerous soil erosion. McPhee retorts that clearances had been encouraged in the Old Regime and that the peasants could not be accused of ecological damage. Rather, they were embodying the principles of private property while taking the law into their own hands. Appropriating the commons embodied therefore a Revolution from below, a peasant Revolution, to borrow Georges Lefebvre's nomenclature.
Poor peasants needed land because the wool industry had collapsed and they had no other means of support. Moreover, realizing that profits were to be made marketing wine, these peasants converted their plots and pastures into vineyards. The region's "ecological transformation" was therefore due to peasant initiative. Yet the battles over the garrigues did not end there. Post-revolutionary regimes concerned with deforestation and with restoring social order attempted to return inappropriately acquired land to its rightful owners. It is here that the story becomes needlessly confusing. Peasants now fought to retain the commons, McPhee tells us, because they needed pastures for their sheep--the very pastures that he had earlier argued served only the big landowners and large flock-owners--and which had, so we were told, been turned into vineyards. It would have been most useful to get specific details about the size, extent, and nature of the contested commons. But it is the conflict itself that interests McPhee at this point more than its material base. As he puts it, conflicts over the commons were primarily political, the peasants' economic woes translating into a radical program.
The book ends with a micro-history, the story of a violent confrontation in the aftermath of the Revolution of July 1830 between landowners and peasants in the village of Villeseque. The powerful Latreille family had demanded the restoration of usurped commons and thirty-five years' back rent, and had forbidden the peasants from cutting wood in their forests. The villagers rebelled, and in the ensuing battle Latreille and his son were killed and their bodies horribly mutilated in retaliation for the landlords' wounding of Antoine Pujol, a local peasant whose sister had been seduced and abandoned by Gonzague Latreille. Latreille was a notorious bully and his misdeeds were so well known that three different tribunals exonerated the peasants who were only finally condemned when a Parisian higher court overturned the last verdict in 1832. McPhee reads the incident in political terms, refusing to concede to "an atavistic peasant brutality." What lay behind the "murders," according to him, was a fifty-year history of confrontation over the commons and different interpretations of its ownership and uses. McPhee's arguments would have more sting had he situated the incident more finely within its particular environment and not relied so much on regional trends which show the peasants as self-serving, wanting their communal cake, and eating it too. Given this, it is hard to view anyone as concerned with the environment (except, perhaps, for the odd state administrator). This is a real pity, for had McPhee pursued the problem of soil erosion and exhaustion, he might have given a real new twist to an old story. Instead, he has trodden the well-worn path of class conflict in the French countryside.
Liana Vardi
State University of New York at Buffalo
Vardi, Liana
Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres 1780-1830
Peter Sahlins
Journal of Social History. 34.4 (Summer 2001): p998.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Oxford University Press
Listen
Full Text:
Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres 1780-1830. By Peter McPhee (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii plus 272 pp. $75.00).
"Too much local history," wrote the historian Marc Bloch more than a half century ago, "is useless for general history, that is, for the only history that matters, when all is said and done." [1] Bloch's judgement is perhaps no less valid today: in an age of excessive academic specialization and crisis in scholarly publishing of what use is yet another scholarly and deeply-rearched monograph in English on rural life in France across the revolutionary divide? In this case, the answer is not quite clear. Peter McPhee has chosen a territory he knows well, an isolated and arid region in southern Languedoc, the Corbieres, part of the Aude department. There, peasants fought a protracted battle with their seigneurs and, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, their former seigneurs over control of the rough, sparsely wooded hillsides (garrigues). He has written a local history based on extensive research in departmental and municipal archives, one that relies on and generously acknowledges the foundational w ork of local historians of the region. The detail is impressive: McPhee informs us about the average weight and height of the tiny sheep of the Corbieres and seems to account for every seigneurial piece of land and rights owned by the abbot of Lagrasse. Along the way, he returns to central figures, such as the "highly-intelligent, irascible, and pro-revolutionary figure" Jean-Baptiste Ciceron, who had been the abbey of Lagrasse's main legal officer before 1789, and who became the major public figure administering the area during the revolutionary decades. Indeed, like the poorer peasants engaged in massive land-clearance that are the heroes of his work, McPhee is something of a defricheur himself-- the term Bloch himself used to describe local historians whose work is so necessary to "general history." But what general lessons can be drawn from this book?
McPhee's local history certainly has implications for broader historiographic concerns of French historians. For example, the book devotes a central chapter to the "battle over the rural environment" during the French Revolution, and the author inserts his story of land-clearing into wider debates about deforestation and peasant abuses. At times, it is not always clear how this "new history" of the environment differs from older historiographic concerns of French social geographers and their detailed studies of changing landholding patterns: the engagement with environmental studies is somewhat limited. In any case, McPhee lays the blame of environmental degradation squarely on the shoulders of the monarchy, that had encouraged such massive clearing in its legislation of 1776 and 1770, and on noble and bourgeois owners of the forges and other charcoal-based industries that denuded the garrigues of wood. Of more general interest, perhaps, is his account of the nascent viticulture of the poorer peasants on the cleared hillsides. McPhee gives a detailed account of how, in the decades after the Revolution, the peasants became small commercial producers of wine whose activities transformed the rural economy and led the way toward capitalism. Here the author connects the Corbieres to a larger story of the "peasant road" through the French Revolution. Critiquing Peter Jones (largely inspired by Georges Lefevre) who made much of the "anti-capitalism" of the peasantry, McPhee makes a general argument about the peasant transition to capitalism, from a subsistence economy, based on stock- raising and agriculture, to commercial viticulture.
These days, a local history must be comparative: it has to consistently identify the singularities and convergences with other local histories, both proximate and distant, within France and beyond. It has to connect local events to national and international contexts (the Corbieres, after all, is virtually a border region with Spain). Moreover, since the success of "micro-history," local history should at least consider the methodological advantages and costs of "thinking small," and of "experimenting with scale." [2] The best local histories, even of rural societies, try to connect with the world and reflect on these matters. Unfortunately, the author is content to relativize the history of the Corbieres only tangentially. Struggles over the forests in the neighboring department of the Ariege are barely mentioned; the author doesn't say enough about the geography and meaning of peasant anti-seigneurialism elsewhere in France during the Revolution; there is little comparative or theoretical attention paid to the question of capitalist "transition." Although the archival and bibliographical material collected in this study is impressive, it is nearly all local: to survive (and especially in such a costly form), local history must simply be more global.
And what of the "murder in the Corbieres" that the title promises so darkly to deliver? The events concern the double murder of two particularly-abusive ex-nobles in the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution in France. In fact, it was the unintended consequence of a confrontation between the villagers of Villeseque, gendarmes, guards, and the two Latreilles in which "two shots rang out" and, however briefly and euphorically, a form of "popular justice" triumphed. McPhee devotes much of his last chapter to an account of the events within "the detailed context of local history" but concludes only that the murders "may best be understood as the climax of a half-century of open resentment and conflict between the inhabitants of Villeseque and the proprietors of the two large estates on the border of the commune's land." (p. 231). The conclusion, "Revolution and Memory," seems to open up another inquiry, this time into the "revolution in political culture," but the reflections are never elaborated or related to the ma in body of the book.
Revolution and Environment has its virtues: it is well-researched, and displays a great love of the region. It is a fine example of a certain kind of local history, perhaps now obsolete.
ENDNOTES
(1.) Quote adpated from in C. Applegate, "A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-national Places in Modern Times," American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1157-82, quote p. 1161.
(2.) J. Revel, ed., Jeux d'echelles: la micro-analyse a l'experience (Paris, 1996).
Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres, 1780-1830
Tamara L. Whited
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 31.2 (Autumn 2000): p267.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
Listen
Full Text:
Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres, 1780-1830. By Peter McPhee (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 272 pp. $75.00
Few regions of France remain to be dissected by historians of the Revolution, but McPhee has found one--the Corbieres. This areas "rough hillsides," or garrigues of scrub and green-oaks, set it apart from the rest of the department of Aude. Its relatively nonviolent politics also contrasted with the uneasy situation in the rest of revolutionary Midi. McPhee aims for a comprehensive history of this isolated region during the Revolution, and, in so doing, delves into territory little explored in another sense--the social and environmental history of the "long French Revolution" up to 1830.
The Corbieres emerges as an oasis of pragmatism and consensus within the context of debates about radical church reform, new taxes, conscription, and requisitioning--issues that rocked other parts of France. Terror and White Terror left the Corbieres virtually untouched. Analysis of the political values and skills of departmental administrators--particularly, Jean-Baptiste Ciceron, former seigneurial judge turned agent of the Revolution as first procureur-syndic of the district of Lagrasse--proves the crucial role, but also the limitations, of local leadership. There was a revolutionary drama in the Corbieres that largely escaped political management, the peasantry's unremitting attack on the seigneurial system. McPhee's focus is the "inextricable link between anti-seigneurialism and the desire for a cultivable plot," the latter particularly acute in the Corbieres due to an extremely unequal property-holding structure and the early death throes of the textile and sheep industries after 1783 (133). With pasto ralism in decline, peasants rushed to clear land, encouraged by the absence of seigneurial justice and the perceived liquidation of the seigneurial system. Conflict between remaining pastoralists and small-scale clearers lay within a larger struggle between peasant communities and former seigneurs over ownership of the garrigues.
The author's attention to the environmental dimensions of, and poignant debates about, land use make this a unique study. Accelerated clearing resulted in erosion, siltation, and flooding, and these connections informed a nascent conservative discourse that equated social and environmental excesses. McPhee demonstrates, however, that the era of clearing was well underway by the onset of the Revolution; Louis XV had also rewarded land clearance by his decrees of 1766 and 1770. The Revolution removed significant barriers to, without providing the cause of, land clearance in this ecologically sensitive region.
Uncovering this chronology of land clearance leads McPhee to show that Gauthier's thesis concerning the "peasant route" to capitalism holds for the Corbieres, especially the eastern lowlands. [1] Less intent on retaining the garrigues for common use, clearers instead wrested tiny units of private property out of them, and many began to plant vineyards in the early 1790s. These economic and ecological shifts rendered the "rough hillsides" valuable as never before, and they go far to explain the passions culminating in the double murder and mutilation in 1830 of former seigneur Auguste Latreilie and his son Gonzagne, two obdurate noblemen determined to win back "their" garrigues. McPhee argues convincingly that the murders were political acts marking the end of an era; in the new, still shaky, peasant economy of the Corbieres, a revolutionary victory was defended literally unto death. Combining social, political, and environmental analysis with a final compelling tale, this book advances our understanding of t he rural revolution in France on several fronts.
The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852
Ralph Gibson
The English Historical Review. 110.437 (June 1995): p781.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 Oxford University Press
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/
Listen
Full Text:
Historians have been aware for some decades now that between 1848 and 1852 parts of the French countryside were engaged in a bitter class war. Peasants and rural artisans were struggling against local notables and the government which backed them in an attempt radically to re-cast the structures of power and the relations of production. One of the great virtues of Peter McPhee's The Politics of Rural Life. Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852 (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1992; pp. ix + 310. [pounds]40) is to make it abundantly clear that this was indeed a class war. Others have done this before him, but McPhee puts the argument with great cogency, basing himself on exhaustive knowledge of the secondary material and (where appropriate) on his own doctoral thesis on the Pyrenees-Orientales. His 'class war' interpretation is, furthermore, more clearly delineated than in some other treatments. He is hostile to the idea that peasant radicalism was the result of propaganda emanating from the towns, and even to the view that it was essentially the work of local bourgeois and petits bourgeois, who acted as culture-brokers to bring 'democratic socialism' to the countryside; peasants, he argues, had long-standing grievances of their own against the rural ruling class, which the crisis provoked by the 1848 revolution enabled them to express. Peasants, that is, were not just manipulated, not even by the Left. Their aims, moreover, were much more radical than many have supposed: the rural insurrection against Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat in December 1851 was not just motivated by the defence of Republican institutions but also by a desire for la Republique democratique et sociale and a willingness to bring it about by force if necessary. McPhee's picture is thus one of a largely spontaneous rising of peasants against class oppression. He is, of course, acutely aware that such was the case only in parts of the country. The insurrection of December 1851 was confined to the south-east and parts of central France. McPhee explains such localization in terms of the combination of the relations of production with specific historical experience: only certain economic structures, combined with certain memories, made such radicalization possible. The analysis works pretty well; the only points at which the author's application of it falls down a bit is when he tries to explain why areas like the Limousin could be ardently democ-soc in the May 1849 elections and yet welcome the coup d'etat with open arms (his argument in terms of the perceived possibilities of success in 1851 is rather weak). But this is only a minor point of disagreement with a splendid book, lucidly written and widely informed. It enriches our perceptions of a pivotal period in modern French history, and indeed of peasant society in general. And for some of us, it gladdens the heart to read once again the history of class struggles.
RALPH GIBSON University of Lancaster
The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852
Nancy Fitch
The Historian. 57.1 (Autumn 1994): p175.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Listen
Full Text:
The Second Republic," a time of incipient civil war" and "complex class struggle ultimately resolved" by Louis-Napoleon's military coup, has long fascinated historians (2). It has played a significant role in a number of historical debates. Was the struggle for the republic a product of dramatic, wide-ranging social, economic, and political developments that had transformed France during the first half of the nineteenth century? Did it represent a mass "apprenticeship" in republicanism? Or, was the conflict "simply an expression of |traditional' factional divisions or instructions from notables skilled in mobilizing their clienteles" (262)? Although we may now know more about this period of French history than we do about most others, much of what we know comes from the collective product of hundreds of community and regional monographs. To anyone who has studied even a small portion of these monographs, it is obvious that how one answers these questions largely depends on the places one has chosen to study. Thus, Peter McPhee's solid synthesis of this scholarship is a welcome addition to the literature on the republic. Moreover, McPhee has incorporated into this synthesis much of the material from his previously unpublished but influential thesis, "The Seed-Time of the Republic," so this book is not simply a summary of what others have said, but consists of McPhee's own thoughtful reflections on the historiography.
Though it is difficult to do justice to McPhee's complex analysis in a brief review, some of his conclusions are worth mentioning. First, he believes that peasants voted for Louis-Napoleon for president in large numbers against the will of notables and journalists, because they viewed him as a man who would bring radical social change to the countryside. Second, he strongly believes that regardless of what position they took, peasants were not the dupes of traditional elites. Instead, they were rational actors who fashioned their own political solutions to specific problems they faced. Thus, to explain whether or not they supported the Party of Order or the Democ-socs, one must consider specific conjunctures of political traditions and cultures, patterns of mobilization during the Second Republic, and economic situations region by region While I agree with his conclusion and applaud his approach to the problem of political choice in the countryside, in the end I was not convinced that I understood the political dynamics of the Second Republic any better than I did after reading the monographs on which the book was based. Still, it is extremely convenient to have the results of these studies synthesized in a single well-written and well-argued volume. McPhee is a beautiful writer, sensitive to many of the nuances in his evidence; hence, this book win be useful for a long time as a starting point for anyone who wants to investigate rural politics during the Second Republic.
The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside, 1846-1852
Gregor Dallas
Journal of Social History. 27.3 (Spring 1994): p629.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Oxford University Press
Listen
Full Text:
How the Second Republic was beautiful! How neat and accommodating were those events as they were played out again and again in the texts of the professional historian: the economic crisis, the common man's call for justice, the initial revolutionary enthusiasms, the deceptions, the treason, the reaction; bare-chested workers shot down in the streets, rural "notables" in felt top hats conniving with capitalism and tyranny, the press gagged, the army sent out, the repression, the prisons--a socialist democracy cut short. The conservatives appeared so evil, the leftists so heroic. Surely only Nazi Germany and the Second World War could compete in issues as black and white as this.
For a very long time the only grey zone in the story was the peasants, though this was a rather unfortunate defect since they made up the majority of the population. Marx, we know, dismissed them as a sack of potatoes; lesser luminaries regarded them as stubborn and bewildered blockheads who retarded civilization's forward march and were manipulated by any wicked, reactionary despot that came along. Then, about twenty years ago, a team of scholars made a concerted effort to restore this zone by giving it a fresh coat of paint--in black and white. The peasants of the Second Republic became "politicized." Not only were they now regarded as active participants in French national politics but, by some accounts, they marched at the vanguard of the forward socialist and democratic movement. Dr. Peter McPhee's book is in that tradition.
The first hint of this is on the book's dust jacket, which shows a bare-chested peasant swinging high the red flag of "1852" while the tiny figures below him, the crowned members of the old elite, file humiliated into the netherworld of history. The text inside corresponds to the image in both idea and style. McPhee obviously owes enormous debt to the dean of progressive peasant studies, Professor Maurice Agulhon of the College de France. But it is clear that the principal inspiration here comes from a younger generation of historians, what McPhee at one point refers to as the "American school" which "has analyzed with great skill the dialectical process of radical activism and its repression."
Now, one could sympathize with some returning voyager from a foreign star who innocently confuses this with the "Soviet school" of the 1930s--it after all subscribes to the theory that "speculators" were the cause of high grain prices in the 1840s, that rural elites survived by extracting "surplus" from the producers and that all history is essentially a matter of class struggle. But, no, this is indeed the "American school." Half way through his book, McPhee explains its origins; it was founded "in the years 1960-75 by scholars as excited by the discovery of a revolutionary peasantry in the mid-nineteenth century as they were aware of peasant-based wars of liberation in former European colonies."
That probably accounts for the odd flights Dr. McPhee makes to Egypt in 1952, to Japan "in the 1950-63 period," to "contemporary Malaysia," to "England in 1381" and to nineteenth-century East Anglia. But let us concentrate on what he has to say about rural France during those six years of political crisis, 1846-1852.
The author's basic idea is to provide a national synthesis out of the plethora of local studies that, if they have made this one of the most scrutinized periods in history, have been the cause of a certain amount of confusion. McPhee's intention is "to make creative use of the tension between local, regional, and national dimensions of rural life, within a narrative framework." He reviews the food crisis of 1846-47, the attacks on grain dealers, food convoys, mills, chateaux, and threats to hang administrators "from the highest poplars around the lake"--a style of violence familiar enough to any student of the eighteenth century. McPhee argues that "all these protests were ultimately political, confronting as they did power-holders within the community." Yet when it came to February 1848 the rural crisis had virtually disappeared: the fall of the monarchy was quite unexpected. What happened now was that the Parisian events set off a different series of troubles, not in the same areas as in the preceding year, and this time more "ideological." They were marked by appeals, for example, for "agrarian law," that primal call that "no one should possess more than another": "Tremble, ye aristocrats of Cogny!"
There follows a series of elections and plebiscites which McPhee argues--in line with the "American school"--gradually polarizes French rural society. It is, he says, "a process of political praxis." By May 1849 "a clear choice had been made" when peasants voted either for the party of Order (in the North and the West), or the democ-socs (in the South); the moderates--to McPhee's delight--had been routed. The peasants who voted for the democ-socs became yet more radicalized on learning of the failure of the attempted leftist coup in Paris the following month. Then came the electoral law of May 1850, which reduced the electorate by over 30 percent, and peasants living chiefly in the South became more incensed than ever. Provencal cafes and chambrees were filled with angry men. Sickles, pitchforks and the old hunting gun were unhooked from the walls, and an appeal swept the land for the rapid establishment of the peasants' and artisans' republic. Louis-Napoleon's successful coup of December 1851 actually saw peasants imposing la Rouge in several communes of southern France in a rising which--if it only lasted a little over a week--was the most extensive rural revolt since 1789.
For McPhee these events are the proof that peasants were not passive objects acted upon by urban political manipulators; they were, on the contrary, "acutely aware of living through a momentous crisis of uncertainty and optimism, fear and solidarity."
One has to understand that McPhee's demon here is what he calls "diffusion or trickling-down theory"--the idea that the political choice of peasants was determined either by rural notables or by urban radical activists. As Dr. McPhee observes, this idea is derived from the twin facts that historians base their work on documents compiled largely by bureaucrats, reflecting the bureaucrats' hierarchical Weltanschauung, and that historians themselves pass most of their lives in bureaucratic hierarchies (surviving, presumably, on "surplus" extracted from society's producers). The historians thus feel a certain affinity with the hierarchical views expressed in their bureaucratic documentary sources.
The problem I have with this book is that McPhee's own answer to the question of political choice is itself rigidly hierarchical--hierarchical in time, hierarchical in space, hierarchical in social conception. For in the end, of course, it all comes down, in McPhee's rural world, to dialectics: "the dialectical relationship between the structures of the specific community or region, the historically produced but not static perceptions rural people had . . . , and the specific conjuncture in 1849 of economic crisis. . . . " (my emphases).
On community structures McPhee sticks to Agulhon's schema of things: communities that were "vertical" went along with their notables and voted conservative, communities that were "horizontal" listened to newspapers being read in cafes, sang songs, and voted for the left. On "historically produced perceptions" McPhee follows a straight line from local ritual to national political ideology: if the communities thought of the French Revolution as the good old times, their rituals and carnivals developed, after 1848, into expressions of "reasoned political ideology"; if the memory of the Revolution wasn't so happy (like in the Vendee) . . . well, McPhee doesn't delve into the details here. McPhee spends much space analyzing songs, though most of them seem to have been composed by urban residents, journalists, or what would usually be described as an elite. It was perhaps some powerful copyeditor at Oxford who made the disastrous decision that all these songs should be translated, in the main text, into English--the result verges on caricature ("On capitalism I declare war,/ We must attack with great hammer blows/ The paying of interest, the pernicious abuse/ Of this system called laissez-faire/ By the aristo").
The one area which would really give McPhee an opportunity to break out of hierarchy and "diffusion theory" is in economics and demography. Oddly (though McPhee may cite the example of Japanese smallholders in the 1950s increasing their output by 38 percent) the author is indifferent to the dynamics of the smallholding system, for it has to be said that McPhee's rural economics--like many in the "American school"--is extraordinarily primitive. In Dr. McPhee's France, if it is the "speculator" who causes high prices in 1846, it is "merchant collusion" that leads to over-supply in 1848. What could be more hierarchical than that?
McPhee's understanding of demography is equally disappointing. He describes the demographic crisis thus: "Postponing marriage to a loved one, avoiding conception, or deciding that some family members would go to towns, themselves hit by unemployment and high food prices could not in the end ensure that the household would be able to afford sufficient flour or bread." Now there is, in fact, something very dynamic which could be explored here, something born within the rural household, something that would in the end affect the whole structure of France's economy. What was going on in those households in the 1840s?
I cannot help but remark that in a footnote I discover a book by this reviewer, cited as an example of the argument that rural society did not change in the mid-nineteenth century. This is, in fact, a rank misrepresentation of my position; I did actually argue that there was a major change in rural economic and demographic strategy at that time, and used this as an example of how dynamic and adaptable a smallholding system could be! The character of that change completely passes McPhee by.
But, in truth, so does most of rural France. Alongside The Politics of Rural Life, I happened to be reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey which describes the Cevennes, a region touched on by Dr. McPhee. RLS describes the hedge-inns, the peasants in green coats, the ringing of cattle-bells, the stony drove-roads, a shepherd leading flocks to the note of a rural horn, the gross turf highland frontier separating the deserted mountainous Cevennes from "the Cevennes of the Cevennes," the deep turning gullies of the Tarn and the Spanish chestnuts standing four-square to heaven. The people troop out to their labors at dawn and return home in threes and fours at night. RLS, with a revolver in his pouch, driving his donkey forward, gives life to this busy, breathing, rustic landscape of the French South. What a useful introduction it would be for an American undergraduate. In contrast, I am not sure--beyond the "American school"--at what public Dr. McPhee's book is aimed (at $69 no peasant I know will buy it). Could it be used in a course? Maybe. But "Rural France" would be the wrong one--because this is not so much a book about France and its peasantry a century and a half ago as it is about America (or Australia?) and the dreams of its students just two decades ago.
The book is dedicated "To George Rude and to the memory of Albert Soboul," a useful reminder that the pupils are rarely the equal of their masters.
Gregor Dallas Anet (Eeure-et-Loir)
‘Liberty or Death: The French Revolution’, by Peter McPhee
A depiction of the Great Fear, a wave of French rural riots in July-August 1789 © Bibliotheque Nationale de France
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
0 Save
APRIL 22, 2016 by: Review by Ruth Scurr
When, in 1978, François Furet pronounced the French Revolution over, he did not mean it had become obsolete or irrelevant. Rather, he was advocating less politically partisan historiography. A lapsed Marxist whose focus had shifted from class and economics to politics, he argued that the time had come to write freely about the revolution of 1789: scholars should not need to declare their political credentials or be labelled as royalist, liberal or Jacobin, as though their research continued the struggles they studied. The French Revolution had become history: “the product of an inherently unstable relationship between the present and the past”.
Sample the FT’s top stories for a week
You select the topic, we deliver the news.
Select topic
Enter email address
Enter email address
Invalid email
Sign up By signing up you confirm that you have read and agree to the terms and conditions, cookie policy and privacy policy.
In his richly detailed book Liberty or Death, the Australian academic Peter McPhee takes a different approach. A social historian of France and biographer of Robespierre, McPhee argues that “after more than 225 years, the fundamental questions posed and probed by the French Revolution remain at the heart of all democratic political life everywhere”. He is critical of Furet’s revisionism and interested in revisiting classical and Marxist interpretations of the revolution. “Is the quest for equality inimical to liberty or is a measure of social equality the precondition for genuine freedom?” he asks in his conclusion. “Are healthy societies best created by interventionist governments acting for what they see as the public good or by freeing people’s entrepreneurial urges?” Both are questions about the relationship between politics and economics in democratic societies, which the French Revolution can illuminate but not answer.
The quest for equality began with the abolition of the seigneurial system and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. Of the elaborate set of dues peasants owed landowners under the old regime, the most important were levies on the major crops produced on all land within a particular seigneurie, bolstered by monopolies over village ovens, mills, grape and olive presses. McPhee presents the abolition of this archaic system as “the single most significant social change brought by the Revolution”. He quotes the English Quaker and farmer Morris Birkbeck, who found during his travels in France in 1814 that agriculture had been improving rapidly ever since 1789: “I ask for the wretched peasantry of whom I have heard and read so much; but I am always referred to the Revolution: it seems they vanished then.”
The Declaration of Rights established the equality of citizens before the law, but was vague about the meaning of social and political equality. Did the assertion of the right to private property mean the destitute would still starve in times of food shortages or harvest failure? Robespierre thought not and, on the eve of the Terror in 1793, tried to amend the Declaration to include a right to subsistence. But the Jacobin constitution of 1793 was suspended soon after it was ratified by a referendum realising universal male suffrage for the first time in history. Terror was declared “the order of the day” until the internal and external enemies of the new republic had been conquered.
An English traveller noted the massacre of wildlife: ‘one would think every rusty gun in Provence is at work’
Slavery was another problem for the revolutionaries. McPhee reminds us that the slave trade was integral to France’s economic growth in the 18th century. In 1785 there were 143 ships actively engaged in trading human beings from the French ports of Nantes, La Rochelle, Le Havre, Bordeaux, Marseille, Saint-Malo and Dunkirk. The merchants of La Rochelle attempted to reconcile their support for the Declaration of Rights with their self-interest by condemning the use of the whip on slaves as “irreconcilable with the enlightenment and humanity which distinguish the French nation”, while ignoring the question of slavery itself. In 1790 the revolutionaries deferred to the interests of the colonial lobbyists and, “without giving things their real names”, maintained the slave trade.
From the beginning, revolutionary progress was dogged by vengeful anger. For every constructive step toward regenerating France there was a destructive shadow. The abrupt end to seigneurial monopolies resulted in a massacre of wildlife, for example. The English agronomist Arthur Young, travelling between Avignon and Aix in 1789, found “all the mob of the country shooting; one would think that every rusty gun in Provence is at work, killing all sorts of birds”. In the Gâtinais near Orléans, the Marquise de Créquy watched bands of local people drain her ponds of fish on the grounds that the revolution had abolished the nobility’s hunting privileges. Soon these displays of opportunistic resentment became bloodier.
McPhee provides a conventional explanation for the emergence of the Terror, presenting it as a pragmatic response to foreign and civil war: “By the time the military crisis reached its peak in mid-1793, the evidence seemed incontrovertible that counter-revolution and the ‘foreign plot’ were the two faces of the double-headed monster of the ancien régime. In a context of invasion and civil war, this was a question of ‘Liberty or Death’.”
McPhee’s title echoes that of another recent book, Sophie Wahnich’s study of revolutionary violence, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (2012). Whereas Wahnich was concerned to contextualise revolutionary violence as part of the Paris-centred struggle to found a genuinely new system of political values in France, McPhee looks further afield, to the provinces and the international setting within which the new republic was born. Rightly, he emphasises that “a fundamental element in the choice of which type of republicanism to support was a person’s attitude to the economy”.
Furet claimed that all historians of the revolution have to choose between Michelet and Tocqueville: between bringing the revolution “back to life from the inside” and analysing the gap between the “intentions of the actors and the historical role they played”. McPhee eschews that choice and finds ways to both revivify and dissect the revolutionary passions that swept not just through Paris, but throughout France, its colonies, Europe and, eventually, the rest of the world. But ultimately it is towards Tocqueville that McPhee turns, quoting towards the end of his book the conclusion of Democracy in America (1835-40): “The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”
The French Revolution has as much to teach the nations of our own time as Tocqueville’s. His belief that equality of conditions is inevitable, and the rise of democracy unstoppable, seems even shakier today than it did in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. No one could extract from McPhee’s book answers about whether the quest for equality will end in freedom or servitude, liberty or death. But he assembles a wealth of information to remind those who need reminding that the French Revolution raised questions that remain at the heart of modern politics.
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, by Peter McPhee, Yale University Press, RRP£25/$35, 488 pages
Ruth Scurr is author of ‘Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution’ (Vintage)
Illustration from Bibliotheque Nationale de France
Liberty or Death: The French RevolutionPrinter-friendly versionPDF version
Buy From Amazon
Book:
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
Peter McPhee
London, Yale University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780300189933; 488pp.; Price: £19.99
Reviewer:
Dr Marisa Linton
Kingston University
Citation:
Dr Marisa Linton, review of Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, (review no. 1975)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1975
Date accessed: 31 January, 2017
See Author's Response
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, is how Charles Dickens began his stirring evocation of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. He had it about right. The first ten years of the French Revolution was a time of limitless hope and shattering violence. It was a time of unprecedented, cataclysmic events, vertiginous reversals of fortune, and of contrasts far more dramatic than in any novel, even one by Dickens. It was also the moment at which the modern political world was invented, a turning point, not just in the history of France, but in that of the wider world. Many of the rights that people fought for then are ones we expect in our own lives. How should we understand the French Revolution? What moment, what image, best expresses it? The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, perhaps, with its bold series of statements about the rights of all people to liberty and equality? Or the guillotine, standing tall and sinister, its blade dripping red with the blood of the Revolution’s enemies? No single book can give a full sense of the sheer scale of the Revolution – the social and economic transformations, the cultural revolution, the religious divisions, the regional experiences in a large and diverse country, the global dimensions, the wars with their national and international impact – all driven on by the tumultuous, complex and ever-changing politics. In trying to chart this seismic event, Peter McPhee has set himself a seemingly impossible task, yet it is one that he brings off with aplomb.
I am often asked which books on the French Revolution, written in English, I would recommend to newcomers. There are many short guides to the French Revolution, including one by McPhee himself, that provide an overview to the subject, and are written principally as introductory guides for students.(1) In recent years, however, few historians have attempted the kind of extended narrative of the Revolution designed to appeal to the interested general reader. The nearest equivalents are Simon Schama’s Citizens, and William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution, both of which were originally written for the Bicentenary, 27 years ago.(2) Much has changed in historical thinking about the Revolution since then, and there is ample space for a study to bring the French Revolution to a new generation of readers. Liberty or Death is very well qualified for that role, and is set to become a standard work on the subject.
It is not only the complexity of events that make writing a narrative of the Revolution a challenge for historians. In the 227 years since its outbreak, the French Revolution has never ceased to attract controversy. Was the Revolution an inevitable conflict rooted in class divisions and exploitation, or a contingent political and financial crisis that might easily have been avoided? What were the aims and motives of the people who made it? Why did attempts to stabilise successive political regimes fail? Why did the Revolution become so violent? What was its legacy, both for France and for world history? In short, how – if at all – are we to make sense of it? Few subjects in history have generated more debate – and less consensus. For the prospective reader the many studies of the Revolution, all clamouring for attention, and each with their very different perspectives, constitute something of a minefield. A generation ago much of the historiography of French revolutionary studies focussed on Marxist and revisionist debates over whether or not the Revolution constituted a class conflict which resulted in the triumph of the bourgeoisie. Much has changed since then. McPhee shows how new paths of research are uncovering hitherto neglected dimensions of the Revolution. He pays particular attention to the ways in which the Revolution impacted on the lives of the rural and urban poor, on women, and on slaves in the French colonies. He also weaves into his account close attention to the global ramifications of the Revolution.
McPhee’s impressive breadth of knowledge (much of his own research has been on the social and rural history of France), empathy and judgement, make him a sure guide as he explores events, ideas, and culture, to reveal what the Revolution meant for the people who lived through it. The book is structured as a clear narrative, sustained by a wealth of detailed knowledge, and punctuated by brief but vivid glimpses into the lives of a myriad of people whose lives were changed by the Revolution. His approach is even-handed. He sympathises with many of the revolutionaries’ goals, yet he does not shy away from the scale of loss of life that ensued.
Much of the power of Liberty or Death comes through the way it combines the epic sweep of the French Revolution with attention to the impact of the Revolution on ordinary people’s lives. McPhee poses two questions that aid our understanding: firstly, what motivated the people who fought either for or against the Revolution; and secondly, how did people of all kinds experience the Revolution? Here the contrast is clear with Schama’s Citizens, a book which dwells at length on the vicissitudes of dispossessed nobles, whilst showing scant interest either in the peasantry who suffered under the seigneurial system, or in the motives of the revolutionaries, and which consequently runs out of steam well before its abrupt closure with the fall of Robespierre in 1794. McPhee’s account is much bigger in scope – chronologically, geographically and socially. His narrative ranges from the epicentre of Paris, through the different regions of France, and on to the impact of the Revolution in Europe, the French colonies, and beyond. The only difficulty with this ambitious approach is that the sheer scale of events means it is often not possible within the narrative constraints to dwell as much on any one aspect as one might wish. People and places have a tendency to appear, and abruptly disappear, in a potentially disconcerting fashion, like characters in Alice in Wonderland. McPhee goes a long way to mitigate the problem, however, by providing both a detailed index and a chronology. An additional bonus comes in the extensive and characteristically generous footnotes. Readers who wish to know more about any particular subject will find in these notes a comprehensive guide to further reading that includes much cutting edge scholarship.
McPhee traces the development of the Revolution through the early years when the newly established National Assembly set up a constitutional monarchy under ‘the most inclusive and participatory system in the world’ (p. 142). The Revolution began in a spirit of enthusiasm, unity, excitement and exhilarating optimism. At the Festival of the Federation, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the king took an oath to support the constitution. The Revolution seemed over. Why then did the constitutional monarchy fail? Some historians, including Schama with his determinedly negative take on the Revolution, have argued that it was always bound to lead to anarchy, violence and terror. McPhee shows that there was no inevitability about the fall of the constitutional monarchy; it came about through a series of misjudged choices by leading protagonists. A pivotal chapter explores the fateful decision by the revolutionaries to impose an oath of loyalty to the constitution on the clergy, forcing them to choose between keeping faith with the Catholic Church and allegiance to the Revolution. It was, says McPhee, ‘the moment that fractured the Revolution’ (p. 123). Yet the king himself still commanded considerable loyalty. Ironically the fatal blow against the constitutional monarchy was dealt by Louis XVI himself when he took the ill-judged decision to flee with his family towards the Austrian border in what became known as the flight to Varennes, with the intention of returning, backed by Austrian armed force and French émigrés, to regain the power he had lost with the Revolution. Recognised, intercepted, and brought back to Paris, Louis never regained the fractured trust of his people. McPhee then moves to the ‘dangerous game’ (p. 152) played by the revolutionary leader, Brissot and his followers, the Girondins, to unleash a ‘people’s war’, intended to unmask the king’s treachery and to bring liberty to other peoples in Europe. Brissot’s policy was strongly opposed by Robespierre, who told the warmongers, ‘No one likes armed missionaries’ (p. 151). Robespierre’s warnings were disregarded, and a war ensued that lasted for 23 years and transformed the fate not only of France, but also that of Europe and beyond. The war in turn led to the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792, and the establishment of a new assembly, the Convention, which declared France a republic.
By the summer of 1793 the Republic was at war with most of western Europe, France was beset with invading armies, and a full-scale civil war had broken out in the Vendée. The cosmopolitanism of the Revolution’s early years gave way to a dangerous nationalism. It was at this crisis point that the radical group, the Jacobins, became leading figures in government, and, under pressure from the Paris popular movement, the sans-culottes, the Convention resorted to a legalised ‘terror’, passing a series of laws that enabled the arrest, trial and execution of people found guilty of opposing the Revolution. Around 40,000 people died in the legalised terror (more if one counts people who died of sickness in the revolutionary prisons). A grim tally. But by far the greatest loss of life occurred in the Vendée. McPhee explains how the specific regional circumstances – the landholding system, religious factors, antagonistic relations between town and country, and peasant anger over mass conscription in the revolutionary wars – all combined to ignite a conflict that resulted in the deaths of around 200,000 people.
What determined people to risk everything, to fight for or against the Revolution? A facinating chapter, entitled ‘Liberty or death: choosing sides in violent times, 1793’ explores the many considerations that led people to make choices about which side to follow, or indeed, whether to keep their heads down and hope for the storm to pass. As McPhee shows: ‘The key determinants were material … but also affective’ (p. 189). Friendship networks and family loyalties were important factors, whilst occupational, neighbourhood, religious and regional identities all played their part. The Revolution left no one’s life untouched, ‘no one could avoid choices’ (p. 203). By prioritising personal choices, McPhee gets to the heart of the turmoil thrown up by the Revolution: ‘By mid-1793 such decisions had become a question of life and death’ (p. 204). It is this dilemma, expressed in the revolutionary slogan, ‘Liberty or death’ that gives McPhee his title. The revolutionaries wanted liberty, but declared they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives to ensure that the Revolution survived. The revolutionary leaders felt increasingly confused, bewildered, and fearful, battered by a succession of unprecedented events, and drained by the effort of living at that pitch of intensity. Ironically, many of them would indeed pay with their own lives for their commitment to the Revolution.
One of the most troubling questions about the Revolution is why a movement that began with humanitarian intentions resorted, three years later, to the state-sponsored violence known as ‘the Terror’? McPhee takes the view – shared by many historians – that the pressure of circumstances, especially the war, was central to this process. He does not, however, limit his analysis to the part played by external forces; he also enlists recent interpretations by historians who have been exploring the ways in which the emotions of revolutionaries affected their decision making. The most important of these emotions in the crisis of 1793 was fear, above all the fear – often misplaced, but nonetheless powerful - that external and internal conspiracies were endangering the Revolution. Such fears helped stoke the revolutionaries’ decision to have recourse to terror.(3) McPhee himself has contributed in no small measure to this new understanding of the thinking behind the recourse to terror with the best biography of Robespierre in English to appear in many years.(4) In place of the tired old view of Robespierre as a power-crazed dictator, and mastermind of a ‘Reign of Terror’, McPhee shows us Robespierre’s gradual evolution from an idealist who began, in Robespierre’s own words, as a defender of ‘the poor and unknown’, against a privileged and rich elite ‘whose luxury devours the sustenance of a thousand men in a single day’ (pp. 47–8). In May 1791 Robespierre tried unsuccessfully to secure the abolition of the death penalty, which he termed a barbaric punishment. To understand how such a man, along with many others, turned to the use of terror to defend the Revolution we need to comprehend the shattering effects of the critical period of the Revolution, combined with the tensions that ran rampant through the political class in 1793–4.
The fall of Robespierre in July 1794 (Thermidor, Year II according to the new revolutionary calendar) was a turning point in the Revolution. It was engineered by a group of Jacobin deputies (later known as the Thermidoreans) fearful for their own lives. In the chapter ‘Settling scores’, McPhee examines how, after Thermidor, the laws that enabled terror were gradually repealed, and suspects released. New revolutionary leaders pulled back from the Jacobin experiment in radical democracy and curbed the popular movement in Paris that had sustained it. The Thermidoreans, all former terrorists, exculpated themselves from responsibility by fabricating the story that Robespierre had been a dictator with sole responsibility for ‘the Terror’, which he imposed on an unwilling Convention. Thermidor did not end the violence. Politics was tainted by hatred, fear, and the desire for revenge; up to almost 30,000 people perished in reprisals against Jacobins during the year following Thermidor. The Revolution had a shattering impact on the political class, as Boissy d’Anglas, one of the makers of the new, more moderate, constitution of 1795, said: ‘We have lived through six centuries in six years’ (p. 294). Many political activists, ‘out of despair, fear or exhaustion’ (p. 299) left public life in the years after Thermidor. The politicians of the Thermidorean regime, and later of the Directory regime pulled away from the social and political equality of the Jacobins, fearful of its dangers. Henceforward the vote was once again restricted to men of property. Advocacy of the libertarian and egalitarian Constitution of 1793 was made ‘a capital offence’ (p. 298). Yet political stability proved elusive. To shore up the regime the Directory turned increasingly to an expansionist military, now fighting wars beyond French borders, thus preparing the ground for Napoleon Bonaparte’s military coup in Brumaire, 1799. For McPhee this was the moment when the Revolution ended and a new, ultimately more fatal, regime began: the coup brought to power a man whose ‘dreams of imperial grandeur would cost French people far more than had the securing of their Revolution’ (p. 341).
In the final chapter, ‘The significance of the French Revolution’, McPhee poses the question – what changed because of the Revolution? His answer is a tour de force, in the course of which he provides a comprehensive reckoning of the Revolution, politically, socially, economically, culturally and emotionally. Many of the changes wrought by the revolutionaries proved temporary and perished along with the Revolution. Many reforms (including the abolition of slavery, and the right to divorce) were subsequently curtailed, either by Napoleon, or by the restored Bourbon monarchy; some, however, proved to be permanent, notably the ending of the seigneurial regime which permanently emancipated France’s peasantry, whilst the former slaves of Saint-Domingue defied Napoleon’s attempts to re-enslave them and, at the price of a colossal loss of life, established the new nation of Haiti. The political legacy of the Revolution was bitterly contested, within France and beyond. The violence that came with the Revolution precludes any easy answers to the continuing problem of that legacy. Yet many of the questions first raised by the revolutionaries still resonate with us. The right to democracy, political equality, social equality, the right to protection under the law, freedom of religious belief, and liberty of the press, all are as pertinent now as they were in 1789 and, as McPhee concludes, they ‘remain at the heart of all democratic political life everywhere’ (p. 370).
Notes
Peter McPhee, The French Revolution, 1789-1799 (Oxford, 2002).Back to (1)
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989). William Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989); a revised edition of Doyle’s book was published in 2003.Back to (2)
Recent works that explore emotions in the Terror include: Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror: Violence in the French Revolution (Harvard, MA, 2015); and Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford, 2013).Back to (3)
Peter McPhee, Robespierre – a Revolutionary Life (New Haven, CT, 2012). See also the articles and discussion by various historians in ‘The Robespierre problem’, ed. Peter McPhee, H-France Salon, 7, 14 (2015), H-France
August 2016
Author's Response
Peter McPhee
Posted: Thu, 18/08/2016 - 12:55
Marisa Linton has written a model review, locating my book within her expert outline of the narrative of the Revolution and also evaluating it within a changing historiography. I am also gratified that an historian who has brought such depth and freshness to our understanding of the origins and course of the Revolution should be so generous about my overview.
There are two particular aspects that Linton notes about my book that I wish to highlight, not so much to respond to her discussion as to emphasise what I have tried to do. One concerns the renewed interest in the global origins and resonances of the Revolution, reflecting the enriched historiography of the past two decades. Historians can no longer make sense of the Revolution without understanding its international origins and consequences. But, while the Revolution was born in the heat of an international imperial crisis, France was the epicentre of that crisis and its repercussions. The shock-waves of its radical revolution were felt throughout Europe, and beyond. They reverberated across the Atlantic to the Americas, especially the Caribbean, along the shores of the Mediterranean, reaching as far as South Asia and even the South Pacific.
Just as important, this was a national upheaval in which the 98% of people who lived outside Paris in provincial towns and villages not only experienced the impact of change and conflict but were engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation with successive regimes. The most dramatic turning-points of the Revolution were Parisian, for obvious reasons, but the nature of the Revolution, the successes of its military defence, and the profound social changes it wrought were a product of France’s diverse regional cultures. So the book asks how rural and small town men and women adopted, adapted to and resisted change from Paris. The men who governed France through a decade of revolution were overwhelmingly of provincial origin and brought to their nation-building the concerns their constituents communicated to them in waves of correspondence. The Revolution did not consist of Parisian political struggles alone, and still less of discursive dissonance analysed by studies of the printed and spoken word. The same point about going beyond the politics of national capitals and their elites holds true for understanding the revolutions and the consequent civil and international wars that have raged across North Africa and the Middle East since 2000.
'Tackling the thorny questions left by French Revolution'. Review - Liberty or Death by Peter McPhee
(2) View gallery
17 Jun 2016 / Jonathan Wright
0 comments
Liberty or Death. The French Revolution
Peter McPhee
Yale University Press, £25
Review by Jonathan Wright
MANY histories of the French Revolution seem reluctant to stray more than a few miles beyond the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. At times it can seem as if nothing much of consequence happened outside Paris. This is regrettable. As Peter McPhee reminds us, in the 1780s only 650,000 out of a population of 28 million were Parisian, and this was primarily a "land of villages and small towns." Every corner of the nation was touched by the cataclysm. Events in the capital were pivotal but it was often Paris that had to react to developments in Nantes, Toulouse, or 100 humbler places. The crucial lesson of McPhee's superb book is that the passion in the pays was just as passionate, and the tragedy no less tragic.
Even before news of the Bastille's fall reached the mountainous areas east of Lyon, for example, châteaux were being menaced. Soon, peasants in the region were burning feudal registers and, on July 25, 800 people from 12 villages attacked the abbey of Saint-Sulpice, near Bourg. The monks narrowly escaped being hanged from a gibbet in their cloister and the abbey was set alight. Such radicalism endured in many corners of the nation.
McPhee tells such stories in wonderful detail but he reminds us that not everyone in the provinces was quite so delighted by the revolution's trajectory. One regional event that does makes its way into almost every narrative was the counter-revolutionary rebellion in the Vendée region, south of the Loire. It claimed as many as 200,000 lives and McPhee aptly describes it as a "visceral rural rejection of a revolution that had brought nothing but trouble." It was, however, only the best-remembered articulation of resentment and reaction. Across the nation, there was fury when the Catholic faith came under siege and attack. Political developments were sometimes just as unpopular. When in 1793 Spanish anti-revolutionary troops crossed the Pyrenees some of the townsfolk of Saint-Laurent-de-Cerdans were sufficiently disgruntled by the Parisian yoke to join up with the invaders.
McPhee traces all these tensions and divisions and puts the France – not to mention its far-flung colonies – back into the French Revolution. He also tackles the thorniest question of all: what did the revolution mean and what was its legacy? The initial sense of shock is wonderfully captured. The Austrian emperor Leopold II, of all people, predicted that "infinite happiness will result from this everywhere, the end of injustice, wars, conflicts, and arrests." Little did he, or anyone else, know how chaotic the revolution would become: "an irresistible combination," McPhee writes, "of regenerative idealism and violent retribution."
Small wonder, then, that the French are still torn over how to interpret their revolution. It was the wellspring of bold, transformative political and philosophical ideals, and it brought truly beneficial reforms to the law, education and local governance. Its darker side, by contrast, inspires regret and pity more than pride. Perhaps we should find some reassurance in the fact that many, even most, of those who had to live through these turbulent years were simply bewildered. One might imagine that a national referendum in the crucible of 1793 would have produced a record turn-out at the polls. Not so. When the new constitution came before the electorate, the participation of eligible voters did not top 50 percent in any region. In Brittany, only 10 percent of people bothered to cast their ballots. Was there a sense of simply not wanting to fan the flames of political tribalism, or of pure exhaustion and confusion? In any event, it is easy to sympathise with one of the most memorable, if nameless, characters in these pages. He came across a child reciting articles from the aforementioned constitution but he did not launch into patriotic rhapsodies about the revolution changing the world and inspiring the next generation of citizens. He simply announced, and who can blame him, that he "preferred a bottle of wine to all that." It was, to be sure, a good time to drink a little too much.
‘Liberty or Death: The French Revolution,’ by Peter McPhee: All the pieces of the story are here, but maybe not the ones you expect
FILED UNDERBOOKS AT JUL 14 SHARE
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
EMAIL
Print This Story
Written byProfile image for David Walton David Walton, Special Contributor Connect with David Walton Email
Don't miss a story. Like us on Facebook.
LIKE DALLAS NEWS' FACEBOOK PAGE
For those who have an abiding interest in the French Revolution, Peter McPhee's Liberty or Death will be the culmination of a lifetime of reading and reflection, just as it is the culmination of many historians' contributions, large and small. Expansive and painstaking, it is like a picture puzzle complete, every piece in place.
McPhee is an honored professor at the University of Melbourne, a biographer of Robespierre and an internationally recognized specialist in French social history. In Liberty or Death, he looks at the Revolution of 1789-99 as a complex national event, generated by a wide range of factors -- the size and diversity of the country, inequities in taxes, the price of bread, innumerable small grievances and injustices that had festered in an antiquated society.
The French Revolution is possibly the single most dramatic, most consequential event in modern history -- and by convention the event that marks the beginning of the modern era. Its lessons may change from generation to generation, but the story line seems unchallengeable: bankrupt regime, well-intentioned but ineffectual king, high ideals evolving into violence, all ending in a military dictatorship.
McPhee doesn't abandon this narrative entirely, but he sees the story differently. He looks at the Revolution as a national event, experienced in different ways in different places by different people.
France in the 1780s, he writes, "was a society in which people's deepest sense of identity was attached to their particular province... Across most of the country French was the daily language only of those involved in administration, commerce and the professions... Several million people in Languedoc spoke variants of Occitan; Flemish was spoken in the north-east; German in Lorraine. There were minorities of Basques and Catalans along the Spanish border, and perhaps 1 million Celts in Brittany."
France was 97 percent Catholic and McPhee attributes the failure of the Revolution to its fracture with the Catholic clergy. Unlike most historians, he gives less weight and proportionately less attention to events in Paris.
"It is true that Paris was the epicenter of revolution," he writes, "but only approximately one French person in 40 -- about 650,000 of more than 20 million -- lived in Paris in the 1780s."
Significant events and personalities figure in, but briefly, and mainly for their effect on public opinion, a concept just coming into use at that time, along with "nation" and "citizen." Thus, the Queen's Necklace affair, the royal couple's flight to Varennes, the murder of Marat, get around a page each, and the execution of Marie-Antoinette half that, and mainly in reference to artist Jacques-Louis David, who sketched her as her tumbrel passed under his studio window in the Louvre.
McPhee gives equal attention, possibly more, to a sampling of French men and women who represent different phases of the Revolution, and the ways people experienced it.
This decentralized, unprotagonized narrative has its strengths, but can be difficult to follow if you don't know the history already. Principal figures in other histories, such as Danton and Saint-Just, are vague presences here, and none of the worst excesses of the Terror are detailed. The horrific slaughter of the royal establishment -- courtiers, cooks, musicians, the Swiss guard -- in the Tuileries on Aug. 10, 1792, isn't even mentioned.
No heads roll in this book. We learn the body counts and track the movements of the guillotine from one Paris location to another as the traffic increased. But we never hear the whisper of the blade.
For unseasoned readers who might want to start with a narrative account, a personal favorite is Christopher Hibbert's The Days of the French Revolution, which focuses on the significant days, or journées, of the Revolution. Hibbert's book would in fact be a good accompaniment to McPhee's more analytic perspective.
Liberty or Death is a deeply satisfying and masterfully written book that will surely be a text for students and scholars for years to come. It illustrates, better than any other book I can think of, the cumulative value of all those highly specialized, seemingly irrelevant theses that Ph.D. candidates and historians have churned out for decades, tabulating grain harvests and currency values and the number of newspapers and novels published and the names people gave their newborns.
They have all found their place in this fine and illuminating book.
David Walton writes and teaches in Pittsburgh.
Liberty or Death
The French Revolution
Peter McPhee
(Yale, $35)
JULY 14 2016
SAVE
PRINT
Liberty or Death review: Peter McPhee's great history of the French Revolution
Phillip Dwyer
HISTORY
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution
PETER MCPHEE
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, $57.95
There is a contradiction inherent in the French Revolution that was there from the start. On the one hand, the Revolution gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and to many of the civic rights that we today take for granted, liberty of expression, equality before the law and freedom of religion. On the other, the means by which those fundamental rights were achieved were often violent in ways that shock not only the modern reader, but also deeply shocked contemporaries.
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK SHARE
SHARE ON TWITTER TWEET
PIN TO PINTEREST PIN
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/liberty-or-death-review-peter-mcphees-great-history-of-the-french-revolution-20160708-gq1eis.html
The French Revolution revealed two contradictory trends.
The French Revolution revealed two contradictory trends. Photo: Alamy
Take the brutal killing of the royal governor of Paris, Louis Bertier de Sauvigny, and his father-in-law, Joseph Foulon. Only one week after the fall of the Bastille, the event that has come to symbolise the Revolution and French national identity, they were beaten to death by a frenzied crowd in retribution for supposedly conspiring to starve the people of Paris.
Their heads were cut off and paraded around the streets of Paris. Foulon had his mouth stuffed with straw because it was rumoured he had stated that if the people were hungry, that's what they should eat. Mutilated bodies and body parts paraded on the end of pikes were not uncommon sights during the Revolution.
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK
SHARE ON TWITTER
PIN TO PINTEREST
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/liberty-or-death-review-peter-mcphees-great-history-of-the-french-revolution-20160708-gq1eis.html
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, by Peter McPhee.
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, by Peter McPhee.
In the 1780s, before the tidal wave of revolution swept over France, the spirit of liberty was beginning to peek through the cracks of the incredibly complicated system that was the monarchy and the Church of the ancien régime. Respect for the monarchy was below the surface and the deference displayed by the lower orders to their hierarchical superiors was visible, but discontent was there, and it ran deep.
What in part held it all together was a brutal justice system that saw, in the worst cases, the guilty "broken on the wheel" (tied to a wheel, their limbs were smashed systematically with an iron rod before being burned alive), or sent to the galleys. Executions were public and spectacular for a reason; they were meant to serve as an example.
The system began to crumble as a consequence of a financial crisis, which in turn led to a newfound freedom among people until then excluded from political participation. It all came to a head in 1789, the year of the birth of democracy in France, the beginnings of massive involvement of the common people in the political process and the development of a system that we recognise as modern – "left", "right", factions for want of parties, and politicians playing to the crowds.
It resulted in a fundamental transformation of politics, culture and society as the old system was swept away, literally overnight for some institutions, and replaced by an entirely new way of thinking, doing and being.
The problem was that the political rhetoric quickly descended from the lofty heights of the brotherhood of mankind associated with 1789 into hate-filled extremes between opponents and supporters, and eventually even between supporters of the Revolution.
Within a few years, anyone "suspected" of being an enemy of the Revolution was vulnerable to being denounced by a fellow citizen wanting to prove that he or she was more "virtuous" than their neighbour, or could be killed by the mob, or get caught up in the machinery of terror that was put into place surprisingly quickly.
Some executed may have been guilty of conspiring against the Republic, but others were innocent, guilty of having said the wrong thing at the wrong time, or of simply being born into aristocracy. Others again were victims of the increased political paranoia. Take the actor Arouch, denounced in 1794 for having delivered a line in a 17th-century play, "Long live our noble king!".It was enough to see him condemned to death. He went to the guillotine insisting that he had only been playing his part.
For many millions of people, the Revolution became a very real struggle between "liberty" and "death", as the country tried to "remake" the nation into a modern, secular and "enlightened" state.
Two things complicated the Revolution enormously – religion and war. In an attempt to bring the Church into line with the modern, reformist principles of the Revolution, many millions of devout Catholics were alienated as their local churches were closed or their local priest denounced for not swearing an oath of allegiance to the Revolution. Eventually, established religions were persecuted and banned, churches all over France closed and a new religion was inaugurated – the cult of the Supreme Being.
The war resulted from revolutionaries wanting to take their principles to the rest of Europe and the world. They should have heeded the warning of one prominent radical, a Jacobin as they were called, Maximilien Robespierre, who declared that "nobody likes armed missionaries". It is advice that western governments would have been wise to heed before launching the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
By the end of 1792, every European monarchy was at war with France, the beginning of a European-wide conflict that would only end on the battlefield of Waterloo some 23 years later, and that would result in millions of dead and wounded.
All of this is lucidly and brilliantly explained by the Melbourne-based historian, Peter McPhee. One of the dilemmas for historians writing about the French Revolution is how to reconcile the two fundamental but contradictory trends mentioned above, the modernising, democratising impulse, coupled with the violence of the mob. How did the Revolution, which began in the belief people that people were innately good, descend into suspicion, denunciation and despotism?
Some historians, such as Simon Schama, have argued that the Revolution was violence. McPhee, on the other hand, approaches this conundrum in a more level-headed manner, neither condemning nor judging, but rather explaining the inner dynamics and workings of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries alike, putting things into perspective as much as possible.
The strength of McPhee's work, the result of a lifetime of writing, thinking and teaching the Revolution, is his ability to bring the province and regions of France into the story, often neglected in histories of the Revolution, as well as his ability to weave details about individual lives into the larger historical thread, giving us an insight into the personal, the local, and the national story.
We learn that the aristocrat Lucy de la Tour du Pin never reconciled the Revolution with her personal losses, or that Marie-Thérèse Figuer volunteered to fight in the army and did so by cross-dressing like a number of other women, or that Marie-Madeleine Coutelet, who worked in a mill in Paris, was arrested in 1793 because of letters criticising the revolutionary government (she was later executed).
If the detail of the political upheavals that characterised the Revolution as one faction gained dominance and eliminated another might deter the uninitiated, my advice is persist. The depth and breadth of McPhee's knowledge is impressive and makes this book an extraordinary achievement.
The French Revolution changed the nature of politics forever. The Declaration of the Rights of Man still remains one of the highest aspirations for any democratic society. But there was also a downside to the Revolution, as one might argue there is for all revolutions, that it degenerated into intolerance, civil war and persecution.
If there is a political lesson to be learnt, it is that opposing sides will always enter a conflict convinced of the malevolence and fanaticism of the other. The Revolution thus remains a salutary lesson for all at a time when democracy throughout the world is under threat.
Philip Dwyer is the Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle and the author of Napoleon: The Path to Power (2007) and Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power (2013). He is currently writing about Napoleon's exile on St Helena.
H-France ReviewVolume 8 (2008)Page187H-France Review Vol. 8 (March 2008), No. 46Peter McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 1789-99. Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2006. x + 319 pp. Maps, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $ 74.95 U.S. (hb). ISBN 0-333-99739-5.Review by Edward J. Woell, Western Illinois University.Whenever students in my western civilization surveys compose essays on how and why the French Revolution began, the writers usually fall into two groups. The first consists of those who failed to read the textbook and ignored lectures given by an instructor passionate about the topic. Such students explain that after centuries of oppression by clueless kings and uncaring nobles, a failed harvest became the tipping point for untold numbers of French peasants, who armed themselves with pitchforks and demanded their freedom. But students in the second group, namely those who read the textbook and even made sense of a lecture or two, write that a long-developing fiscal crisis came to a head, prompting a meeting of the Estates General in 1789 and with it the beginning of the French Revolution. Invariably I give the better grades to the latter.But I must admit that reading Peter McPhees latest scholarly effort has given me some pause about my own grading rubric. McPhee contends that the 1789 Revolution had an irrevocable impact on the people of France--particularly the nineteen-twentieths of whom were living in the rural communities of villages and small towns--and that this revolution came to be defined, in large part, by a process in which rural peoples were central. It is a difficult argument to make for two reasons. First, as McPhee himself acknowledges, he is swimming upstream against a torrid historiographical current. Eminent historians like Donald Sutherland, Timothy Le Goff, David Andress, and most notably, Richard Cobb, have argued that the French Revolution was a largely irrelevant affair to the vast majority of rural inhabitants.[1] Such scholars have often shown, moreover, that if rural peoples ever did find themselves caught in the revolutionary maelstrom, most reacted with revulsion, if not outright violence, toward the new regime. Second, McPhee also encounters the perennial problem of offering up evidence about a people who left very little written documentation. Frequently we must rely on indirect reports about what rural peoples did during the Revolution and just as important, why they did it.Yet McPhee is far from the first to confront such historiographical and evidentiary obstacles and ultimately part ways with Cobb. As he also admits, Georges Lefevbres study of the Great Fear helped to demonstrate that peasants were not passive in revolutionary events. More recently the work of Anatolï Ado, Peter Jones, and John Markoff has underscored the pivotal role of rural communities in one of the most important transformations of the revolutionary decade: the irreversible abolition of seigneurialism.[2] Even so, McPhee is more than just interested in showing how and why peasants mattered to the Revolution; he seeks to depict a complex give-and-take between revolutionary initiatives and a rural populace. As he puts it,This book is premised on the approach that the local experience of the Revolution is best understood as a process of negotiation and confrontation with distant governments rather than simply one of more-or-less recalcitrant communities being acted upon, and only occasionally lashing out in violent retribution. . . . Of particular importance will be the evocation of the ways in which revolutionary changes altered the textures of daily life or were adapted as people sought to resist change (p. 5).
H-France ReviewVolume 8 (2008)Page188To this end McPhee draws on a vast array of sources mostly from departmental archives, including family court records, petitions, correspondence both unsolicited and formulaic in nature, and deliberations and declarations from rural municipal councils. For this tome he undertook specific case studies in five diverse departments: the Orne, the Ain, the Aude, the Aisne, and the Charente-Maritime. Supplementing these with his previous studies of the Pyrénées-Orientales and the Hérault, along with monographs regarding rural communities written by other scholars, McPhee has a base of evidence wide enough to withstand the criticism that he is cherry-picking archival records.[3]He begins the book by describing the Old Regime as experienced in villages and small towns. Here he uses the cahiers de doléances to great effect while acknowledging their limitations at the parish level. Central to McPhees description is the seigneurial system and how those subject to it understood the institution. It is also here where he introduces an overarching theme in the book--the wide degree of social and political variations among rural inhabitants. In discussing the seigneurial administration of justice, for example, McPhee explains that in some areas (Saintonge and Angoumois) peasants saw seigneurial courts as oppressive, in other areas (Normandy) these institutions were moribund, and in still other areas (Northern Burgundy and Upper Brittany) rural peoples highly respected them. Yet even given these discrepancies, McPhee finds much similitude in rural and small-town cahiers, including universal hatred of seigneurial dues and concerns about natural resources, land usage, local ecclesiastical and educational institutions, and trade policy.McPhee then takes up events in 1789 and 1790 and tries to demonstrate how, despite representatives of the Third Estate belittling or ignoring requests made by rural inhabitants in their cahiers, the voice of people in the countryside was ultimately heard. He not only considers the collective panic of the Great Fear, but also pervasive food rioting and anti-seigneurial attacks. In such actions McPhee finds an unprecedented sense of egalitarianism and hostility toward nobles and clerics and goes so far as to assert that [a]ll the evidence points to near universal participation in these extraordinary months of celebration and protest (p. 53). Also discussed here is the impact of new institutions created by the Constituent Assembly, most notably the formation of departments, districts, and municipalities.Still another key reform for rural inhabitants was the reorganization of the justice system, which McPhee--siding here with Anthony Crubaugh–sees as highly advantageous for people of the countryside.[4] The books comprehensive depiction of the rural reaction to early revolutionary reforms resembles a montage of, in McPhees words, exhilaration, menace and resolve (p. 62). Many rural peoples lost economic ground due to the Assemblys inviolable protection of private property and the foot-dragging that arose in the wake of the abolition of privileges. Just for this reason many took matters into their own hands, especially when it involved matters of land usage and resource management. As McPhee explains, [t]he lived experience of thousands of rural communities was one of testing the boundaries for local advantage in the context of the new laws (p. 69).Regarding the crucial period between passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) and promulgation of the complete Constitution (October 1791), McPhee points to several critical developments for rural inhabitants. The ecclesiastical oath crisis and the royal familys flight to Varennes had the effect of polarizing rural communities, causing some to turn against the Revolution as a whole, while augmenting anti-noble, anti-clerical, and anti-monarchical sentiment in others. Just as relevant to small-town citizens and villagers was passage of the Le Chapelier law and the Constituent Assemblys ongoing reluctance to dismantle all vestiges of the seigneurial system. All of these, however, paled in comparison to the repercussions of war beginning in the spring of 1792. The advent of hostilities unleashed rabid rural hatred toward nobles and clerics and pushed politicians and ordinary citizens alike toward the complete abolition of seigneurialism. The subsequent fall of the king elicited little shock or anger in the countryside and perhaps surprising to many scholars, McPhee shows that the September Massacres were not necessarily unique to Paris; ancillary killings took place in
H-France ReviewVolume 8 (2008)Page189numerous rural regions, with refractory priests and nobles being the most frequent victims.As debate continued in the national legislatures over land tenure in 1792 and 1793, rural inhabitants often took it upon themselves to dismantle what remained of the Old Regime, albeit often in ways that displeased revolutionary officials. McPhee argues that while political attitudes varied across the countryside, underpinning attitudes everywhere was hostility both to the Ancien Régime and to bourgeois concepts of untrammeled rights of private property: the communitarian impulse was dominant (p. 116). Also at issue during this time, according to McPhee, were regenerative concepts about society, marriage, family, and women. Although rural communities were less affected by new divorce laws than were their urban counterparts, the former certainly felt the effects of the equal inheritance law passed in March of 1793. Inevitably war came to the countryside not only by foreign invasion, but also through the requisitioning of resources and draftees, to say nothing of internal rebellion in the Vendée. In spite of popular counterrevolution, McPhee depicts rural France as largely devoted to the republic when it was most under threat, as indicated by the referendum on the Constitution of 1793.The Terror and the unparalleled centralization that accompanied it brought both hardship and opportunity for rural communities, according to McPhee. More land became available through the seizure of emigré property and some division of commons, yet this was more than offset by the injurious price controls embodied in the Maximum in September 1794. The scarcity of manual labor became an acute problem at harvest time, but at the same time it drove up wages for seasonal workers. Meanwhile, dechristianization had disastrous effects on local institutions and the demands of war caused the republics new charitable initiatives in the countryside to wither. Still, McPhee is unwilling to see the Terror as exacerbating a breach between urban and rural citizens; he maintains that the urban-rural divide was not so clear-cut in actuality, and the Revolution continued to enjoy mass support in some areas (p. 149). He shows how many rural communities embraced the republics new political culture, despite the regimes inability to provide adequate primary education, its tendency to suppress localized languages, and its unabashed destruction of the Vendée and other areas of popular counterrevolution and republican revolt.McPhee then demonstrates how rural communities loomed large in the backlash of Thermidor in 1794 and 1795. The White Terror in southeastern France strikes him more as a civil war between political factions than a social division between urbanites and their rural adversaries. As the economy faltered and inflation exponentially rose, small-town citizens and villagers were especially hard hit. Yet many rural inhabitants, contends McPhee, remained dedicated to the republic--though again frequently on their own terms. Some, for example, sought to rebuild religious institutions from the bottom up, as women often assumed leadership when priests were absent. McPhee also argues that the Directory period from 1795 to 1799 was not as narrowly elitist and therefore exclusionary of rural citizens as traditionally thought. He acknowledges that war, inflation, resistance to renewed conscription, and poor administration left some areas of the countryside virtually ungovernable, particularly in the south. He is reticent, however, to accept that popular counterrevolution was rampant. It was not the Republic as such that was being spurned, McPhee claims, but rather the class politics of its self-perpetuating elite(p. 199).In his conclusion, McPhee underscores why he takes issue not only with those who contend that daily life in the countryside remained largely unchanged during the revolutionary decade, but also with scholars like David Andress who represent the Revolution as inherently waged against the people. Specifically disputing several points of the Revolutions légende noire, McPhee dismisses the alleged disastrous effects on the environment, the massive loss of life, the widespread dissolution of families, and the irreparable loss of Catholic morality.McPhees book is a remarkable synthesis, providing compelling evidence that the Revolution left an
H-France ReviewVolume 8 (2008)Page190indelible mark in many areas of the countryside. That the Revolution often included a kind of negotiation between rural inhabitants and a centralized regime can hardly be disputed, as McPhees many examples deftly show. His focus on both individual and communitarian agency in the countrysideduring the 1790s brings attention to one of the most underappreciated aspects of the Revolution and should become a basis for future research. The figures and detailed notes provided by McPhee, along with his exhaustive bibliography, assure that the book will be a solid reference for many scholars.At the same time, though, it is far from clear that McPhee overturns what Cobb and others have argued about the relative intransigence of rural inhabitants during the Revolution. The problem in this respect is that for every example that McPhee provides about a given commune taking revolutionary or even counterrevolutionary action--and admittedly there are hundreds in the book--one is left to wonder if the thousands of unmentioned rural communes throughout the nation responded in a similar manner. This is not to suggest, though, that McPhees study is purposely skewed or that his approach is inherently flawed. Rather, this problem speaks more to the enormity of the task that McPhee undertakes, not to mention the overwhelming difficulty of gathering precious little evidence left by rural communes during the Revolution that still remains intact. Otherwise put, this synthesis complicates, in a most productive way, our understanding of the Revolution in rural France, but it falls short of providing an iron-clad refutation of Cobbs take on the topic. Somewhat related to this problem, moreover, is the absence in the book of a comprehensive political or economic geography of revolution in rural France. The reader is told of countless rural municipalities that responded to the Revolution in one way or another, but it is never made clear, by a map or otherwise, which rural regions in the nation mostly supported the Revolution and which largely opposed it, as well as which parts of the countryside were more socially and economically transformed by revolutionary reforms and which were not.[5]Even if one accepts McPhee’srevolution from belowin the countryside, its relationship to therevolution from above”--better known, to be sure--is somewhat problematic here as well. The portrait that McPhee frequently renders is that revolutionary politicians in Paris issued a law or decree, and then the people of the countryside accepted, modified, or rejected it. Although this view grants agency to the people in the countryside, it overlooks the role that agency also played at the intermediate levels of the departments, districts, and later arrondissements. Now that we have a better conception of the Revolution in rural France, thanks to McPhee and others whom he cites, and our understanding of national political culture is more complete than ever, perhaps more attention should be paid in a book like this to how disparate revolutions from below and above actually converged and underwent their own kind of negotiation, particularly within departmental, district, and arrondissement administrations.[6]Despite these concerns and regardless of whether one is apt agree with McPhee about a revolution from below, scholars of the Revolution should read this valuable historiographical contribution and weigh the evidence and arguments for themselves. I doubt that the study will stop my own share of apathetic students from writing aimlessly about peasants armed with pitchforks, but it certainly will enable their instructor to have a better sense of how clueless and uncaring their study of the Revolution really is.NOTES[1] See, for example, Donald Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Timothy Le Goff, Vannes and its Region: A Study of Town and Country in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); David Andress, The French Revolution and the People (London: Hambledon, 2004); Richard Cobb, Paris and Its Provinces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789-1829(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
H-France ReviewVolume 8 (2008)Page191[2] Georges Lefevbre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (New York: Vintage, 1973); Anatolï Ado, Paysans en Révolution. Terre, pouvoir, et jacquerie 1789-1794, trans. Serge Aberdam, Marcel Dorigny et al. (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierriestes, 1996); Peter Jones, Liberty and Locality in France: Six Villages Compared, 1760-1820 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996).[3] See McPhee, Collioure 1780-1815. The French Revolution in a Mediterranean Community (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1989); McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).[4] Anthony Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice: Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750-1800 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001).[5] Note how Lynn Hunt depicted a political geography of the Revolution, though in her case she focused more on urban areas and revolutionary officials residing there. See Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, twentieth anniversary ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004), 123-148.[6] In my own work, for example, I consider the agency of district officials in the Loire-Inférieure (now the Loire-Atlantique), particularly regarding their actions toward local religious institutions. See Woell, Small-Town Martyrs and Murderers: Religious Revolution and Counterrevolution in Western France, 1774-1914 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003).Edward J. WoellWestern Illinois Universityej-woell@wiu.eduCopyright © 2008 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. No republication or distribution will be permitted without permission. ISSN 1553-9172