Carla Hesse

The New Empiricism

One can, of course, find examples of bad or flawed historical writing about any topic and in any genre. Selective use of evidence, insufficient contextualization and overblown explanatory claims are not ills exclusive to recent practitioners of cultural history. One could amass no small number of complaints, from Ranke or Gibbon forward, admonishing colleagues to steer clear of the temptations of belletristics and to rededicate themselves to the toils of empirical research and rationalist analysis. But Peter Mandler is right that cultural historians who in recent years have taken the linguistic or discursive turn are more susceptible to these weaknesses than are those who have remained committed to an empiricist project of reconstituting historical ‘facts’ as well as interpreting systems of meaning, and it is well worth asking why. Perhaps Mandler would have done better (especially in the context of the launching of a new journal by the Social History Society) to limit his criticisms to a narrower subgroup of practitioners of cultural history. He is clearly not worried about sociocultural historians like me who, for all our limitations as historians, would happily sign on to the programme for reform he outlines in his closing remarks. He is not worried about those of us who have retained a commitment to investigating what John Toews felicitously described as ‘the dialectic between meaning and experience’, or, to put it in Bourdieuian rather than Hegelian terms, the relationship between fields of meaning and fields of power. Mandler is worried, rather, about those among us who have taken a radically discursive turn – either consciously or by mere professional osmosis. He might do better, then, to pose his question more narrowly, along something like the following lines: why did a significant number of historians – most of them trained initially in social scientific approaches

Revolutionary Historiography after the Cold War: Arno Mayer's “Furies” in the French Context

“War is an act of force,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the aftermath of the French Revolution, “and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.”1 The same could be said of revolution, according to Arno Mayer. Indeed, because of its foundational nature, revolution may be the paradigmatic form of war unleashed toward its extreme. Revolution is an epochal struggle in which violence becomes the means for instituting political order, rather than being reined in by it. Mayer has written a magisterial comparative history of the French and Russian revolutions that places foundational violence at the center of the story. Why, he asks, does modern revolutionary change—in his view a manifest good—necessarily entail violent conflict to achieve its ends? His answer is that revolution engenders forces that oppose it: “There can be no revolution without counterrevolution; both as phenomenon and process, they are inseparable, like truth and falsehood” (p. 45). In a revision of the traditional Marxian narrative, Mayer views modern European (and even global) history as a grand dialectical struggle—at once civil and international—between two civilizations: revolutionary modernity and counterrevolutionary tradition. Rather than viewing the French and Russian revolutions in historical succession, with one set of class struggles superseding the next (aristocracy vs. bourgeoisie in the French case, then bourgeoisie vs. proletariat in the Russian), Mayer sees the main lines of conflict in the two revolutions as “at bottom . . . homologous” (p. 65). They are twin engines of a single historical phenomenon, whose main axes of conflict can be enumerated as follows: democracy versus aristocracy, urban versus rural, secular versus religious. Counterrevolution in both

La logique culturelle de la loi révolutionnaire

Résumés L’article examine la façon dont le concept monarchique de « justice extraordinaire » fut transformé en concept républicain de « loi révolutionnaire » après la chute de la monarchie le 10 août 1792. L’auteur démontre que même si les révolutionnaires ont emprunté à l’Ancien Régime cette idée de justice extraordinaire, c’était pour en faire un usage nouveau: au lieu de chercher àpréserver un régime, ils utilisèrent une loi existante pour en créer une nouvelle. La loi révolutionnaire a, ce faisant, marqué une rupture radicale avec la conception d’Ancien Régime de la loi d’urgence. En l’absence d’une constitution qui définisse la souveraineté du peuple, les législateurs révolutionnaires entre 1792-1795 ont été confrontés au problème de la répression de l’opposition àun régime dont les paramètres avaient encore àêtre définis. La loi pénale offrait une piste en permettant aux députés de la Convention de définir les crimes envers la nouvelle souveraineté àtravers une rhétorique en trois points: négation, abstraction et particularisation. L’article examine un ample corpus de 80 lois pénales enregistrées devant le tribunal révolutionnaire entre le 10 mars 1793 et le 12 prairial an III, pour conclure que toutes ont échoué àconstruire une notion stable de l’identité républicaine.

Roche on the Move

Daniel Roche has made illuminating intellectual journeys, and now he has chosen mobility itself as his path of inquiry. Like the citizens of Ithaca on Ulysses’ return, we are lucky to be able to reflect with him on his many voyages. What itineraries has he followed? What new worlds has he discovered? And, having recounted these voyages so well, how has he transformed our understanding of his own land—France in the age of Enlightenment? When Roche first embarked on his intellectual journey, there were two grand narratives to orient the historical traveler in the France of theOld Regime, those of Alexis deTocqueville and Pierre Goubert. For Tocqueville, a disillusioned heir of the old political classes, the logic to the road maps of the Old Regime—whether geographical, political, socioeconomic, or cultural—was to be found in the precocious centralization of the state, on the one hand, and in the persistence of the eviscerated privileges of the kingdom’s corporations and social estates, on the other.These two animating principles worked in concert to stifle the energies and liberties of the French at all levels of the social order and to impose a suffocating and deforming unity, in an increasingly tyrannical manner, on a luxuriantly diverse country. Tocqueville thus left us with an image of theOld Regime as a stalled society that finally rebelled against the state in 1789. By contrast, Pierre Goubert—who was nourished in the cradle of