France and the Age of Revolution

In this collection of essays (some previously published), William Doyle reaffirms his stance as a revisionist historian of the French Revolution, for whom events and circumstances are the chief drivers of history. Having demolished Marxist ‘class determinism’ in 1980 with The Origins of the French Revolution (rev. ante, xcviii [1983], 460), he now deploys the same hard-nosed empiricism against ‘intellectual’ and ‘cultural’ strands of post-revisionism. Wide-ranging and boldly argued, these essays offer compelling insights into the French Revolution’s achievements, its international context and recent historiographical trends. In the first section, ‘Functions for Sale’, Doyle argues that, although criticism of venality stretched back for centuries (even to Aristotle), its abolition was rarely attempted in early modern France. Colbert’s efforts to reduce it during Louis XIV’s reign were short-lived, reversed by the financial demands of war by 1674. Enlightenment philosophes portrayed venality as a regrettable but necessary evil (Montesquieu, Diderot). Even Voltaire did not inveigh against venality until late in his career, and then only as part of a broader attack on noble privileges. It was the circumstances of 1789, Doyle insists, and not a crescendo of opinion against the practice, that brought about its abolition. In Chapter Four, ‘Changing Notions of Public Corruption, 1750–1850’, Doyle compares France’s venality with Britain’s ‘Old Corruption’ (the Crown’s bribing of parliamentarians and officials). Though both were central moral and political concerns, France, he argues, succeeded in eliminating venality sooner (1789) and more effectively than Britain rid itself of ‘Old Corruption’, which dragged on until the 1870s

Context (archaeology · Criticism · Economic history · Enlightenment · Historiography · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Reign · Theology · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence