BOO KS
301
A REVOLUTION BETRAYED
THE AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION: A Political History.
By
Robert R. Palmer. Princeton University Pr.ess. $20.00.
Tocqueville was the first historian of the French Revolution to
describe it as a "European" or "Western" revolution. Like Tocqueville,
Palmer sees the events of American and European history
in
the period
from 1763 to 1800 "as a single movem'ent, revolutionary in character,
for which the word 'democratic' is appropriate and enlightening." What
Palmer adds to Tocqueville's conception is by way of thoroughness and
precision: where Tocqueville merely sketches the common experience,
both institutional and ideological, which led to the "world-wide" Revolu–
tion, Palmer makes an heroic attempt, while marking the similarities, to
render the national peculiarities of any and all the countries which
before and after 1789 participated in the conflict between "democrats"
and "aristocrats."
Indeed, the scope of Palmer's enterprise, considering the thorough–
ness with which he executes it, is astounding. His work represents an
artful synthesis of the best and most up-to-date monographic research
now available on the social and, especially, the political history of the
late eighteenth century. In these two substantial volumes, Palmer describes
political developments not only in France, Britain and America, but in
Sweden, Russia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Holland, the Austrian Nether–
lands, Switzerland, Germany and Italy as well. Yet for all its usefulness
as a compendium on the political history of the latter half of the
eighteenth century, Palmer's enterprise fails to add significantly to our
understanding of the Revolution. It fails because it presents a largely
distorted picture of the Revolution, both of its place in the context of
eighteenth-century European history and its subsequent effect on the
history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In dealing, as he
says,
"with Western Civilization as a whole, at a critical moment in its
history," Palmer treats the Revolution in France itself as only one aspect
of a general revolutionary movement. But in fact, what makes the
French Revolution so very important in European and world history is
precisely that, in its origin and in its course of development, it is
not
analogous to events elsewhere: it is not the core of an occidental revolu–
tion, but an anomaly in eighteenth-century European history, a breach
in the solid front of the Old Regime.
In his first volume, Palmer says, correctly, that there was in France
and throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century a conservative
or aristocratic reaction to the monarchical absolutism of the Old Regime.
