BOOKS
RETHINKING THE REVOLUTION
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By
J.
F. Bosher.
W. W. Norton
&
Co. $24.95.
309
By any criterion, the French Revolution is one of the great
events of human history. But what exactly is its significance? A number of
standard Or plausible interpretations are available. It was the implementation
of the Enlightenment: in the course of the eighteenth century, inspired by the
Scientific Revolution, a set of thinkers had elaborated a secular, naturalistic,
empiricist, and materialist vision of the world and of its social corollaries, thus
undermining the hierarchical conception both of the cosmos and of society.
The French Revolution then attempted to carry out their program. Alterna–
tively, it was a major episode in the long story of the centralization of France
and of the equalization of conditions, a development initiated long ago in the
Middle Ages. Or again, it was the victory of the bourgeoisie over feudal
privilege and/or monarchical absolutism. Or it could be the very first of the
third world
revolutions de rattrapage:
if, in the early nineteenth century, the
third world began on the Rhine, then in the eighteenth it had been located on
the English Channel. A new social order had emerged in England and had
demonstrated its superiority, and, for all its universalistic rhetoric, the trans–
formation really had the rather specific aim of keeping up with the Anglo–
Saxons. (Oswald Spengler's complaint was that the French revolutionary
armies, while nominally fighting the English, were in reality spreading English
ideas throughout the Continent.)
It
can be seen as the culmination of the Ra–
tionalist disease, which would have society based not on custom but on ab–
straction; or as the beginning of that trend towards democratic totalitarianism
which was to find its culmination in our age. No doubt there are many others.
Bosher's approach to the Revolution is that of an historian proper
rather than of a philosopher (in modern parlance, a macrosociologist). He is
skeptical concerning the validity of any single interpretation of the event, and
he follows Alfred Cobban in the view that not merely is there no single
meaning, but there is not even anyone single event which could be the car–
rier of that meaning. There cannot be a single interpretation, because there is
a whole series of complex events to be interpreted. Bosher further
strengthens such a view by the argument that the Revolution had not been
intended Or planned. He asks, ". . . where in the prerevolutionary years are
