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the ideas of nationalism, of republicanism ... of democracy ... and the other
guiding ideas of the Revolution?" Against the ideological or philsophical ap–
proach, he affirms: "Anyone who approaches the subject with scientific doubt
and detachment, however, may find a generation of revolutionaries whose
deeds were not premeditated and a series of events that do not seem in–
evitable."
This sense of complexity and contingency, and the distrust of the uni–
fying formulae, comes naturally to many historians (if indeed it is not part of
their professional training), and it carries the authority of their intimate famil–
iarity with the facts. All the same, I am far from convinced. I do not dispute
the absence of specific and concrete premeditation - a feeling which markedly
distinguished the French from the Russian Revolution - though I would dis–
tinguish, with more emphasis than can be found in Bosher's presentation, the
issue of premeditation from that of inevitability: the Revolution might have
been unpremeditated yet inevitable, and it might have been planned and yet
not
inevitable.
The crucial point seems to me this: the world we live in now, two
hundred years after the Revolution, is, in its manner of sustaining itself, in its
political organization, in its ideology, radically discontinuous from the world in
which the Revolution occurred. This fundamental transformation is probably
our single most important datum, from which
all
our social thought must pro–
ceed. The Revolution was, though not the prime mover, at any rate the at–
tempt to work out, codify, implement the new order, as it was then under–
stood.
It
is unquestionably a milestone on the highway of world history. To
say that it is, essentially, but an assemblage of heterogeneous, complex, con–
tingent, and uncoordinated events, is probably true, and certainly far less than
the whole truth.
Bosher gives us a good summary of what the Revolution has done to
France, but he says fairly little about what it has done to the world, as if to
punish the French for their nationalist vainglory (on which he comments),
their tendency to turn world history into little more than a backcloth for the
history of France. In restricting his focus to France in this way, he tries to
turn the tables on Michelet, for instance. Yet although world history is not
French history writ large, the French Revolution
is
part ofworld history.
The bicenntenial of the French Revolution coincided with the ascen–
dancy of the Soviet
perestroika,
in effect a partial effort to dismantle the
Russian Revolution, which itself was meant to complete the work of the
French Revolution. The Bolsheviks were Jacobins
with
premeditation, ardent
students of the most serious and sustained theoretical effort to think through
the French Revolution and to correct its deficiencies. Bosher seems on the
whole to accept the left-wing view of the Revolution as a task left uncom–
pleted, because it failed to incorporate 'the people': "The greatest task during
the two centuries since the Revolution has been to bring the urban populace
