BOOKS
Is the Revolution a Text?
THE CULTURAL ORIGINS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By
Roger Chartier. Duke University Press. $29.95.
INVENTING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: ESSAYS ON FRENCH
POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By
Keith
Michael Baker. Cambridge University Press. $49.50.
Historians are the hermit crabs of the academy. Their work lacks the
thick shell of theory that now separates scholar from layman in the rest
of the humanities, yet they hesitate to renounce a theoretical approach
altogether. Thus they borrow, crib, and steal from other disciplines. They
appear in the guise of amateur psychologists one day and amateur
economists the next. At its best, this eclecticism helps cast old subjects in
new and exciting lights; at its depressing worst, it does little more than
dress them up in new and pretentious jargon.
At present, American history departments are resounding with the
clatter of used theories falling to the ground and hermit historians strug–
gling to squeeze into new ones. Only a decade ago, with the so- called
"new social history" still dominant, members of the profession looked
for inspiration mostly among the "hard" social sciences. Armed with
quantitative methods and sociological models, they plunged into the
archives as earnest census-takers of the past. To the dismay of traditional–
ists (some of whom detected a left-wing agenda in the prevalent motto,
"History from the bottom up"), they filled their data bases with statistics
on grain yields and infant mortality, often disregarding the intellectual
and political currents that also shaped past societies. In fact, political his–
tory never fared as badly as the more acerbic critics charged, but it did
not remain immune to the new trends. Studies of revolution, for in–
stance, tended to begin with learned discussions of "status crystallization,"
the "etiology of internal war," and other concepts borrowed from the
sociologists and political scientists.
Today, however, historians are less concerned with the bare facts of
social existence and more with the customs, gestures, and rituals that give
those facts meaning. They now plunge into their work as earnest an–
thropologists of the past, and since their sources are not live subjects but
texts, they borrow their theories and methods as much from literary
criticism as from anthropology. This shift has brought new attention to
