318
BOOKS
cultural history" - have begun to do so in ways that make the Revolu–
tion seem exciting
terra incognita
once again. Two new books by Keith
Michael Baker,
Inventing the French Revolution,
and Roger Chartier,
Tltt
Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,
represent, in very different ways,
the best of this new approach. They also reveal some of its flaws.
Neither of these books are entirely new, and neither fits easily into
established publishing categories. Baker has revised and sewn together a
number of compact, difficult, brilliant essays, composed over nearly two
decades, on the political language of eighteenth-century France (in some
cases, the seams still show awkwardly between the chapters) . Chartier,
meanwhile, has produced a concise, subtle and original overview of re–
cent work in eighteenth-century cultural history. His genre, which may
seem unfamiliar to American readers, is the
cours d'agregation,
the
marathon seminar in which gifted alumni of the
ecoles normales
(like
Chartier himself) synthesize masses of secondary research for aspiring
members of the French educational elite. Unlike Baker, who has long
evinced an obsession with the Revolution, Chartier, a cultural historian
best known to American readers for his contribution to the
History
of
Private Life
series, is relatively new to the subject.
Despite these differences, both books have the same goal: explaining
how a socially hidebound, rigidly hierarchical nation came to desire lib–
erty, social equality, and all the rest of the unlikely harvest of 1789 in the
first pl;lce, and to wrest these things from the monarchy by force. The
question has a long history, but Baker and Chartier give it a new twist
by assigning overwhelming weight to what they call the realm of
"discourse." This is to say that socio-economic issues have faded into the
deep background (in Baker's case, so far as to become essentially invisi–
ble), without heralding the return of older approaches that attributed
the Revolution to a handful of great thinkers. Rather, following much
current literary theory, both authors locate the
philosophes
within a great
linguistic web that ensnares all individual thinkers, no matter how bril–
liant or original. The decisive prerevolutionary shifts occurred within this
web, in obedience to cultural and linguistic imperatives, as some words
acquired new meanings, others lost their sacred connotations, and still
others ("nation," "liberty," "public opinion") gained a new kind of
power.
Of the two, Chartier takes a much broader view of language and
culture. In fact, he criticizes earlier works (notably Daniel Mornet's pio–
neering 1933 study,
The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution,
whose
title he deliberately echoes) for limiting their investigations to overtly
political and religious writings. Why, Chartier asks, attribute phenomena
such as the decline of religious observance solely to the diffusion of deist
