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different subjects. To discover "cultural shifts" in this manner, and then
speculate on their political ramifications, is a tenuous process indeed. The
book also leaves a host of questions dangling in the air. Why did these
cultural shifts occur in the first place? Does some phantom of the rising
bourgeoisie lurk in the deep recesses of the analysis, or did the cultural
shifts themselves give rise to the bourgeoisie? How do these shifts relate
to the well-known story of overseas defeat, royal bankruptcy, rising social
tensions, and all the other traditional "causes" of the French Revolution?
Most worrisome, Chartier seems hardly to acknowledge the common
range of human motivations. The desire for power, for wealth, for free–
dom, for revenge - urges that make up the stuff and drama of conven–
tional history, including the Marxist variety - have little place in this
cool and ethereal account of shifting conceptions of "public" and
"private." Not surprisingly, Chartier spends hardly any time discussing in–
dividuals. Perhaps, like Hayden White (a harsh critic of conventional his–
toriography and a guru of the new cultural history), he has renounced
the very idea of reconstructing human beings from fragments of texts and
prefers to consider only the perpetual play of discourse.
With Keith Michael Baker's book, this same problem arises even
more starkly. At first glance, Baker's work seems conventional compared
to Chartier's. He does not range over cultural practices but concentrates
on the writings of the major
philosophes,
plus a rogues' gallery of
interesting, eccentric minor authors. He provides cogent, original analyses
of familiar themes in French intellectual history, such as the idea of
representation, the political uses of history, or the origins of ideology. In
other words, not only does he dismiss the notion that ideas reflect a
deeper, distinct social reality, he refuses to acknowledge any such reality
at all outside the web of "discourse." Understanding the revolution
therefore means understanding its "political language," a task best fulfilled
by tracing how various old regime "discourses" interacted with each
other to "invent" new meanings and new symbolic practices (hence his
title,
Inventing the French Revolution).
How does one actually go about tracing these elusive interacting
discourses? The older essays in the book mostly scrutinize the collapse of
what Baker terms the French monarchy's "linguistic authority." Ac–
cording to traditional Catholic theorists of absolute monarchy, politics,
properly speaking, did not exist. The king himself made all decisions and
resolved all competing claims. Individuals might give him counsel, but
they could never defy him. In the 1750s, however, France's ancient, in–
dependent high courts
did
defy Louis XV, repeatedly, when he tried to
stamp out the dissident current of Catholic thought called Jansenism.
The courts derived much of their strength from their self-proclaimed
