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as extended processes with their own dynamic and chronology.
In short, by 1789 "revolution" had acquired its modern meaning,
and for Baker this semantic shift had seismic consequences. For the first
time, political actors could cast themselves as "revolutionaries" (the word
itself dates only from 1789), that is to say, as secular crusaders for a com–
plete transformation of the social world, imbued with
me~< ianic
fervor.
The transformed concept of "revolution" thus made it possible for
France's political leaders to formulate hitherto unimagined objectives -
and thereby to transform the course of history.
Baker's analysis is brilliant but frustrating. The brilliance shows in the
learned and subtle way he traces the £low of ideas between very different
minds, some great, some less so, some linked to traditional institutions,
some rebelling against them (in this respect, he owes much to Quentin
Skinner and
J.
G. A. Pocock). Rather than creating artificial distinctions
between "traditional" and "modern," "revolutionary"and "conservative"
(a vice that even Tocqueville fell prey to) , he sketches a convincing, nu–
anced picture of an entire, rapidly changing political culture. He does so
in forbiddingly dense prose, but the writing is not poor; rather it is
constructed with geometrical precision, each block laid against the next
with no distractions. Yet it is impossible to avoid frustration. Like
Chartier, Baker leaves some important questions dangling. Why did the
political crisis of the 1750s (which fell into many venerable patterns) have
such uniquely fateful consequences? Why did the monarchy behave as it
did? Why did the crescendo of ideological ferment seemingly increase in
lockstep with such mainstays of the conventional political interpretation
of the revolution, such as rising bread prices and the monarchy's financial
woes?
Unlike Chartier, Baker also fails to address the crucial problems of
diffusion and reception . The thinkers he discusses all occupied the rarified
intellectual heights of old regime society; they represented a very small
elite indeed. What connections exist between the revolutionary journal–
ist's definition of " revolution" (let alone Condorcet's definition) and
that of the
sans-culotte?
Given that in 1789, at least half of the population
did not even understand standard French (they spoke a congeries of
French dialects, plus Breton, Basque, Flemish, German, and several ver–
sions of Gascon-Provenc;:al), the question of translation also rears its head.
What is the Breton for "revolution," and did the word undergo its own
metamorphosis?
Most troubling, however, is Baker's refusal to disassociate human
motivations from the language in which they are expressed. One can
imagine, for instance, a straightforward reading of the material that
would look (for the essay on the word "revolution") something like
this: Mably, Voltaire, Condorcet and the others all advanced new
