BOOKS
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al/cien regime
and the Revolution; even the Catholic Church, long the
bastion of counterrevolutionary sentiment, now too has been integrated
into the mainstream. Furet sees evidence of this in changed attitudes to–
ward the question of education, an explosive issue that has always been
the center of the conflict between Catholic France and lay France.
In
his
illuminating book,
La Repllhliqlle dll centre,
Furet recalls the mass street
demonstrations in France in 1984 protesting the elimination of Catholic
schools. Catholic education evoked not the influence of a reactionary
church on young French minds but rather the possibility of diverse edu–
cational institutions. Interestingly, Catholic education has come to
represent freedom and choice. Furet envisions the Church incorporating
the values of the republic and the republic being able to tolerate the in–
fluence of the Church. The entire nation, and the Church along with it,
has moved toward the political center.
Thus, for Nora and Furet, the national obsession with the Revolu–
tion and the antagonisms that have defined French political life have fi–
nally come to an end. Now there is a fresh sense of national identity and
political unity in France, created by new conditions such as remarkable
economic growth and prosperity, the decline of the Communist Party, a
Church and a right wing that accept the legacy of the Revolution, and
the exercise of power by the left under the aegis of the Fifth Republic.
Furet contends that French national identity today depends less on heal–
ing old divisions than on surviving the assimilation of France into a
politically and economically united Europe.
How ironic that such deep and longstanding political disunity was
the direct result of a Revolution that worshipped unity. Two enemy
camps were the inevitable outcome of the Revolution's radicalism, its
refusal to incorporate into its institutions and myths any meaningful
references to France's historical past, its determination to deny the values
and beliefs of a significant segment of the population.
In
a sense, to un–
derstand the French Revolution and its consequences is to understand its
fetishistic and ultimately murderous cult of unity. This is clear in the
stunning and monumental
Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.
In
many of its ninety-nine essays on Events, Actors, Institutions, Ideas, and
Historians of the Revolution (the exemplary table of contents, lucidly
and imaginatively conceived, is alone worth the price of admission),
written by two dozen of the world's most eminent historians of the
Revolution, the ominous theme of unity surfaces again and again.
Surely the Revolution's downfall can be traced to its fatal obsession
with unity, oneness, unanimity, an obsession as central to the Revolution
as it was mysterious and irrational - all the more incomprehensible to
