The French Revolution and Historical Materialism: Selected Essays

Henry Heller, The French Revolution and Historical Materialism: Selected Essays (Boston: Brill, 2017), 273 pp., $133.00. in paperback (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 273 pp., $28.00.

Once the dominant paradigm for understanding the French Revolution, Marxist historiography has been challenged since the 1970s, most seriously by revisionist historians. Part of the “cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities that includes post-structuralism, revisionist historiography of the French Revolution finds ideology to be the driving force in events that led to and followed 1789. The economic and social forces that were the foundation of Marxist explanations were secondary, if not minimized to the point of obscurity.

It is against this wave that Henry Heller has struggled, particularly since the publication in 2006 of his masterful The Bourgeois Revolution in France: 1789-1815 (Berghahn Books). In this work, and in subsequent articles, many of which reappear in the current volume, Heller attempts to reassert the historical materialist understanding that finds a long history of class struggle in the period preceding, during, and following the French revolution. The present collection contains three responses to Heller, together with his replies in turn.

The principle point of contention that the present volume seeks to address is whether the revolution was, in fact, a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Regarding the bourgeoisie, the perspectives presented range from their non-existence to their being a force that led the masses in 1789 and subsequently consolidated their power. Heller refers to historian Sarah Maza’s argument for the former: a bourgeois class was not aware of itself and the term was not used to represent a class until after 1820; therefore, the bourgeois aspect of the revolution is mythical. Contra Maza, in a rare rebuke of Marx for arguing that the revolutionaries were too enveloped in classical republican ideology to advocate as a class, Heller, drawing from French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, the second mayor of Paris Jérôme Pétion, and the poet André Chénier, among others, argues that the bourgeoisie was class for itself. It had emerged in itself during the economic and social (and cultural) struggles under the ancien régime.

Regarding the revolution as capitalist, Heller, and the collection’s responses by William Beik, David Parker, and Stephen Miller, make much of the composition of the economy in the [long] seventeenth century. Heller, drawing from Friedrich Engels, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean-Marc Moriceau, and others, finds a burgeoning primitive accumulation in the sixteenth century, followed in the seventeenth century by a decline in the strength of the bourgeoisie relative to the nobility and the Bourbon state who served their interests. As Heller writes, drawing from Ladurie, this was part of “a long-drawn out struggle” (62) between the bourgeoisie seeking profit and the nobility and state increasing rents and taxes. But the bourgeoisie was resilient, and those that survived grew stronger over the course of the century and through their triumph in the revolution. In contrast, Beik, Parker, and Miller respond by finding a bourgeoisie that “was not strong enough or conscious enough to seize power” (Beik, 84), “aspired to join the nobility rather than destroy it” (Parker, 92), and an eighteenth-century economy that “showed no evidence of capitalist cycles of accumulation” (Miller, 114). Heller responds to each point, unwavering in his contention of a period marked by the dynamism of both the bourgeoisie and class conflict.

The debates that play out across the pages of this volume are one of its strengths. Heller should be commended for their inclusion. The back-and-forth between author and critics affords the reader the opportunity to clearly see the struggle over the historiography of the French Revolution play out in one volume. Heller has organized a vast body of research and critique into a coherent argument. And though there is some repetition, particularly in the discussion of the struggle between historical materialist and revisionist arguments, the collection of previously published essays, many of which appeared in the journal Historical Materialism, hangs together well and is much more than the sum of its parts.

The chapters on Juarès and banking and finance capital are where Heller shines most brightly. Criticized by the right for his socialism, and by the left for his reformism, and by both sides for his pacifism, Heller provides a nuanced look at Juarès’s contributions. It was Juarès, Heller contends, who provided “the first assertion of what came to be referred to as the classic or Marxist view of the French Revolution in which the French people en masse figured as the main actor” (25). The subsequent development of this Marxist historiography by French historians in the twentieth century became the narrative against which emerged the revisionism that first appeared in the 1960s, and particularly post-’68, among scholars in England and the United States. Over the course of the examination of Juarès’s work, Heller presents the complexity of history and of historiography. We read about an important historical figure whose positions were realist, not dogmatic. Juarès saw a long-term potential for socialism in the bourgeois revolution and in democratic changes that were occurring in the writing of the constitution by the Convention. Heller concludes his discussion by applying Juarès insights to the revolutionary struggles in Latin America.

The chapter on banking and finance capital exemplifies another strength of this volume in its breadth and depth of coverage. It is the longest of the chapters and it examines the arguments for and against the presence of a system of credit that would allow for a capitalist revolution to emerge. The revisionist position is that a well-developed and production-promoting financial system was necessary but absent. The picture that emerges is of a bifurcated financial system. At one end are the money changers and other speculators, despised by most everyone except themselves. If not engaged in what would now be called predatory lending, they were simply making money on money. On the other end of the system were the small and large commercial banks and investment bankers who were providing funds locally for “land, mines, and manufacturing” and were investing in overseas trade and other aspects of productive capital. Heller contends that the popular reaction against the speculators forced more productive investment. The expansion of investment capital continued as bankers purchased and capitalized national properties and ecclesiastical buildings during the Terror and in the creation of the Bank of France under Napoleon. The evidence presented by Heller for the existence of a capitalist financial system is compelling.

One wonders where we go from here in our understanding of the French Revolution and perhaps of its applicability to our present moment. In Miller’s contribution to this volume he argues that liberal historians have more or less accepted “market dynamism and bourgeois revolution”-or at least not rejected them as forces but in doing so class conflict and inequality become naturalized if not unexamined. While Heller provides us with sources that suggest that the argument over the economic and social origins of the French revolution are far from settled, Miller’s point is worth considering, particularly in recognition that historiography—and knowledge production more generally—is contextual to the broader cultural moment in which it is produced. According to Heller:

Indeed, the spread of revisionism can be understood as part of a political and intellectual reaction against the long-standing Marxist cultural hegemony in France and the international threat of revolution which stirred anxiety not only in France, but even in England, the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world in the 1960s (26).

The same point reappears as Heller explains that Juarès’ placed a degree of importance on individuals that complicates his class-based argument.

Political figures need to be understood in the context of their times. Indeed the dominant political figures are successful because they are most characteristically products of their times (34).

If context matters, both individually and structurally, and if we incorporate Miller’s point on the current absence of class and inequality in analyses of the French Revolution and capitalism, then a Marxist historiography on the revolution and of capitalism is desperately needed in the current historical moment. For that reason alone, although it is certainly not the only one, Heller’s volume is well worth reading.

Kirk S. Lawrence
St. Joseph’s College, NY
klawrence@sjcny.edu