Sort each position on the French Revolution by whether it belongs to the SOCIAL interpretation or to the REVISIONIST critique of it.
Groups: Social interpretation · Revisionist critique
- Lefebvre and Soboul are the leading exponents
- Cobban and Furet mounted the main attacks
- The class categories fit the actual participants poorly
- A bourgeois revolution destroying a feudal order
- The Revolution is best read as a political and discursive event
Hints
- One reading explains the Revolution by what classes wanted; the other denies the classes were as described.
- Ask who the revolutionaries actually were by occupation.
Show the answer
Social interpretation: A bourgeois revolution destroying a feudal order, Lefebvre and Soboul are the leading exponents
Revisionist critique: The class categories fit the actual participants poorly, The Revolution is best read as a political and discursive event, Cobban and Furet mounted the main attacks
The revisionist case rests partly on prosopography: the men of the assemblies were overwhelmingly lawyers and officeholders rather than merchants or manufacturers, which fits a bourgeois-capitalist revolution badly. The reply is that a class can be represented by people who are not typical of it, and that is where the argument still sits.
Practise The Age of Revolutions I: the Atlantic and France
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