x Acknoutledgments

Kahan, Matthew Levinger, and Kent Wright. I am grateful, too, for the
technical help received from the project for American and French Re-
search on the Treasury of the French Language at the University of
Chicago (a joint proiect of the Centre National de Recherche Scienti-
fique and the University of Chicago).
The publishers who have permitted me to reprint and revise essays
previously published are identified as appropriate at the beginning of
each essay. I wish to thank them formally here. I wish, roo, to thank the
editors who lavished scholady arrenrion on rhose essays in their original
form, particulady Steven Kaplan,Jack Censer, and Colin Lucas. I am also
grateful to §lilliam Sewell, Dena Goodman, Carroll Joynes, Jeremy
Popkin, §Tilliam Doyle, Dale Van Kley, Dominick LaCapra, Elizabeth
Eisenstein, Lionel Gossman, and John Bosher for help and information
at particular points.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Cathérine and Terence Murphy,
and to Thomas and Maureen, for the unfailing warmth of their welcome
in Paris.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Terry, and my sons, Julian and Felix,
who have helped in so many ways ro bring this volume about.
i

Inventing
the French Revolution
Essays on French Political Culture
in the Eighreenth Century

KEITH MICHAEL BAKER

CA*TNRIDGE
TTNTÍERSITY PRSS§

j
 tublirbcd by the Plem Syndicetc of thc Unlvcrrity of Carrúriqc
Tüc PIO Butldtry" Tnnpington Sú€ci, Carüdgc CB2 IRP
40 lVcst 20ú Súcct, Ncw Yorls, NY lml l-{21 I, USA
l0 §t¡mford Rmd, (h¡dc¡gb, Mc¡bomc 316ó, Ar¡¡rrll¡

O Canhidgc Univcrsity Prces 1990

F¡rs. publishod 1990

ncerinto¿ 192,1994

Library of Colrgrcss Cualoging-in-Publicatioo Data i¡ avallablc

Brtüsh Ubrary Catdoguing-tn-hrbücaion Data appttcd fo

ISBN G52 l -385?8{ paperback

Trar¡sfor¡ed to digital printing 1999

r.::
¡' ,.
Fc,

05730? I 7 ileY 2üi6

 Introduction

The essays presented in this volume have been written over the span of a
dozen years that have seen remarkable changes in the manner in which
historians ?re approaching the study of the French Revolution and its
orisins. In the most eeneral terms. the reorientation that has occurred
can be cfflractfJ:ized as-a rbift_frpm Marx to Tocqueville, from a basically

a evolution was
social. It started from the assumption that the Revolution marked the
cridcal point of transition from a feudal to a capitalist society; that it was
essentially the product of the long-term social changes usually summed
up in the notion of the rise of the bourgeoisie; and that its fundamental
significance lay in the creation of a political and legal order appropriate
to the needs and interests of the new dominant class. Thus the principal
aim, in explaining the Revolution, was to derive its character as a political
event from social phenomena that were held to be more basic. This was
to be achieved by tracking economic and social changes in eighteenth-
century French society; by identifying the latent social conflicm that
found open political expression in 1789; and by reading off the subse-
quent political history of the Revolution from the class conflicts initiated
by the efforts of the bourgeoisie to throw off the remnants of a feudal
regime and institute a political order that would ensure its dominance.
The year 1789, in other words, was seen as the moment of rupture;
point at which subtercanean had long under¡
atrons
tne ent suDerstruct
In the last or so, this social interpretation of the French Revo-
lution has been increasingly abandoned by historians. There are many
reasons for this shift, which is now widely recognized, and only sorne of
the more obvious ones need be suggested here. First, as a result of
 Acknowledgments

In the years during which these essays have been wrirten, I have bene-
fited from generous institutional support, as from the warm encourage-
ment and criticism of friends and colleagues. It has been a distinct plea-
sure to acknowledge these contributions to each ofthe essays previously
published, as they appeared. The opportunity to reirerate those ex-
pressions of thanks here simply adds to the enjoyment of publishing a
volume such as this.
My research and writiog have been supported at various stages by the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities; the John M. Olin Foundation; the Ecole des
Flautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton; rhe Center for Advanced Srudies in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford; and the University of Chicago. I am grareful to each
of these insd¡utions for the generous facilities and stimulating environ-
ments I have been privileged to enjoy in consequence of their support.
Two groups of friends and colleagues, in Paris and Chicago, have been
of particular importance in offering regular cridcal responses to this
work as it has taken form. In Paris, I owe much to the participants in the
seminar on eighteenth-century French political cukure directed by Fran-
gois Furet and Mona Ozouf at the Ecole des Haures Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (and now the Institut Raymond Aron), and especially to Fran-
gois Furet, Mona Ozoul and Ran Halévi. In Chicago, I am above all
grateful for the intellectual supporr and critical stirnulation provided by
colleagues and students. To Jan Goldstein, Harry Harootunian, Robert
Morrissey, Peter Novick, George Srocking, and (again) Franqois Furer, I
wish to express my particular appreciation and thanks. And I could have
wished for no better scholarly colleagues and critics than that group of
srudents who participated in the workshop on the history of political
culture, particularly Thomas Bellavia, Daniel Gordon, Jim Johnson, Alan

lx
 Introdtction

ánd specialized studies áccümulated, it became increasingly difficult

to discern anything resembling a coherent class explanation amid the
proliferation of social categories required to make sense of an incredibly
complex society, subject to extreme regional and local variation. Alfred
Cobban's bold call, i¡Tbe Social lnterpretation of tbe Frencb Reoolation,t as
early as 1964, for a new vocabulary for the study of social history was in
part a recognition of this siruation, which became increasingly clear in
the decade following the publication of his work. In Kuhnian terms, the
paradigm was becoming increasingly cluttered with anomalies.2
In Kuhnian terq¡q, !oo,the shlft!g_1_qgyipproac!¡ was fostered by
cr,
wtrere-tñé'"-sóc rzf iñffi
m,. e s t, t he re was a growi ng

disenchantment with Marxism, both politically - a development ulti-

mately culminating in the collapse of the French Communist Pany as a
maior electoral force - and intellectually - witness the range of doc-
trines, structuralist, poststructuralist, or deconstructionist, that denied,
in one way or another, the essential Marxian dichotomy between base
and superstructure. Given the extent to which Marxist categories were
grafted upon the revolutionary legacy, these developments were bound
to lead to a full-scale reevaluation of the accepted wisdom regarding the
French Revolution. After some initial skirmishing, that reevaluation was
announced by the publication of Frangois Furet's Penser la Réaolution
frangaise ia L978. Cobban had argued earlier that our understanding of
the French Revolution had been fatally muddled by the conflation of
polidcal aod social categories inherent in the Marxist historiography and
by a failure to disentangle a oarrative account, cast in terms familiar to
the actors themselves, from an analytical account, subjecting those terms
to critical scrutiny. This same argument became the starting point of
Furet's analysis. But whereas Cobban was principally interested in disen-
gaging a social interpretation of the Revolution from the polidcal catego-
ries he found confusing it, Furet insisted on the importance of grasping
its character conceptually, as political event and cultural creation. As a
series of acts that transformed the situation making them possible, as the
creation and experiential elaboration of an entirely new mode of polidcal
action, the Revolution had a logic and a dynamic of its own, oot derivable
from the necessity of social conditions or the ineluctability of social
processes. Furet made it the most essential task of revolutionary histo-
riography "to rediscover the analysis of the political as such." The price
to pay for this, he argued, was a double one: "On the one haod we must
stop thinking of the revolutionary consciousness as a more or less 'natu-
ral' result of oppression and discontent; on the other, we must be able to

\
 lntroduction 3

conceptualize this strange offspring of pbilosophie (its offspring at least

chronologic ally)."t
Two further implications of this prcigram for the rediscovery of the
political are worth noting in passing. First, in addition to its repudiation
of the assumptions of Marxist historiography, it involved a no less pro-
found shift within the powerful tradition established in France by the
Annales school, a tradition that had conventionally set aside the study of
political events in their immediacy (including those of the French Revo-
lution), oo the grounds that they constituted limle more than the inciden-
tal foam on the oceanic configurations of long-term structures and pro-
cesses.4 Second, it opened up a new creative synergy between French
historiography of the revoludonary and prerevolutionary periods and an
EnglishJanguage historiography in which polidcs, political theory, and
the history of ideas had remained a matter of more vital concern. The
results of that synergy are only now beginning to appear.,
Finally, any complete account of this rediscovery of the political in the
historiography of the French Revolution must also recognize the impor-
tance of the eruption of the political imaginary into the academic life of
the late 1960s. Scholars in universities throughout Europe and the
Uoited States suddenly got a close look - in some cases, too close a look
- at the dynamics of politics in its immediacy, at the power of political
rhetoric, at the workings (often unpredictable) of the political imagina-
tion. Nowhere was this rnore true than in Paris, in May 1968, where, for
a few days, revolution suddenly seemed possible - not revolution con-
ceived as a rather mechanical change of political regime or as rhe neces-
sary end result ofa conflict between soci¿l classes, but revolution experi-
enced as an ultimate moment of political choice, in which the givens of
social existence seerned suspended, the only power was the power of the
imagination, and the world could be made anew. After 1968, it became
easier to conceive of the power of the political imaginary. The logic of
revolutionary utopianism, with its dialectic between spontaneity and
order, could be brought to the fore.6
For these reasons, then, and doubtless for others, there has been a
decisive reorientadon of scholarly interest toward the political and cul-
rural dimensions of the French Revolution. One consequence of this
shift - one that informs the present volume - is that historians have
begun to look agaia at the political dynamics of the Old Regime and at
the processes by which revolutionary principles and practices were in-
vented in the context of an absolute mooarchy. As long as the social
interpretation of the French Revolution was rhe dominant one, rhis ques-
don remained at the margins of historical research. Although the politi-
cal history of the Old Regime was never entirely abandoned as a subject
in its own right, those in search of the "real" social origins of the Revolu-
4 lnroduction
as it were'
tion were obliged to look rather to processes occurring' relatively
and it appeared
behind the political ,."n", of the old Regime,
ideology of the Revolution' once it
riánf" to explain ,h. iuig""g" and
But once we start looking
occurred, as the expres,ion or social interests.
crlt,,,e, we find that th-e Revolution did not simply
ñ;; "iprfitic"l
"g"it ¡á beni.,d rhe scenes of the old Regime. on theacted contrarv, the
out on a
;;;;,t that brought it into being urere improvised andin language that
well-lit and well-populated stage and were articulated
g^". ,tt"." their iundamental meaning in relationship to a contrnulog
which the French Revolution
[oti,i."t drama. The conceptual space in in relationship to which the
was invented, the ,,r*,o" of mlanings
and politi-
q.,i." ai,pu,ate actions of t789 took on a symbolic coherence
If the revolutionaries came
cal force, was the creatioo of the Old Regime'
of their actions and utterances as
- " proiourrd sense of the character too was historically coostituted
constituting a radicalr,,p,"t", that claim
«"rra ,n",or].u[v d.pláv"d)
within an existing linguistic or-symbolic field'
it. probl.m for the úirto'iun is to show how the revolutionary script
wasinvented,takingonit'po*"tanditscontradicdons'fromwithinthe
political culture of the absolute monarchy'

emphasize at the outset

ln referring here to "political culture"' I should
from the meaning
that I use the term in a way that differs considerably
of the 1950s and
thar became common t ,iL ,".iur-scientiñc
literature
that found its principal formulation in the work of political
iXOt Verba oo com-
""¿ and Sidney
á"rr,ir* like Gabriel AlÁond, Lucian Pye' modernization theories'
;;;;i"; poütical developmeni'7 lnspired bv
social-psychologi-
their understanding of poiitical culture was essentially
and sentiments instilled by pro-
cal. They were conceried with values
and particularly
cesses of socializatio., *i,f in differing
political systems'
or the developrnent of a
with those that appeared to promote
-retard
here is more linguistic.8
§üestern political ,vr,"i. rrr.ieñnition offered
ing claimsl4 tbe activity through !¡tr-ich
!t sees Pp!¡Il§ as iate, imP§¡qqnq
i,r¿iuia,r-Jf ñl!¡-tpsinanv-ñIietvqtrc"latg
the competTñETlalms t[ey maKe ñone
up-t¡u 9qq 4
another and uPon""
á;i -|; this sense, the set of discourses or
;ffir;rrcdces by which these claims are rnade. It comprises the
definidonsoftherelativesubject.positionsfrornwhichindividualsandand
one uPon another'
groups may (or -", no,) Lgitil""iv make claims
of the community to which they
therefore of the identi,í "á boundaries
in which these claims are
belong. It constitutes túe *e"nings of the terms
and the-authori-
irá."J,it. nature of ,h. .on'"*tl to which they pertain'binding' lt shapes
iv of tfre principles according to which they are made which
procedures by
iír. .""t,l,"tions and ;;*.; of the agencies and
 Introduction t
contestations are resolved, competing claims authoritadvely adiudicated,
and binding decisions enforced. Thus political a ity is, in this view,
essentially a matter of linguistic au sense

discourse; and lnt that their exercise

form upnolorng ve definiti wirhin that

Two obfections to this definition of political culture are commonly

made. The first insists that it denies the relevance of social interests to
political practice, seeking instead to privilege a symbolic realm over the
realities of social life. I snqgest tq/o principal responses to this kind of
objection. The first is to deny that there are social realities independent
of symbolic meanings: All social activity has a symbolic dimension that
gives it meaning, just as all symbolic activity has a social dimension that
gives it point. This is to argue that claims to delimit the field of discourse
in relation to nondiscursive social realities that lie beyond it invariably
point to a domain of action that is itself discursively constituted. They
distinguish, in effect, between different discursive practices - different
langoage games - rather than between discursive and nondiscursive phe-
nomena. To take the example of the Great Fear, so revealingly analyzed
by Georges Lefebvre, it is evident that raditional local fears of beggars,
during periods of scarcity and unrest, were an important element of the
political situation that developed in the French counryside in the sum-
mer of i789. But these fears were not the expression of brute instinct:
They had a cultural and social logic of their own. At the same time, they
could also be given an entirely new force and meaning within a political
laogoage that now defined aristocratic resistance as the primordial obsta-
cle to achievement of the reforms being sought by the "National Assem-
bly." Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the events of i789 is
the way in which quite tradidonal forms of social action could suddenly
take on different meanings in a redefined political situation. Unless we
recognize the nature of the discourse (or discourses) that defined the
siruation in which the French found themselves in 1789,we cannorgrasp
the meanings of the "social" events that occurred within that situation.
My second respoose to this objection regarding social interests is to
argue that the notion of "interest" is itself very much a political one.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as Marshall Sahlins has
pointed out, the term comes from a I¿tin term meaning "it makes a
dirfference, concerns, matters, is of importaice." "Interest," then, is a
priociple of differentiatio¡.e But individuals in any reasonably complex
sociery can invariably be seen as occupying any number of relative posi-
tioos vis-á-vis other individuals, and therefore as possessiag any number
of potendally differentiating "interests." The nature of the "interest" (or
6 lxtrodzction
difference) that matters in any particular situation - and, in consequence,
the identities of the relevant social groups and the nature of their claims
- z¡re continually being defined (and redefined). Historians have long
recognized, for example, that the distinction between the privileged or-
ders and the Third Estate, though it became in 1788 the foremost issue
in the conflicts over the convocation of the Estates General, obscured or
ran counter to other differentiations no less salient to the social and
political life of the Old Regime: that within the privileged orders be-
tween the clergy and the nobility; that within the nobiliry between new
and old, court and country; that created across the boundary berween
nobility and Third Estate by the emergence of a new elite, characterized
by wealth, power, and access to the resources of a modernizing state.
Rather than taking this distinction berween the interests of the "privi-
leged" and the "unprivileged" for granted as constituting the most basic
social cleavage of the Old Regime, it is necessary to show how it sud-
denly became - according to the logic of political debate - the crucial
one, the one upon which the very definition of social and political order
now seemed to hinge. "Interest" is a symbolic and political construction,
not simply a preexisting social reality.
A second obiection commonly made to this linguistic approach to
political culture is that it denies the possibility of human agency, trans-
forming individuals (and groups) into mere discursive functions. The
effort to efface the human subiect has certainly been characteristic of a
powerful strand of discourse analysis, most notably associated with
Michel Foucault. But to assert that human identity and action are lin-
guistically constituted is a statement regarding the conditions of human
action, not a denial of the possibility of such action. Human agens find
their being within language; they are, to that extent, constrained by it. l

Yet they are constantly working with it and on it, playing at its margins,
exploiting its possibilities, and extending the play of its potential mean-
ings, as they pursue their purposes and projects. Although this play of
discursive possibility may not be infinite, in any given linguistic context,
it is always open to individual and collecdve actors. By the same token, it
is not necessarily controllable by such actors. In practice, meanings (and
those who depend upon them) are always implicitly at risk. Any utter-
ance puts the authority of the speaker, and the place from which he or
she speaks, potentially in question. This is all the more true in that in any
complex society - and certainly in a society as complex as eighteenth-
century France - there will be more than one language game, each
subject to constant elaboration and developrnent through the activities
of the individual 4gents whose purposes they define. These language
g¿¡mes are not insulated from one another in any strict manner: They
ovedap in social practice, as well as in the consciousness of the indi-
 Introdrction 7
viduals who participate in them. Individual acts and utterances may
therefore take on meanings within several different fields of discourse
simultaneously, redounding upon one another in often unpredictable
ways. Thus language can say more than any individual actor intends;
meanings can be appropriated and extended by others in unanticipated
ways. At the lirnit, no one is safe from the potential play of discursivity.

This was never more apparent than in the French Revolution, when
successive actors in the revolutionary competition to fix public meanings
were constantly swept away by the power of alanguage that each proved
unable to control. FranEois Furet has explained this phenomenon as a
consequence of the manner in which the relationship berween power and
social interests was disrupted by the collapse of royal authority in 1787.
French society, abruptly freed from the power of a state which both
dismantled and masked the destruction of the traditional social order,
oow reconstituted itsell at the level of ideology, through the illusory act
of overthrowing a state that no longer existed. But in so doing, it fell
victim to an illusion of politics in which social interests were suspended
ia favor of a "perpetual outbidding of the idea over real history," ii "a
q¿orld where representations of pos/er are the centre of the action, and
where the semiotic circle is absolute master of politics."lo The Revolu-
tion rhus "substituted for the conflict of interests for power a competi-
don of discourses for the appropriation of legitimacy."lr Only with the
reassertion of social interests after 9 Thermidor did this dialectic of
powbr and the imaginary come to an end.
i Fu¡et's analysis has had the great virtue ofredirecting historians'atten-
rion to the fundamental character of the French Revolution as a political
phenomenon, a profound transformation of political discourse involving
powerful neq/ forms of political symbolization, experientially elaborated
io radically novel rnodes of political action that were as unprecedented as
rhey were unanticipated. But it achieves its clarity of focus upon the
dynamics of revolutionary language by demarcating the years berween
1787 and 1794 as a period in which the natural relationship between
power and social interests was temporarily suspended. In this respect,
úe argument presents rwo difficulties. The first difficulty is that the
ergument takes as its most essential category a distinction - the dichoto-
my berween state and society - that appears, and becomes central to
European social thought, as part and product of the revolutionary and
cornrerrevolutionary experience. (The explanation of the unprece-
dented power of revolutionary langtage as a pathological function of the
disruptioo of rhe normal and proper relationship berween state and soci-
erÍ was offered, for example, in the liberal discourse of the Ther-
midorian period.) The second difficulty, an implication of the first, is that
 8 /ntrodaction
the linguisticality of the Revolution thus becomes (as Lynn Hunt has
pointed out) "its special, temporary condition . . ., rather than . . . a
sratus it shares with any and all events."l2 If power is to be understood as
always linguistically constituted, in any society, we cannot explain the
particular dynamics of power in the revolutionary period simply as a
consequence of the fact that this latter inhered in language; we must be
able to grasp these dynamics as arising from identifiable features of
revolutionary language itself.
In an analysis of the political culture of the French Revolution that
owes much to Furet's approach, Lynn Hunt [¿5 sr¡ggest€d such an expla-
nation by characterizing the Revolution as a period in which language
itself became charismatic and took on "a unique magical quality." "As
the king's sacred position in society eroded," she has argued, "political
language became increasingly invested with emotional, even life-and-
death significance."l3 Hunt offers several reasons for this development'
First, revoluti med into an instrument
of political and social change": use of
sw@hs
trng thus a "re-
nt lngs t
they were more suc
c of the monarch than they
were in replacing royal power with any setded institutional representa-
tion of the sovereignty of the nation. The revolutionary text coqstantly
subverted its own authority and that of those who appealed to it. Thus,
second, "as a consequence of this cons,tant di of politic7i7[-
came to most con§,!GIyJ@._!4 w!rcq-!!4!-r§Jn
to speak rtion. Revolutionary language . . . had been
'ñlésré@: fhird. the language in_which sacred
aurhority was invested was, above ali
-.-|.
sence-ot a common law tradltton or any acceptaDle sacreo text tor reter-
ence, the voice of the nadon had to be heard constaotly. Speaking and
naming took on enoimous significance;-g$ly became the source of sig-
nificance."16 In revoludonary America] the written word of the Con-
stitution soon became supreme; the politics of the new republic hence-
forth revolved around issues of interest, rights, representation, and the
balance of powers. In France, by contrast, "the spoken word retained its
supremacy (at least until 1794, perhaps undl 1799), and political dis-
course was structured by notions of transpareocy, publicity, vigilance,
and terror."l7
This is a cogent analysis, in many respects, but it remains ambiguous
on the central point raised by Hunt in her critique of Furet: How far (and
in what manner) is the linguisticality of the French Revolution its "spe-
cial, temporary condition," rather than "a status it shares with any and all

\
 lntroduction 9
events"? At times Hunt characterizes as a special feature of language in
the revolutlonary period aftributes that language would seem to possess
in any society. That words were endowed "with emorional, even life-and-
death significance," for example, can hardly be seen as distinguishing the
Revolution from the Old Regime (or any other period). On this, at leasr,
the philosophes engaged in the campaign to éraser I'inrtAme could agree
wholeheartedly with those agents of the Paris police constantly on the
watch for maaoai¡ di¡coars. Nor was it the fact that language "itself"
served as an instrument of social and political change that made the
Revolution remarkable. It was, after all, no accident that the most crirical
work of the French Enlightenment was an Encyclopédie, oa Dictionnairc
raisonné, or that the most ambitious claim of its editors was ro change the
common way of thioking by their critical scrudny of the meaning of
words. To the extent that social and political arrangemeots are lin-
guistically constituted in any society, efforts to change them (or to pre-
serve them) can never occur outside of language. Language is constantly
deployed as an instru¡irent of social and political change, or, ro be more
precise, social and political changes are themselves linguistic. Nor does
the significance of "speaking and naming" in the revolutionary period
s€em to distinguish it from other eras: Although these activities may take
different forms in different societies, they are surely essendal to any kind
of action. This must be true, moreover, when political choices are cast in
rerms of intgrest, rights, and representation, just as when they are cast in
terms of rráiip"r,in.y, publicity, vigilance, and terror.
Yet revolutionary actors were indeed particularly conscious of the
power of language. They str',ggled constantfu to institute a new social
Íroo polr'car orqer Dy la*r"
new the more explicitly
was at issue, the more highly it became. Is this to say
char language itself had become charismatic or rhar it had assumed the
displaced charisma of the monarch? The difficulty with this argument is
üat charisma itself must be understood as a linguistic effect: The sense of
üe monarch as the sacred center of the corporate social order, express-
ing its very ground of being as the public person in whom a multiplicity
of parts became one, sprang from traditional symbolic represenrarions
constituting the nature of human existence and social identity in essen-
'-lly
religious rerms. To say rhat the charisma of rhe monarch eroded (as
rt did in the course of the eighteenth century) is to say that the symbolic
representations upoo which it depended had been rendered increasingly
problematic by changing discursive practices, some of which are dis-
crlrs€d in the following essays. tVith the Revolution, the sacred cenrer
ras symbolically refigured; the public person of the sovereign was dis-
pbced by the sovereign person of the public; lése-nation ¡vas substitured
 10 lntrodaction
for lise-najaté. The narion was thereby constituted symbolically as the
onrologicai Subiect, its unity and identity becoming the very ground of
individual and collective existence.
Alrhough effected within revolutionary language, this displacement of
power from crown to nation was oever entirely secured by it. Revolu-
iionury actors found ir impossible to stabilize their new discursive prac-
tices to the degree necessary for these latter to assume the settled form
of institutions. In this respect, Huot is right to emphasize that the text of
the Revolution was constantly subverted, and that the claims of those
enacting it were persistently undermined, by tensions and contradictions
inherent within ir. To understand these latrer is to grasp'why language
remained so explicitly at issue, and so highly charged, throughout the
revolutionary period. But this, in turn, requires us to approach that
language as a historical creation. Because the French Revqlqtio? 3i-
sumed irs meanins as a radical r,¿p¡¿¡Ie *fifiIfi¿ past, because it soughi-so
F{-lq4'eroáehft -
*; t"ai¿ai; ;¿*,.o ;ffm;;m; fiññti .- i,; leariiád-ñiim doile
óó.]-ui thá;oñrioñT&An¡'*-r ical character and claims, for all that
was unprecedented in its system of thought and action, was a human
invention, nor a blind historical mutarion. As a human invention, it was
far from being an immaculate conceprion. Improvised in the course of
acrion, it was marked by the tensions and contradictions, the ambiguities
and obscurities, inevitable in any historical creation. To, understand
these, we must grasp the particularides of rhe manner and context in
which revolutionary discourse was invented.
This is ro revert to an ancient clairn of-thebis¡rlfian, noYbgs_better
ññT-Vi."t Neut Science: The nature of things derives from the
manoer of thetr
ac-
uals and groups whose PurPoses it As it
stains and gives acttvlty, so rs lt and
transformed in the course of that activity, as oew claims are articulated
and old ones transformed. For rhis reason, it resembles nothing more
closely than a kind of living archeological sire, in which heterogeneous
discourses frequently overlap and changing Practices are frequently su-
perimposed one upon aoorhef, coexisting in everyday life as in the con-
icioosness of individuals. Even in those revolutionary moments when
earlier discourses and pracdces seem to have been swept away and the
pattern of the site entirely transformed, their traces remain to give mean-
ing to the new. §(hen the revolutionaries coined the term l'ancien régine
social and political order
-ihe old, or former, regime - to describe theacknowledging that their
they were repudiating, they were, in effect,
new order could be defined only in contradistinction to what had gone

L
 Introdaction 11
and limited the Revolu-

It is the purpose of the followi to explore §ome

are
á-ysternatic account of thelolitical discourse of the Old Regime or of
the relation of revolutionary discourse to it, they may perhaps serve as an
invitation to further e:cploration of a terrain that remains, after two hun-
dred years, still remark¿bly uncharted.

fy\ {r,onn Eo
t fr§

cúL{.^r.
\ta,(* -
 On the Problem of the
ideological origins of the French
Revolution

in an ironic
In recent years, intellectual historians have found themselves
irrele-
p.tl,i.". b.r.e ,rnd", sentence of confinement to the scholastic
uarrce of the superstructure' they have seen the base -superstructr¡re
distinction almoit entirely abandoned in modern social thought. Once
social science among histo-
threarened by the imperialism of behavioral
generally
rians, they have wirnessed a reorientation ofthe social sciences
i.**a pioblems of meaning. They have watched those who dismissed
ideas asihe most epherneral ofappearances - and
the history ofideas as
a ¡arrative cob*eb to be swept away by ¡he Annalistes' broom - re-
discover the domain of the event a§ the play of meanings in human
the world as a text without histo-
action. structuralists have offered thern
,f, por*,r,.r.turalists have threatened them with the specter of history
*i úo.r, a rexr. It is scarcely surprising, then, that intellectual historians
the walls
h".re ,ho*., some of the disorientation of ghetto dwellers after
whether they have been invaded or
have been broken down, uncertain
liberated.
I can best srare my own view by saying that I regard intellectual history
as a mode of historical discourse, rather than as a distinct
field of inquiry
with a clearly demarcated subject matter. It is a way of addressing the
toward history generally, rather than a separate
pasr, a cerraio orientation
o, ,.r,orro-ous branch of historical scholarship in any strict or categorical
sense. The intellectual historian analyzing a text' concept,
or movement
of ideas has rhe same problem as the historian faced with any other

This chapter is reprinted, in revised [orm, from my essay,

"on the Problem of the Ideologi-
;J'ó;tó;;artárrencú r.*u,¡".,; ¡" Modern'Ettropeax lntellectaal(Ithaca',N'Y':
Hittory: Reappraisals.
cornell
;Ñ;i;r;i*iaa, ed. D;;i"a.k Lac^p,^and-stevé-n L' Kaplal
a 1982 bv Cornell Universitv Press' Used
Úrrir.rsiry Éress, 1982), tli:ili.itopvtigt't
by permission of the Publisher.)

L2
 ldeological origins of tbe Reuolution 13

historical phenomenon, namely to reconstitute the context (or, more

usually, the plurality of contexts) in which that phenomenon takes on
meaning as human action. History, in other words, is a diagnostic disci-
pline: Given the scratch, the historian seeks to discover the itch; or, to
offer a less behavioristic formulation, given the solution, the historian
rries to reconstitute the problem. I do not think the intellectual historian
differs (or, at least, should differ) in this respect from other historians
with other concerns. Let us rebuild no walls.
\W'hat, then, is the orientation characteristic of intellectual history? I
would say that the intellectual historian seeks particularly to attend to the
intellective dimensions of social action as historically constituted. This
may seem a rather general definition, perhaps even ao empty one. But I
choose it for several reasons. The first is that I want to set aside from the
ourser the idea that intellectual history is confined to the history of
"intellectuals." This is not to say, of course, that their activities have no
¡lace in intellectual history: The nature and definition of cognitive func-
rions in particular societies, the institutional position, social role, and
:onceptual claims of those who engage in more or less specialized intel-
.ecrual activities, remain among the most interesting problems with
:'¡ich rhe intellectual historian is presented. They offer a rich field for
:,:nparative research of a kind that intellectual historians have barely
:€qun to consider. FIowever, such problems do not exhaust the domain
:: ioreliectual history, nor, indeed, could they be answered adequately if
::el did. Intellectual history is not simply the history of intellectuals,
:::ad as that history may be. It is the history of "intellection," which
.:--ording to the Oxford Englisb Dictionary) derives from a Latin root
::..:: implies "perceiving, discerning, discernment, understanding, mean-
.:¡. sense, signification." ln a word, it is the history of meaning.
3:r meaning is a dimension of all social action. \ü7e can therefore set
'¡-:= ¡he untenable distinction between ideas and events - and the ar-
',:l:r¿.i and srerile problems about the relationship and priority between
:--.:. - rhar has so often inroduced confusion and absurdity into discus-
i - :. :,í intellecrual history. The action of a rioter in picking up a stone
.i: :l more be understood apart from the symbolic field that gives it
: :::.:r'rit rhan the action of a priest in picking up a sacramental vessel.
I-= :rrlosopher picking up a pen is not performing a less social action
::: ::e ploughman picking up a plough, nor does the latter act lack
.::=-:¡:ua.l dimensions. Action implies meaning; meaning implies cultur-
- .:=:subjectivity; intersubiectivity implies society. All social activity
: ' -- :::leliecrive dimension that gives it meaning, just as all intellectual
ir. :, :as a social dimension that gives it point.
. :: :,:,! mean ro as§ert here that all history is intellectual history. But I
i- - r .r :¡¡es follow from this argument that intellectual history can have
 Ideological oigins of the Reuolution 13

historical phenomenon, namely to reconstitute the context (or, more

usually, the plurality of contexts) in which that phenomenon takes on
meaning as human action. History, in other words, is a diagnostic disci-
pline: Given the scratch, the historian seeks to discover the itch; or, to
offer a less behavioristic formulation, given the solution, the historian
rries to reconstitute the problem. I do not think the intellectual historian
differs (or, at least, should differ) in this respect from other historians
wirh other concerns. Let us rebuild no walls.
What, then, is the orienta.ion characteristic of intellectual history? I
would say that the intellectual historian seeks particulady to attend to the
inrellective dimensions of social action as historically constituted. This
may seem a rather general definition, perhaps even an empty one. But I
choose it for several reasons. The first is that I want to set aside from the
3urser the idea that intellectual history is confined to the history of
"intellectuals." This is oot to say, of course, that their activities have no
:lace in intellectual history: The nature and definition of cognitive func-
::ons in particular societies, the institutional position, social role, and
::,nceptual claims of those who engage in more or less specialized intel-
-ecrual activities, remain among the most interesting problems with
:'¡ich rhe intellectual historian is presented. They offer a rich field for
:rnparative research of a kind that intellectual historians have barely
l€Eun ro consider. Flowever, such problems do not exhaust the domain
:: inrellectual history, nor, indeed, could they be answered adequately if
::"=i" did. Inrellectual history is not simply the history of intellectuals,
:::ad as that history may be. It is the history of "intellection," which
::;,:rding to the Oxford English Dictionary) derives from a Latin root
::.: implies "perceiving, discerning, discernment, understanding, mean-
:-i, sense, signification." In a word, it is the history of meaning.
3:r meaning is a dimension of all social action. We can therefore set
,,.:= rhe untenable disdnction between ideas and events - and the ar-
--.::' and sterile problems about the reladonship and priority berween
'.:;: - rhar has so often introduced confusion and absurdity into discus-
-:, :¡ inreliectual history. The action of a rioter in picking up a stone
.:' :. 1 more be understood apart from the symbolic field rhat gives it
::i::-iE ¡han the action of a priest in picking up a sacramental vessel.
l-= ::rlosopher picking up a pen is not performing a less social action
: , -, ::e ploughman picking up a plough, nor does the latter act lack
: :. -=:::al dimensions. Action implies meaning; meaning implies cultur-
- --:=:s:bjecrivity; intersubjectivity implies society. All social activity
:-- -: -::ellecrive dimension that gives it meaning, just as all intellectual
r-- . r. :¿s a social dimension that gives it point.
: - :-:i mean to assert here that all history is intellectual history. But I
::..-. r .: ::-es follow from this argument that intellectual history can have
 14 ldeological origins of tbe Reoohtion
no precise boundary with other fields. On the one hand, it will seek to
elicit the intellective dimensions in those forms of social action which
preseot themselves as stable forms of behavior - those patterns of action
constituted by implicit meanings that often seem indistinguishable from
a description of the actions themselves. To this extent, it will merge with
institutional or social history as the histoire de¡ nentalités. On the other
hand, it will seek to analyze those more explicit forms of intellectual
activity rhat have been established as specialized kinds of knowledge,
recognizing that the more explicit play of ideas that characterizes such
activity occurs within a structured field of discourse that defines its pur-
poses and procedures internally and establishes its existence externally as
part of a set of social constrainrs. To this extent, intellectual history will
rake shape as the history of particular disciplines, genres, theories, or
problems: for instance, the history of the sciences, the history of the-
ology and philosophy, legal history, and the history of historiography.
Indeed, insofar as the identity of any such discipline depends upon estab-
lishing and maintaining an appropriate genealogy, intellectual history
merges imperceptibly into the practice of the discipline itself.
I should emphasize here that I am not trying to reinstate the distinc-
tion between popular and elite culture, one dominated by habit, custom,
passivity, the other by creativity and rhe "free play" of ideas. Inherited
reifications of constituted experience form many dimensions of the con-
sciousness of the elite, no less than those of other social groups; intellec-
tual creativity occurs within the domain ofpopular culture, just as it does
in more specialized cognkive activities. Nor do I regard the distinction
between implicit social meanings and explicitly articulated intellectual
acrivities as an exhaustive one. On the contrary, it defines two more or
less stabilized limits in the relationship between intellection and social
life; rwo limim between which there exists a complex middle ground,
where ideas seem neither to merge with the practice of concrete social
life nor to separate out as the obiegt of a set of specialized intellectual
activities. This is the middle ground - more or less vast in any particular
society at any particular time - in which there is a consciousness of ideas
at play in social life, in which mental sets appear to form and disaggre-
gate, ia which dom¿ins of experience are claimed for competing fields of
discourse, in which the relationship berween words and things presents
itself as problematic.
In the body of this essay, I shall consider a classic problem that falls
within this domain: the problem of the ideological origins of the French
Revolucion. Before doing so, however, I feel obliged to return to one
aspect ofthis briefinitial effort to characterize intellectual history. I said
that the intellectual historian seeks particulady to attend to the intellec-
tive dimensions of social action as historically constituted. But I have oot
 ldeological origins of tbe Rerolation 1,
yet touched on the problem of how one might think of these dimensions
as historically constituted. I have not, that is, s',ggested how one might
counter the Faustian bargain we seem to be offered by the structuralists:
an offer of the entire world as a domain of meaning, but at the cosr of our
historical souls.
I can perhaps approach this problem by appealing ro the meraphor of
bricolage offered by Claude Iévi-Strauss.r Bricolage is the activity of the
bricolear, the jack-of-all-trades who is good with his hands, purrers
a¡ound in his workshop, and finds fulfillmenr in creating (or undertak-
iag) odd jobs. The bricoler¿r d,oes not throw things away. He collects "bits
and pieces," "odds and ends," on the assumprion thar they will eventually
come in handy. He uses them for his purposes in an improvisational way,
combining objects that had been fashioned for a variety of prior uses.
Thus the distinctive features of the bricoleal¡ srock are finiteness and
bererogeneiry. He defines his projects in terms of what he has; his ac-
rivities ¿ue preconstrained by the nature of the materials he has collected.
These materials are heterogeneous, in the sense that they have no neces-
sary or systematic relationship. They are remains, the end results of
previous activities, the remnants of previous constructions. Thus their
rn¡al reladonship one to another is contingent: They exist in the srock
¡s üe result of the occasions the bricole*r has taken to extend and renew
r- Aod their potential relationship is unpredictable, in the sense that the
iaiahar chooses among and cornbines them in ways, and for purposes,
fu¡ do not derive from any necessary relationships undedying their
coerisrence within the stock. In this manner, Lévi-Strauss s,rggests, rhe
üirrLlr "builds up sructures by fitting together evenrs, o¡ rather rhe
lEoeios of events," whereas the scientist or engineer (with whom he is
mrrasted) creares eveors by elaborating structures.2
If,rhis is to be a useful metaphor for intellectual history, we must begin
i
:r avoiding the temptation to regard the bricolear as a ranscendent,
r rugrehistorical subjecc Bricolage is not rhe Cunning of Reason. But we
a, perhaps consider the intellectual stock of any society, at any particu-
r cme, as in some ways resembling that of the bricolear. An inveotory of
& rock, which would look very much like Michel Foucauk's "ar-
:¡ne,-l would reveal a multiplicíty of separate discourses constituting
.,túcrrp domains of meaning. Each of these discourses would have its
rn hisrory; each c/ould have its own "logic"; each would constirure a
i;; ot social action by categorizing the world of social acrors in accor-
rc riü its own terms of reference. These discourses q¡ould coexist
r¡ñ*a üe sociery as a whole, some remaining quite separate one frorn
re'*rr --"y overlapping in the practice of socid life, as well as in the
ilmrGr¡ess of individuals. They would be heterogeneous in the sense
ü sc1 rould often involve assumptions and implicadons that, if elabo-
t6 Ideological origins of the Reoolution
rated far enough, would contradict the assumptions and implications of
others. Their relationship would be contingent in the sense that they
could not be integrated into a totd system or structure, as parts ro a
whole, according to a strict enchainment of logical relarions. They would
be arranged hierarchically in the sense that some would be regarded as
controlling and some thought of as conuolled, that some would be
thought of as more powerful than others. But this hierarchy would be
conventional rather than apodictic, political rather than logical.
How, then, could we move from a synchronic view of such an intellec-
tual universe to a diachronic one? If we set aside the bricoleur a ffar.-
^s
scendent historical agent, how can we think of the process of transforma-
tion and change that would correspoad to his activity? The answer would
seem to lie in emphasizing that the multiplicity of discourses we have
been considering are not dead remnaots, the archaeological remains of
some vanished constructions. On the contrary, they are fields of social
action symbolically constituted, social practices, "language games" each
subject to constant elaboration and development through the activities
of the individual agents whose purposes they define. Coexisting in a
given society, often overlapping in social practice and in the con-
sciousness of individuals, they are oot insulated one from another in any
strict way. Drawing upon common linguistic resources, they will have a
greater or lesser degree of interpenetration, so that individual acts and
utterances wíll often take on meaning within several fields of discourse
sirnultaneously. Changes in one realm of discourse will redound upon
others in unanticipated and unpredictable ways; elements from several
discourses will be combined to define new domains of experience and
social action. In some cases, these changes will support and reinforce one
another. In others, they will create a state of tension and contradiction
still negotiable within the conventional hierarchization of discourse. In
others, compedng claims and implications will be elaborated ro such an
exteot that their resolution will threaten - and eventually force a re-
definition of - that hierarchization in more or less radical ways.4
Rather than elaborating these considerations further in purely abstract
terms, I shall explore the kind of approach they seem ro suggesr to one of
the classic problems of European intellectual history, the problem of the
ideological origins of the French Revoludon. §ühy speak of "ideologi-
cal," rather than "intellectual" origins? At rhis point, I have rwo answers
to that question. The first is that I think it inconsistenr with q/hat I have
already said to offer aoy strong disdnction between these terms. In irs
original sense, "ideology" was concerned with the study of the process
by which the wodd of phenomena is given order and meaning through
the activity of signification. For the Idéologues - the fascinating and
much maligned group of philosophers to whom we owe rhe rerm - that
18 ldeological origint of tbe Reulution
their exercise takes the form of maintaining that discourse by upholding
aurhorirative definitions of (and within) it. In these terms' then, a revolu-
rion can be defined as a transformation of the discursive practice of the
communiry, a moment in which social relations are reconstituted and the
discourse defining the political relations between individuals and groups
is radically recast. Some such revolution, it seems safe to say' occurred in
France i¡ 1789.
Yet there has been relatively litde explicit or systematic attention in
recenr years to the question of the ideological origins of the French
Revolution: that is, to the elaboration of the field of political and social
discourse - the pattern of meanings and implications - that constituted
the significance ofthe events of 1789 and gave them explosive force. In
large part, this problem has been obscured by prevailing approaches to
rh; fi;ld, particularly by the Marxist paradigm that has dominated histor-
ical interpretation of the French Revolution undl very recently. As Fran-
eois Furet has argued very effectively, the Marxian conception
of the
French Revolution as an "advent" - rhe rise of the bourgeoisie to power
as the expression of an objective historical necessity - has obscured its
..event,,
nature as an - as the invendon of a new form of discourse
consriruting new modes of political and social action.T To the extent that
compedng modes of political discourse have been treated as functions of
a sociological infrasructure, parlementary constitL¡tionalism as noble re-
acrion, and Enlightenment political theory as bourgeois coosciousoess'
the question of the ideological origins of the Revoludon ha§ disappeared
as an independent problem. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, one of the
most telling symproms of the weakening of the Marxisr paradigm in the
study of the French Revolution is the growing interest in the more
directly political aspects of the period, in the goals and strategies of the
political acrors, in rhe political vocabulary of the French Revolution, not
as "mere rhetoric" (rwo words which the last generation of historians
welded together almost as inseparably as "rising" and "bourgeoisie"), but
as a means of transforming the symbolic grounding of the national com-
munity, the supremely political act of redefining the body politic' The
mosr pressing task for the historiography of rhe French Revolution,
Furer has rightly argued, is precisely rhis: "to rediscover the analysis of
im political dimension. But the price to pay is two-fold: not only must we
stop regarding revolutionary coosciousness as a more or les§ 'natural'
result of oppression and discontent; we rnust also develop a conceptual
understanding of this srrange offspring of'pbilosopb¡e' (its offspring, at
least, in a chronological sense)."8 In short, we musr understand the lan-
guage of the French Revolution as an intellectual creation.
But il as Furer suggesrs, the revolutionary consciousness is rhe off-
spring of pbilosophie, we should be able to draw on the vast body of work
 Ideological origins of tbe Reul*tion 19
on the Enlightenment io discussing the ideological origins of the French
Revolution. Efforts to do so, however, are often obscured by a false
problematic (which I arn tempted to call the "Heath Pamphlet Prob-
lematic") which presents itself as the question of "The Influence of the
Enlightenment on the French Revolution." To my mind, no very helpful
response is likely to emerge from a question posed in these terms. "En-
lightenment" and "Revolution" simply become so reified that they face
one another like two blocs - or, perhaps more accurately, like rwo
opposing pieces at the end of a game of checkers, which can be manipu-
lated through an indefinite series of relationships without ever making
contact. There have, of course, been attempts to break this issue down
analytically, but they have tended to take rwo forms, neither of which
seerns to pose the question effectively. The most obvious form has been
a linear history of doctrines, cast in terrns of a necessary logic of ideas,
usually with an emphasis on the influence of a particular docrine or
thinker. This, I suppose, is what one would call the "C'est la faute á
Rousseau" style of interpretation. The most obvious example in rela-
tively recent historiography is probablv J. L. Talmon's work on the ori-
gins of totalitarian democracy, a work that, in my view, reveals some of
the v¡orst excesses ofthe teleological tendencies in intellectual history so
ably criticized by Quentin Skinner.e
This kind of approach can be distinguished from a second one (with
which it can merge in practice), which might be called the "diffusionist"
or "trickle-down" approach. Here the issue comes to rest on questions
regarding the extent to which certain writings have been circulated or
certain ideas diffused, and the extent to which those acting in the Revo-
lution can be regarded as motivated to act by such ideas. I do not wish to
diminish the relevance of quantitative studies of the book trade, or of
efforts to investigate the circulation of ideas among particular social
groups. They are important for our understanding of the nature of intel-
lectual and social life during any period. But books are not mere objecrs,
nor are ideas isolated units. Texts. i are understood, and hence
reinte their readerf in con-l¿rl¡ that
on meaning only in relation to others in
e set of ideas into whi are rncorporareq. I nus rt rs lmportant co
..-+?..-.
insist upon veen examining the circulation of ideas
aod understanding their meaning to social actors, and to avoid treating
ideas as if they were causal, individual agents of motivarion and deter-
mination. Understanding the ideological origins of the French Revolu-
tion is not a matter of establishing a causal chain linking particular ideas,
individual or group motivations, and events in a series of one-to-one
derivations. It is not necessary, for example, to establish that everyone in
rie crowd attacking the Bastille inJuly 1789 was motivated ro ovenhrow
t-

20 Ideological origins of tbe Reulution

despotism, for that evenr to take on the meaning of a¡ attack on des-

po,itt1l within the field of polidcal discourse created in the course of the
eaflier eveots of that year. Nor is it necessary to deny that the Great Fear
retained many elements of traditional behavior in order to recognize its
significance as revolutionary ac¡ion. The Revolution of 1789 depended,
in effect, on the creation and deployment of a political language that ca§t
many different kinds of behaviors, from aristocratic resistance to popular
fears, into the same symbolic order. In order to understand the Revolu-
tion aS a political -that is to Say, public - event, we need ro reconstitute
the field of political discourse in which it occurred, a field in which
ceftain kinds of acrions took on meanings that often wenr far beyond
what particular actors intended.
yet rhere has been relatively little effort in contemporary historiogra-
phy (though there is a body ofolder historiography to be recovered on
this theme) to consider the political discourse of the prerevolutionary
period as an object of study in its own rerms. If the power of the "social
interpretation,, of the French Revolution has been one reason for this
lack, another seems to have been what I will call the "Tocqueville syn-
drome": the tendency to identify French political reflection with the
activity of men of letters engaged in an "absrract and literary politics," by
definition divorced from immediate problems of political and social life.
Tocqueville's charactedzation of the Enlightenment can be challenged
in a number of ways. It can be insisted that much of irs thinking, far from
being abstract, was intimately related to the immediate social and politi-
cal issues of the day. It can be pointed our rhat many of its principal
spokesmen were by no means innocent of the practice of public affairs:
that Montesquieu, for example, served as a magistrate in the parlement
of Bordeaux; rhat Mably acted as a ministerial adviser on international
affairs and c/rote one of the standard works on international law; that
Helvétius engaged in m:r-farming; thar voltaire produced polidcal tracts,
at request, for several ministers; that Turgot was no less a philosophe for
all his experience as intendant. And it can be demonstrated that its
principal institutional expression - the provincial academies so ably stud-
ied by Daoiel Roche - is characterized precisely by "the solidarity of
comrnand and powey'' of a ruling elite, united "in a vocation of common
service to city, province or State."ro
But these arguments do not entirely engage the argument of L'ancien
régime et h Régolation Tocqueville i¡ fact acknowledged, both explicitly
and implicitly, that the tendency to abstract radical thinking was not
simply a function of alack of pracúcal public responsibilities. on the one
hand, he allo\¡/ed that eighteenth-century French thinkers, contemplat-
ing the confused and antiguated spectacle of their social order, "were
natarally led to want to rebuild the society of their time according to an

I
 ldeological origint of the Reaolution 17
process q/as to be understood as an essendally individual one, grounded
in a universalistic conception of natural human reason.l If we understand
ic as a social - that is say, intersubjective - process, grounded in a
pluralistic theory of discourse, then "ideology" and "intellection," "ideo-
logical" and "intellectual," are not strictly distinguishable.
At the same time, it may in another respect be useful to maintain a
differentiation between the tq/o sets of terms. The various uses of "ide-
ology" have generally involved some notion of contested meaning, of the
process of signification itself as problematic, of a tension berween alter-
oarive - usually true (objective) and false (subjective) - constructions of
:ire world. For the Idéologues, "ideology" offered a scientific, objective,
:arional understanding of the logic of the human mind: an understanding
¡i rhe order of sensations and ideas that would sweep away false reason-
.ng and establish the basis fo¡ arational social order. In appropriating the
:erm, Marxism inverted the relationship berween "science" and "ide-
: iog.v," identifying the latter with the false, subjective reasoning to which
:;re Idéologues had opposed it. But Marxism also maintained the sense of
:ceo.logy" as a matter of contested meanings - of representations of the
=:rld rhat are either explicitly contested by historical actors in the
: - trrse of class srruggle, or implicitly contested by the philosopher-histo-
:.:i rn terms of the dichotomy between ideology and science. I would
--,iE ro retain "ideology" and "ideological" in a related sense, as terms to
:"---acterize those activities and situations in which signification itself
:.;Írs ro be at issue in social life, in which there is a consciousness of
:-:,:Esred representations of the world in play, in which social action
::.:=s rhe form of more or less explicit efforts to order or reorder the
-- -:.: rhrough rhe ardculation and deployment of competing systems of
- =.^ no 6

!.:haps I should add, to avoid possible misunderstanding, that I see

- -:":-:rg in this view that commits me to a notion of ideology as the mere
:::l:::ron of some more objective or real interests of social groups or
- :i!:i. i think it points toward a conception of a "politics of language"
- :---= B-a,' Pocock has used that term) rather than a sociology of ideas.
--:---- in¡erests are not brute, objective phenomena; they rest on cog-
:--- ' = ::inciples of social differentiation. A community exists only to the
::::*: :har there is some common discourse by which its members can
.- --j:-:*:e themselves as different groups within the social order and
:-ir. :.er¡os upon one another that are regarded as intelligible and bind-
.: ¡ .:-: interaction involved in the framing of such claims is constrained
¡ ----- :ia¡ discourse, which it in turn sustains, extends, and on occasion
---:::---::s. Political authority is, in this view, a matter of linguistic au-
: - : :, :.¡¡ir in rhe sense that public functions are defined and allocated
r -:-i :i. ¡iamework of a given political discourse, and in the sense that
 Ideological origins of tbe Reoolation 2l
enrirely new plan, v¡hich each of them drew up according to the sole light
of his reason";11 on the other, he acknowledged rhat even those in power
vielded on occasion to the claims of abstract thioking. 12 The participa-
tion in public affairs he found lacking in France was a special kind of
participarion, the kind rhar comes only with free political institutions.
Ulrimately, he explained the central importance of men of letters in
French public life, the radical, abstra« quality of their language, and its
poc/er over the mass of Frenchmen, all in terms of a single factor: "the
complete absence of all political liberry."r3 Denied the acquaintance
q-ith the nature of public affairs thar comes only with free political in-
scirurions, the philosophes became even bolder in their speculations than
:hey otherwise would have been. Innocent of the experience of self-
¿overnment, and lacking any constitutional means to express their con-
cerns, the mass of Frenchmen readily accepted these speculations as a
s'.rrrogate for the expression of their political passions. Deprived of rheir
:¡adirional authoriry, even rhe nobility engaged in the philosophical par-
.Jr gar\e, forgedul, owing to their lack of political freedom, of the ob-
rr,cus knowledge "that general theories, once accepted, are inevitably
::ansformed into political passions and reappear in actions."la Thus all
-,ecrions of French society, Tocqueville r¡¡ould have us believe, v¡ere
::rndless of the fact ¡hat ideas have consequences.

3:r what will seem more exrraordinary to us, as we contemplate the debris left
:-, so many revolutions, is that rhe very idea of a violent revolution never oc-
:-::ed to our parents'minds. No one talked of it, no one even imagined it. The
r::!l disturbances v¡hich public liberty constandy inflicts on rhe mosr stable
r.-.::eries serve as a daily reminder of the possibility of upheavals and keep rhe
:-:-ic on the watch. But in rhis French society of the eighteenth century, which
--i.: about to fall into the abyss, there had as yet been no warning of danger. l)

firis picture is surely overdrawn. If France lacked English political

.:erries, it was by no means devoid of the kind of consriruriooal con-
'=¡:arion many conremporaries associated with that turbulent state across
,: Channel. Acure observers derecred revolutionary English v/earher in
'::= srorms that dominated the French constiturional climate in the mid-
: ;:reenth century. "There is a philosophical wind blowing toward us
: - : England in favor of free, anri-monarchical governmenr," wrore rhe
::-,:¡uis d'Argenson i¡ 17) 1; "it is eotering minds, and one knows hov¡
: ::on governs the world. Ir could be that this government is already
;::::plished in people's heads, to be implemented at the first chance,
-:: :he revolution might occur with less conflict rhan one thinks. All the
':.:s ofsociety are discontented together . . . adisturbance could turn
,: - :evoir, and revolt into a total revolution."l6 Considered in this
: ::=xr, "liberty" and "despotism," "property" and "represenration,"

,l'
li

il
22 ldeological origins of theRnohtion
were not abstract literary counters: They were ideological claims that
Jansenists hurled against oppressive clergy, that parlemenary magis-
trates elaborated in exile and circulated in clandesdnely published re-
monstrances, that provincíal Estates mobilized against ministerial en-
emies. As a result of these conflicts, d'Argenson observed, the nature of
nation and état were debated in mid-eighteenth-century France as oever
before: "These two terms were never uttered under Louis XIV; even the
idea ofthem was lacking. §üe have never been so aware as we are today
of the rights of the nation and of liberty."tz
Tocqueville, who cites d'Argenson's Mémoires for his own purpo§es'
did not entirely disregard the constitutional stlggles which the marquis
follou/ed with such interest and apprehension. But it was crucial, for the
political argument of his work, to minimize their importance. He there-
fore relegated them to a relatively unobtrusive chapter of L'ancien régime
et la Réoolatioa devoted to the "singular sort of liberty" that did still exist
amid the institutions of absolutism. 18 Here the constitutional activities
of the padements are praised as "the only part of a free people's educa-
the Old Regime gave us;" and their resistance to Maupeou in 1770 is
held out as an action as noble as any in the history offree nation§, even
though they were "doubtless more preoccupied with their own interests
than the public good.'19 Yet several chapters later, in the chapter upon
which his entire work hinges, Tocqueville can still insist that Frenchmen
had no interest in liberty in the mid-eighteenth century, that they had
lost the very idea of it along with the practice.2o \üflhy the conradictionT
The answer becomes clear in Tocqueville's discussion of the physiocrats,
whom he in fact cites far more frequently than the philosophes in his
consideration of the ideological origins of the French Revolution. The
physiocrats, he argues, reveal rnore cleady than the philosophes the
"rrue nature" of the French Revolution,2l that combination of the desire
for equality with the acceptance of the despotism of centralized public
authority which had emerged again in France, in his own day, with the
coup d' état of Napoleon III. It was this latter phenomenon (as Richard
Herr has ably demonstrated) that Tocqueville set out to explain in
L'ancien régime et la Réaobtion And he did so by maintaining rhat the
French were infected with the egalitariaq cenaalizing, despotic ideology
exemplified by the physiocrats ("false ideas, vicious habits and per-
nicious tendencies" contracted by long exposure to absolute authority)
before they reacquired their taste for liberty.22 Ideas of equality as imple-
mented by centralized authority established themselves ñrst; ideas of
liberty as an alternative to centralized authority appeared only as a weak-
er (and ultimately incompatible) second.2] To butress this argument,
Tocqueville was therefore obliged to set aside the actual political con-
flicts of the mid-eighteenth century (in which the conflict between liber-
 Ideological origins of tbe Rewlution 23
rv and despotism became clearly defined as the central issue), despite the
quire compelling evidence of their importance in the development of
French political consciousness. Later historians have tended to follow his
-ead in minimizing the importance of these constitutional struggles or
a"riring off the political language of the parlements as a mere guise for
:ie defense of particular social interests.
Thus it was the effect of Tocqueville's analysis to emphasize the gap
:€!s'een philosophical thinking and immediate realities of political life,
:: rhe one hand, and to divert attention from the ideological significance
:: :ire actual political conflicts chat occurred in eighteenth-century
i:.:"r,ce on the other. Both of these issues need to be reexamined. The
:-:,osophes need to be considered within the spectrum of political lan-
;*-:¿e existing in their own day, aot arúficially insulated from it; the
:;:*¡e of eighteenth-century French political culture needs to be recon-
. :=:eC in its own terms, rather than denied by comparison with English
:':.'::cal liberties. Neither of these suggestions is new.24 Yet, oddly
:- - -iir. rhere has been no systematic effort to reconstitute the discourse
:: ::ench public life in the decades preceding the French Revolution,
: :: :as rhere been a full-scale attempt to recover the competing repre-
.: i :ir-,los of social and political existence from which the revolutionary
¿:; :ge uldmately emerged. Despite the wealth of material available
: - -¿::. perhaps, in part, because of it), there is no equivalenr for pre-
*:', :.
-:-,rnary France of Bernard Bailyn's ldeological Origins of tbe Ameú-
-., : r:.t¿lion.25
I :----c- Ilorner's classic work is a particularly interesting contrasr in
r1-- ::!:Écr. ks origines intellectuelles de la Réaolution franEaise is present-
-- ;. -¡ ir-istory of the intellectual origins of the Revolurion and not a
r---. -, :: ¡evolurionary ideas."ze Since these latter (liberty, equality,
'-:*:*,:;, tire social contract, and so on) have existed more or less con-
**'r .: ¿il human societies, Mornet argued, a history of revolutionary
-i:rjr a r : require an endless genealogical regression into the history of
..:,-;- ::c'.rines. But what, rhen, does Mornet mean by the "intellec-
* - *+-(" of the Revolution? Can one, indeed, write such a history
& : - -' i-.:' e'riting a history of ideas? The effort to do so seems ro me
'rr ::;;:.:.::rfn of why Mornet's erudite and far-ranging wOrk is yet So
|l...*:-: : lJme respects and so elusive in others. Something is being
-..::-c-: - -\f crner's prerevolutionary France, but it is difficult ro say
"'': -{ ; ---': :¡ is. Ir seems to be a critical artitude of mind or habit of
r-,:r r."r.i- : -:",.ersive of authority in all aspects. Mornet's favorite term
: . :."- .: ,: t.-i .2- Yet, in an odd way, he appears to offer us a story of
1n ;:- r-,: -: ¿ habir of rhinking, wirhour any sustained analysis of its
..- -- -,,,t .
-- -L. , ;:.:,ilrl"rly noticeable in relationship ro political thinking.
 Note¡ to pp. tg_22 3O9
work more fully in a review essay, "Enlightenment
and Revolution in France:
Old Problems, Renewed App.o".h.r,;,701*"1 ,¡
2*l-3o3' For a brief review of the hisár¡ographicar
Urer; ;;;;;. r, trqrrl,
Marxist consensus regarding tt e orig; colrapse oítie bro"dly
r§lilliam Doyle, of the French Revolution, see
The.Origint o¡ tt, nrríri Reuhrion (Oxford,
8. Furer, Inkrpreting tbe pincb'Reoolt tggD),7_40.
t¡or,-Zl_A.
9.J. L. Tdmon, Tbe Origiu of Tototiiorio
Demouacl (tondon, 1952). See
Quentin skinner, "Meaning un¿...,^nding in the History of ldeas,,,
"na
Hittory and Theory 8 (19691: 3_r3.
-_
10. Daniel Roche, * dys tyira en protince; Acaümie¡
:,:r!: vols.
proainciarx, 16g0_I7Sg,2 (paris, tblA), tZOe.
et académicien¡
I l' Alexis de Tocquevi,e, L'ancien
complétes, ed.J. p. M:r:.r, z(i),
ai*t ri lnarrztion, i¡Tocqueville, oeatre¡
Alrhough I have nor folroweJ t¡.
6i¡r J ip*ir, 1952;, i;;,-;;ii.,lrj,
cilie.i iranslarion at all points, I c/,r
"a¿.a.
also
cire relevant page numbers in the
,,";¡";; English ,¿¡¡orl,-iü,ou Regime
Reaohtion, rr. stuart Ciil;;, (Garden
?i(,,:;:,r:;;: c"r.,ñ.;., ; e55), in
12. Tocqueville, L,¿ncien régime,2O0
(Otd Regine, 147).
13. Tocquevilte, L'ancien ¡éBine,
14. Tocqueville, L,ancien ,agi*r,
t9) iOt¿ i'ái*r,
UO¡.
De iOUiá'i*r, Uz».
l). Tocquevile, L,ancien ,nsi_i, tlt
I 6. [René Louis de voyer
ull.
ioU ir\'í*r,
marqtis dArgensoz,.¿.
de- y3r-v, ;; ;;;i;rr. nson], J un a I t m émo i re¡ d,
o c

september l75l).
J;p. n.th¿ry, l rolr. (p".¡r, lg59_67), 6:464 (3
Impend¡rg r"r"r.ifí b;:"-. a
genson's journal during the recurrenr theme in d,Ar-
l7r,s,
menrs unfolded: See, for .xample,^,¡.,,r'rggle berween crown and parle_
LZi; i>.t;.11242; 7 :27 l; 7:295; g:lj3;
9:294;9.370. Lord Chesterfi.td;*;.";;¿
Aubertin, L,esprit prlblic
,i-i1", ,,¡.* in t7 52:See Charles
xwil:;;¿r¡;ii
", d'Argeuon, g::3-rj
"
.¿. fpu.tr, 1873),279, n. 2.
17 ' Jotrnal et mémoira da-marqzis
(26June 1754).For a concise
general discussion of rhese..ilif;l".ínnr.,r,
seeJean Egret, Lozit XV
et l'opposition parlemen taire, t 7
-^ t 5 _ I 7i;(p"ri., f SZOI.
18. Tocqueville, L'ancien régime,
16g_71 @)) irs¡.r, l0g_20).
19. Tocquevilte, L'¿ncien régiyne,
20. Tocqueville, L,ancien régime,2t4 !7a_75 iOi¿ nrs¡*r, tt6_17).
21. Tocqueviile, L,ancien nésine,209
<Ol¿'lrii-r, rc».
22. Tocqueville, L'ancien
ióUl;;;, ó8).
y.gine,.2l3_te, iiio'iou Resime, 163_7,137). See
Richard Herr, Tocqaetille and ¡be OU
23' "It was this desire to. inrroduce p.li;:;i
ArSi;;erinceron, 1962), esp. ,6_63.
institutions that were i"."-p",iuÉ
i;..ty in the midst of ideas and
our rírsres and habits _ ir was rhis desire
*iit i,'uI, ,¡* had become ingrained in
that has,
produced so many vain attempts "";;,-üi;;,.rffi.r."rr,
ro creare free governrnenr, fo,owed
bv such
disastro us revolu tio ns., Finalli,
painful and srerile undertaking,
b;;'ff
tired ; .;f;;;, ;;ü".d"u.v?.¡,
-"r;F*;;men
objeftive [poritical libertv] in árder abandoned their second
¿ ;;r;;" their firsr [efficient admin_
istration and social equaliiyl and
fouJ,n..r.lr., welcoming the realizarion
that to live in equality under a
Thus it is rhat c/e resembre *u.¡
master
"ili
ñ, afte¡ all,a cerrain attraction.
ior.,"ilr,ir. econornists of l7J0 than
24 ldeological origins of tbe Rettolation

In this respecr, Mornet suggests another distinction that is quite reveal-

ing: a distinction between "intellectual causes" of the Revolution and
..purely political" causes. Purely political causes involve "situations or
events-intolerable enough to inspire the desire to change or resist, with-
out any other reflection than the sentiment of suffering and the search
for immediare causes and remedies." This latter search is revealed in
..purely political works . . . limited ro setting out the§e situations and
.u"rrrr, these causes and these remedie§, without ever seeking to gener-
alize, or to base themselves on principles and doctrines." By contrast,
purely intellectual causes express themselves in "the study of these prin-
.ipte, urrd doctrines without concern, at least in appearance, for the
pá[tic"l realities of the presenr rime."28 of course, Mornet insisted that
ihir di.horomy was more theoretical than real, particulafly in relation to
eighteenth-cenrury France: "The purely political a«or lle Politique Pur)
*ií se.k to fortify his claims by appealiog to philosophical iustice and
reason; the philosopher will construcr his doctrine to resolve the prob-
lems that real life and contemporary politics have posed."2e Yet what is
missing in this formulation - or, more properly, precluded by it - is
e*actly-the sense of politics as constituted within a field of discourse, and
of political language as elaborated in the course of political action. This is
p"ihup, the ,érton for the striking absence in Mornet's work of any
s,rst"ined discussion of the constitudonal conflicts that were so central a
feature of French public life after the middle of the century, and of the
conflicting representations of the social order that were elaborated in
response io tlr"*. "It is intelligence," Mornet insists in the very last
*ord, of his book, "that produced, organized the consequences, and
gradually carne ro demand rhe Estates General. And from the Estates
ó"rrer"l, but without intelligence suspecting it, would come forth the
Revolution."3o Ljnfortunately, Mornet offers us a history of that intel-
ligence withour providing us with the language in which it was articu-
lated. It is difficult to imagine how from an intelligence so inarticulate so
profound an ufterance could spring.
This does not mean rhar we musr resorr ro the endless genealogy of
revolutionary ideas that Mornet regarded as the logical alternative to his
own approach. on the conrrary, we should aim not to write the history of
particüLr uoit ideas, but to identify a field of political discourse, a set of
iinguistic parrerns and relationships that defined possible actioos and
urrerances and gave them meaning.ll We need, in short, to reconstitute
the political culture within which the cfeation of the revolutionary lan-
gathered in
suaie of 1789 became possible. It is the burden of the essays
the first two parts of this volume to §uggest that this political culture
began to emerge in the 1750s and 1760s and that its essential elements
were already clear by the beginning of Louis XVI',s reign.32 In the course
 ldeological origins of tbe Rewlation 2'
of these swo decades, politics broke out of the absolutist mold. Opinion
became opinion pabliqze: not a social function but a political category, the
tribanal du pablic, the court offinal appeal for monarchical authority, as
for its critics.33 Droit púlic - the nature of the polidcal order and the
conditions under which the nation existed as a collective body - became
the uldmate question upon which that tribunal was called to decide. And
the pabliciste as learned authority on the nature of droit pablic began to
give way to the publicist as man of letters whose ambidon it was to define
the language of the court of public opinion by laying dov¡n the meaning
of terms.34
The various effons to reconstitute the meaning of d.roit pablic and
redefine the nature ofthe social order in France were rernarkable in their
number and complexity. But I think they can be understood in terms of
three basic strands ofdiscour§e. These strands represent a disaggregation
of rhe attributes traditionally bound together in the concept of monar-
chical aurhority - reason, justice and will - and their reconceptualization
as the basis of competing definitions (or attempted redefinitions) of the
body politic. According to the tradidonal language of absolutism, monar-
chical authority is characterized as the exercise of justice, that iustice by
which each receives his due in a hierarchical sociery oforders and estates.
Jusdce is given effect by the royal will, which is preserved from ar-
birariness by reason and counsel. In the second part of the eighteenth
ceorury, this cluster of attributes seems to separate into three suands of
discourse, each characterized by the atalytical priority it gives to one or
úe other of these terms. Vhat I shall call the judicial discourse empha-
úzes jtstice. Vhat I shall call the political discourse emphasízes utill.
What I shall call the administradve discourse emphasizes re4§0n. These
üee competing vocabularies structure the language of opposidon to
rcoa¡chical authority, iust as they define the efforts and claims of its
&oders.
Tbe idea that royal power is essentially iudicial rernains a constant
rm€ of monarchical theorists throughout the eighteenth century. At
ft me time, it provides the essential topos in the padementary con-
rhioaalism rhat becomes so important in focusing the attack on royal
*qlaism in the 17)0s and afterward. It finds its clearest expression in
ft ¡r8¡rmsnt for a traditional constitution, a historically constituted
¡!¡'6f rhings which both defines and limits royal power, and which it is
t hrd,oa of royal authority to uphold. The essential notions in this
fu¡¡e are iustice as the recognition of that which is fitting and proper
üi*ch his due in a hierarchical society of orders and Estates); social
a cmstituted by prescription, tradition, and continuity; the exer-
Fblk power according to constitutionally prescribed legal forms;
porticipation understood in the most traditional sense of mak-
 310 Notes to pp. 22-5
our fathers of 17 89." (L'ancien régine, 216 lOld Resine, 167 -8). In this case, I
have followed the translation by Herr, Tocqaeúlle and tbe Old Regine, 6l-2,
including his interpolations. )
24. See, for example, Peter Gay, Voltaire's Poli¡ics (Princeton, 1959), and The
Enlightennent: An Interpretation; vol. 2, Tbe Science of Frudom (New York,
1969); Furio Diaz, Filosofia e politica nel Settecento france¡e (Turin, 1962).
21. BernardBailyn,TheldeologicalOriginsoftbeAmericanRetohtion(Cambridge,
Mass., 1967).
26. Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectulles de la Rfuolation franEaise (17 lt-
1787),6th ed. with preface by R. Pomeau (Paris, 1967), 1.
27. "Our study proposes precisely to examine this role of intelligence in the
preparation of the French Revolution," Mornet explains by way of introduc-
tion (Let originu intellectaelles,2). In his conclusion, he speaks of "this vast,
active, passionate awakening of intelligence lwhich] was not limited to Paris
or some large towns" (475). See also the text to note J0 in the present
chapter.
28. Mornet, Les origines intellecnelle¡, 411"
29. rbid.
30. tbid., 477.
31. [6¡ ¿ 5¡,ggestive move in this direction, informed by a sophisticaced linguistic
analysis, see the work of Régine Robin: "Fief et seigneurie dans le droit et
I'idéologie juridique á la fin du XVIII. siécle," Annale¡ bistoriqus de la
Rétohtion frangaise 41 (197 l): )54-602; Régine Robin and Denise Mai-
didier, "Polémique idéologique et affrontement discursif en 1776: Les
grands édits de Turgot et les remontrances du Padement de Paris," in J.
Guilhaumou, D. Maldidier, A. Prost, and R. Robin, Langage et idéologies: It
di¡coars comme objet de l'bistoire (Paris, 197 4), 13-80: Régine Robin, Hi¡toire ¿;
lingzistiqae (Paris,1974).The cabiers of 1789 have also been the subject c:
,an important study by George Taylor, "Revolutionary and Non-Revolution-
ary Content in the Cahiers of 1789: An Interim Report," Frencb Hi¡torir;.
Stadie¡ 7 (1971-2): 479-502.
)2. Several paragraphs, sketching arguments now developed more fully in lare:
essays in this volume, have been deleted here from the version of this essar
originally published.
On the tribznal da pablic, see Edmond Jean Franqois Barbier, Chroniqae d" -:
régence et da régne de Loti¡ XV (1718-1763), 8 vols. (Paris, 188)),6:¡:-
(March 1757), citing the denunciation of unauthorized writings concernrr¡:
the Damiens affair by Joly de Fleury, aucat généralof th!' parlement of Pr;.
For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 8, this volume. On the emergence of ri:..
rerm opinion pzblique more generally, seeJürgen Habermas, Straktaru.a¡;¿.
der Oeffentlicbáar7 (Neuwied, 1962), I04-18.
34. On the term pablicitte, see Ferdinand Brunot, Hi¡toire de la langae fran;::-,,
des originu ¿ 1900, new ed., lJ vols. (Paris, 1966-1972),6(i):)6; Wah--,::
von Wartburg,Franziis*cbes etymologischet tYiirterbuch,2l vols. (Bonn, 191-
6)), 9:)08. Malesherbes offered an interesting historical view of this pro.:ti
in the Remontrance¡ of the Cour des aides in 1775: See Chapter ). ::-s
volume.
 26 ldeological origins of tbe Retoh.tion
ing representations, that is, framing particularistic claims. This is the
prevailing language of parlementary attacks on ministerial despotism. It
is still perceptible in the more liberal constitutionalism of figures such as
Malesherbes, and it informs much of the resistance to monarchical re-
form in the immediate prerevolutionary period.
Alongside this discourse of justice, however, and increasingly in ten-
sion with it, there emerges a discourse of will. Again this remains a
characterisdc of defenses of royal sovereignty in more or less traditional
terms. But it also becomes the cenral feature of a vocabulary of opposi-
tion to monarchical authority that is couched in explicitly political, rather
than quasi-judicial or quasi-constitutional terms. In this discourse, social
order is defined not in terms of justice, law, prescription, adjudication,
but in terms of will, liberty, contingency, choice, participation. If, in the
judicial discourse, will is opposed to justice as the arbitrary and con-
tingent to the lawful and constituted, in the political discourse will is
opposed to will. Royal power is despotic, nor because it is the exercise of
will per se, bur because that will is royal or particular, not national or
general. The discourse of will provides the dominant language in Rous-
seau and Mably, in some of the works of rhe radical parlementary pro-
pagandists, and eventually in Sieyés's famous pamphlet Qu'ett-ce qle le
Tier¡ Etat?
This discourse of will can in turn be distinguished from a rhird dis-
course, a discourse of reason. In its terms, the ancient constitution has
become a present contradiction, of which the arbiuariness of royal will is
but one expression. The contingency of royal will must give way, not ro
the assertion of the political will of rhe nation, but to the exercise of
reason and enlightenmenr. The social order must be reconstituted on rhe
basis of nature - which is to say, propefty and civic equality - in order to
transform political contingency into rational order, arbirary governmenr
into radonal administration, Iaw into education, and representation inro
an institutional means for the expression of rational social choice. Thus,
in contrast to the discourse of will which frequently appeals to rhe model
of the ancient city states, the discourse of reason is a discourse of mod-
ernity that emphasizes the growth of civilization and the progress of civil
society. Elements of this language pervade much of the political thought
of the Enlightenment, as well as the thinking of some of the enlightened
administrators of the period; it is at its clearesr in the discourse of Turgot
and the physiocrats, whose aim is ro rranspose the problem of social
order into the language of social science. At the end of the Old Regime,
it sustains the reform program of the monarchy for greater admin-
istrative uniforrnity, civil rights, and fiscal equality, and for the represen-
tation of social interests through the participation of property owners in
the rational conduct of local governmenr by provincial assemblies.
 Ideological origins of tbe Reaolation 27
The emergence, elaboration, and interpretation of these three dis-
courses, I think it can be argued, defined the political culture that
emerged in France in the later part of the eighteenth century and pro-
vided the ideological framework that gave explosive meaning to the
events that destroyed the Old Regime. The origins of the political lan-
guage of 1789, the language that came to constitute the grounding of the
new order, cannot be found solely in any one of them. Instead, it seems
ro have been created from the competitioo among them. The revolution-
-ies replaced the historical jumble they characterized as "feudalism"
=-:rh a ratiooal social order grounded in nature; in doing so, they based
'::ir reconstitution of society on such principles as property, public
-:jin , and the rights of man. To this extent, they achieved the goals and
;;:epred alatguage defined within the discourse of reason. At the same
- -:. they established responsible government sub ject to the rule of law
;:: insisred that public authority be limited constitutionally in a system
:: ::)resenrative government. To this extent, they fulfilled the purposes
i:: .:.;cepted some of the language of the constitutionalism that I have
r-:.s:.;l¿red with the discourse of iustice. But all of this was construed as
r-: ¿--: of will, as an expression of the general will of a nation that declared
:-:-: ,fne and indivisible in the assertion of its inalienable sovereignty.
'* :: --nis was bracketed, in short, within the discourse of will. The result
c u ¿ --:a¡sformed political discourse with its own tensions and contradic-
: : -: z'hich in turn played their part in patterning the history of the
i-:'.:--jon afrcr 1189.
 Notes

Throughout the book, translations from French works are the author's, unless
otherwise indicated.

Introdution
l. Alfred Cobban, The Social lnterpretation of tbe Frencb Rewlztion (Cambridge,
t964).
2. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The St¡zcttre of Scientific Reoolztioru,2d ed. (Chica8o,
r970).
3. Franqois F:.lret, Penter la Rtaolation frangaise (Paris, 1978),47. My translation
differs slightly from that in the English version of this c/ork, lnterpreting tbe
Frencb Rnolation, tr. Elborg r'orster (Cambridge, l98l),27-8.
4. The shift'is well ¡eflected in Frangois Furet, Iz tbe tVorAsbop of History
(Chicago, 1982).
1. See, for example, the essays in Keith Michael Baker, ed., Tbe Frexcb Reaola-
tion and tbe Cre¿tion of Modern Politic¿l Caltare: vol. l, Tbe Political Czltare of
tbe Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), and in Colin Lucas, ed., The Frencb Rcrolatian
¿nd the Creation of Modera Politic¿l Culttre: vol. 2, Tbe Political Ciltue of tbe
F¡ench Reular¡¿z (Oxford, 1988).
¡- As in the studies of Mona Ozouf, Fe¡tiuls and tbe Frencb Reulztion, tr. Alaa
Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and Bronislaw Baczko, Ltmiére¡ de l'utopie
(Paris, 1978).
-- For a brief definition of this approach, see Lucian V. Pye, "Political Culture,"
in David L. Sills, ed., lnternationzl Encyclopedia of tbe Social Science¡, l8 vols.
(New York, 1968-79), 12:218-24. Principal works include Lucian V. Pye
ud Sidney Verba, eds., Politic¿l Cal¡zre and Political Dnelopment (Princeton,
l96l); Lucian V. Pye, Politic¡, Personality, and Nation Brilding: Barm¿'¡ Se¿¡ch
¡tr ldentity (New Haven, 1962); Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Yerba, Tbe
Citic Calttre: Political Attittde¡ and Democraqt in Fite Nation¡ (Princeton,
i963).
I As the reader will recognize, it draws in somewhat eclectic fashion on the

107
308 Notes to pp. 4-18
insights of the "Cambridge" school of the history of political discourse (for a
recent statement, seeJ. G. A. Pocock, "Inrroduction: the State of the Art," in
Pocock, Virtte, Connerce, and History [Cambridge, 1985], 1-34); on Michel
Foucault's version of discourse analysis (see especially Michel Foucauk, Tbe
Arcbeolog of Knouledge [New York, L9721; on Marshall Sahlins's reflections
on the historical relationship of culture and practice (see Marshall Sahlins,
Islands of History {Chicaeo,l985l); and on rhe critique of the "positivity of rhe
social" offered by Eroesto I¿clau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy @ondon, 1985).
9. On this point, see Sahlins, I¡land¡ of Hittory, l5O.
10. Furet, Pen¡er la Ré.uolation frangaise, 42,72.
11. Ibid., 71.
12. Lynn Flunt, review of Furet, Pen¡er la Réttolation franEaise, in History and
Tbeory 20 (1981): 313-23.
13. Lynn Hu¡t, Politic¡, Ctlttre, and Cla¡¡ in tbe Frencb Rettobtion (Berkeley,
1984),20.
14. Ibid., 24, 2t.
1r. Ibid.,26.
16. rbid.,44.
17. Ibid.
ChaPter I
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tbe Sawge Mind (Chicago, 1966), 16-36.
2. tbid.,22.
3. Michel Foucault, Tbe Archaeologl of Knoutledge (1969), tr. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York, 1972), 126-31. The following discussion draws generally
on Foucault's approach to what he calls the "historical a priori" (127).
4. For what I take to be an essenrially similar view of this process, see J. G. A.
Pocock, "Political languages and Their Implications," in Pocock, Politic¡.
Langtage and Tine: Estay on Political Tboagbt and History (New York,
t97t), )-41.
5. See George Lichtheim, "The Concept of Ideology," History and TheorT 4
G964-5): 164-70; Emmet Kennedy, "'Ideology'from Destutt de Tracy to
Marx," Journal of tbe H*tory of ldeas 4O (1979): 353-68. As a result of recent
work, the Idéologues are now much better understood. See Sergio Moravia,
Il tranonto dell iilzmini¡no: Filoufia e politica nella ¡ocietá francese (1770-
1810d(Bari,1968),and Ilpensierodeglildéologaa:ScienzaefilosofiainFranci¿
(1780-1815) (Florence, 1974); Georges Gusdorl l*s sciences bamaine¡ er k
pensée occidenlale: voL. 8, La conscience rérolztionnaire, le¡ ld.éologaes (Par§
1978); Emmet Kennedy, A Philosopbe in tbe Age of Rerol*tion: Destatt de Tr«7
and tlte Origins of "Ideologt" (Philadelphia, 1978); Martin Staum, Caba¡b:
Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the Prench Rmohtion (Princetoo,
1980).
6. See Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in Geertz, The I*
te¡pretation 0f Cilltilres (New York, 1971), 193-233.
7. Frangois Furet, Penser la Réaol*ion frangaise (Paris,l978). Further reference¡
to this work will cite the English version, Interpreting tbe Frencb Reulation, w-
Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981). I have considered the argument of tl¡;.
 Notes to pp. 18-22 309
work more fully in a review essay, "Enlightenment and Revolution in France:
Old Problems, Renewed Approaches," Joarnal of Modern Hittory 53 (1981):
281-303. For a brief review of the historiographical collapse of the broadly
Marxist consensus regarding the origins of the French Revolution, see
Villiam Doyle, Tbe Origins of tbe French Renlation (Oxford, 1980),7-40.
8. Furet, Interpreting the Frencb Reulltion, 27-8.
9. J. L. Talmon, Tbe Origins of Totalitarian Democracl (London, 1952). See
Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of ldeas,"
History and Tbeory I (196il: 3-5).
10. Daniel Roche, Le siicle des lzniires en protince: Acadérnie¡ et académiciens
protinciaax, 1680-1789,2 vols. (Paris, 1978), l:206.
11. AlexisdeTocqueville,L'¿ncienrégineetlaRfuobtion, inTocqueville,Oeaares
complites, ed. J. P. Mayer, 2(i), 6th ed. (Paris, L952), lgt, emphasis added.
Although I have not followed the Gilbert translation at all points, I will also
cite relevant page numbers in the standard English edition, Tbe Old Regime
and tbe French Retolation, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y., 19rr), in
this case 140.
12. Tocqueville, L'ancien régime, 200 (Otd Reeine, 147).
13. Tocqueville, L'ancien régime, 19) (Old ReSine, L4O).
14. Tocqueville, L'ancien régine, 196 (Old Regine, 142).
l). Tocqueville, L'ancien régine, 197 (Old Regine, 143).
16. [René louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d'Argensoa),Joarnal et mémoires dt
marqais dArgenson, ed. J.B. Rathéry, 9 vols. (Paris, 1859-67),6:464 (3
September l75l). Impending revolution became a recurrenr theme in d'Ar-
genson's journal during the 1750s, as the struggle betq/een crown and parle-
ments unfolded: See, for example, 7 :23; 7:JL; 7 :242; 7:271; 7:29); 8:Li)-
9:294;9370. Lo¡d Chesterfield expressed a similar view in 1712; See Charles
Aubertin, L'erprit pilblic aa XVIII" siicle, 2d ed. (Paris, 1873), 279, n. 2.
!7 . Joarnal et ménoires dt marqz* d Argenson, 3:115 (26J,¡ne 1714). For a concise
general discussion ofthese constitudonal conflicts, seeJean Egret, Lotit XV
et l'oppotition parlementaire, 1715-1774 (Paris, 1970).
18. Tocqueville, L'ancien régine, 168-77 (Old Regine, 108-20).
19. Tocqueville, L'ancien régime, L74-71 (Old Resine, Ll6-17I
20. Tocqueville, L'ancien régime, 214 (Old Resine, 165).
21. Tocqueville, L'ancien régine, 209 (Old Resine, 158).
22. Tocqueville, L'ancien régime, 213-16, 190 (Old Regine, 161-7,117). See
fuchard Herr, Tocqaeoille and tbe Old Regine (Princeton, 1962), esp. t6-63.
ll. "It was this desire to introduce political liberty in the midst of ideas and
institutions that were incompatible with it but that had become ingrained in
our tastes and habits - it was this desire that has, over the last sixty years,
produced so many vain attempts to create free government, followed by such
disastrous revolutions. Finally, tired by so much effort, disgusted by such a
painful and sterile undertaking, many Frenchmen abandoned their second
obiecive [political liberty] in order to return to their first [efficient admin-
istration and social equality] and found themselves welcoming the realization
üat to live in equality under a master still had, afte¡ all, a certain attraction.
Thus it is that we resemble much more today the economists of 1750 than