Hello, my name is Karen O'Brien.
I'm the head of humanities at Oxford University, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the 2020 Bestman annual lecture.
Of course, it's an annual lecture like no other. We normally greatly look forward to doing this in person.
But we're so delighted that with the support of the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities,
we're able to bring this to you from the Voltaire Foundation. And I'm very much looking forward to hearing the lecture today.
A particular pleasure for me, because as well as being head of humanities, I'm also myself a scholar of the Enlightenment.
It's my great pleasure to introduce as the introducer of the lecture, Professor Gregory Brown,
who is a senior research fellow at the Voltaire Foundation and himself a considerable expert on the literature and drama of the Enlightenment,
including Bo Marché. And he's also been for a number of years, the general editor of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment book series,
a book series that recently made a transition to a new publisher and a new way of working.
And he has so ably and so importantly, led that transition on behalf of the Voltaire Foundation and the University of Oxford.
And he's going to introduce our enormously distinguished bestman lecturer, Professor William Doyle.
Over to you, Gregory, and welcome. And I hope everybody hugely enjoys this special occasion.
Thank you, Professor O'Brien. So I'd like to welcome the live audience.
And I'd like to remind everyone that questions for Professor Doyel may be posted in the YouTube live chat, which you'll see below.
And those will be addressed after the completion of the lecture. And the panel of respondents.
So over the past 40 years, the French Revolution has experience something of a renaissance within the
humanities as a point of conjuncture of several different important tendencies.
It's continued to be a focal point for advanced studies and social structure and scholars.
The revolution have integrated important thinking about the role of the state and economy with cultural and linguistic theory.
The wave of scholarship that rose to a crescendo in 1989 has not ever really crested,
due in part to the activity of a generation of scholars who entered Bazille in its wake.
For that generation, William Doyle has been one of the most influential of historians for undergraduate students in the Anglophone world.
Doyle's name is recognisable as the author of The Origins of the French Revolution,
first published in 1980, and the Oxford history, the French Revolution, which first appeared in 1989.
And he's been updated twice. Most recent edition in 2013.
For postgraduate students and advanced researchers, Doyle's editorial oversight of the Oxford Handbook with the Assad regime published in 2011,
has provided a foundation for appreciating both the dynamism of the old regime and how the revolution constructed
what it considered the former state of affairs prior to 1789 as a paradigm of obsolescence and activism.
In his almost significant monograph, Venality, The Sale of Offices in 18th century France published in 1886,
Professor Doyle brought to fruition long standing rethinking of the social conflicts of the late old regime,
focussed not on totalising categories such as class or order, but on specific sites of conflict amongst elites.
Whereas the idea of stress zones between nobles and bourgeois had been posited since the early 1970s,
Doyle and his book demonstrated how the roughly seventy thousand venal officers and the families which held them constituted at once a dynamic social
network in and of itself a powerful driver of political change from within the state and a set of reference points for changing conceptions of status.
In his most recent book, France in the Age of Revolution, regimes old and new from the 14th to Napoleon Bonaparte,
for all that's considered the rise and fall of the absolu, the state and its reconstitution.
Doyle's essays here highlight the extent to which the long 18th century now appears to us, much less a world historical hinge or an epistemic break.
Instead, through rigorous research and sensitive analysis, Doyle reveals a continuity of elites, especially for the decades from the 70s and 70s,
the 80s weekends, even as the concepts, vocabulary and representations used to exercise social political power were reinvented.
What has long been notable about Professor Doyle's work and what makes it such a privilege for us to
have him deliver this year's best forum and lecture is how he brings together the study of economics,
of language and meaning. And if the exercise of state power does work consistently,
provides us with avenues for research that have both spoken to and enlarged the
interdisciplinary and international audience for eighteenth century studies.
For those of us who are specialists, historians of the revolution, Doyle's work has provided a crucial bridge from the post-war generations.
Rethinking of economic and social change.
The 1950s and 60s to the more institutionally and politically oriented work on state power of the 1970s and 1980s.
And then the linguistically oriented study of political language and of culture in the 1990s and since.
His work has been an important. As important for the questioning of the Marxist paradigm of the origins of the revolution,
as bourgeois as it has been to questioning the tendency of scholars to limit our focus to Parisian Jacobin political activists,
Doyle has been a forceful advocate for understanding the importance of culture and belief,
including religious belief is not reducible to economic interest.
And at the same time for appreciating the events of the age on a broad scale national, continental and global.
It is therefore for me and I think for all of us,
a particular delight to hear from this masterful teacher and influential scholar as he offers us his take on this central question,
if not the constantly rising bourgeoisie with utopian cloud conjurers of the Enlightenment who were in fact, the French revolutionaries.
We now welcome to the Torch, the attempt to deliver the 2020 Voltaire Foundation best lecture.
Professor of history, emeritus and fellow of the British Academy, William Doyle.
Thank you very much, Greg. Thank you very much, Karen.
And thank you to the Voltaire Foundation for inviting me to give this lecture in this unprecedented situation.
Now, although I can't really say I ever knew him, when I look back, I realise that every stage of my student life at Oxford,
from admission to my college through Avivah in schools and onto acceptance as the doctoral candidate I met and was beholden to to Trevor Ropa.
And since he was a considerable authority, amongst many other things,
on the Enlightenment lecture at the Voltaire Foundation seems an appropriate occasion to pay him.
Pay him a belated if if passing tribute. Now, notoriously, he never produced the great book of which he dreamt.
But he was a brilliant essayist. And one of his principles in this field was, and I quote, It's a great mistake to give away too much in a title.
Now, I'm sure he was right.
And you may think that I should have borne it in mind in selecting my title today, because isn't it quite obvious who the French revolutionaries were?
They were men and they were all men who overthrew the old regime of absolute monarchy and aristocratic privilege and sought to replace it with you,
one based on representative government and guaranteed political and civil liberty and equality to secure these things against reactionary enemies.
They were compelled to take increasingly extreme steps, which only swell the ranks of those enemies ultimately antagonising most of Europe.
But in the process, they laid the foundations of modern political culture.
Now, it was always a story that everybody interested in politics or public affairs, not just history,
has had to know something about and could scarcely help taking a view on whether for or against.
But until the 1960s, it was whether you approved of it or deplored it, an agreed story.
And when you wanted to know about the revolution, you went straight to the authoritative texts, accounts in English,
broadly echoed surveys by Joshua IFAB, who just died all by his natural heirs, it seemed, out there.
So, boom, they offered what Subu like to call a classic version of the French Revolution.
A classic story was, in fact, an interweaving of two interpretative stand strands.
The basic narrative was forged during the revolution itself in 1790, three to four, an orthodoxy promoted by the Jacobin Club.
It depicted the revolution as a struggle for liberty and equality in which bourgeois and popular forces overthrew the powers
of aristocracy privilege and then went to defend their gains against counterrevolutionary enemies at home and abroad.
These enemies were so determined that they deserved no quarter.
And the problem for true revolutionaries throughout the first four years of struggle was to eliminate successive waves of moderates, moderates,
Menasha fascists feel Gironde the moderates who, in the name of bringing the revolution to an end, were prepared to compromise with its enemies.
And eventually it was found that only terror worked. A regrettable necessity for apps, but a necessity nonetheless,
and integral to the revolution and the way those who brought terror to an end by overthrowing Robespierre began
the moment he and it were gone to backtrack on the gains of five years in the so-called Thermidor in reaction.
It showed how necessary it had been.
The revolution was now over, and it was no coincidence that most of the classic accounts and derivatives ended in July 1794,
leaving the period between then and the advent of Napoleon a largely trackless stereographic for wilderness.
Anyway, that was Strand one bought into it was woven in the first half of the 20th century, a Marxist overview of the revolution at this level,
it was in the famous words of Sobule,
the crowning moment of a long economic and social evolution which has made the bourgeoisie the mistress of world.
In economic terms, with its attack on feudalism and the jungle of economic restrictions symbolised by privilege,
it marked the triumph of capitalism in social terms.
It marked the coming to power of capitalism's products and beneficiaries.
The bourgeoisie. And in the popular movement of the soul culotte, it also offered a glimpse of the future.
Predicted by Marx is that when ordinary working people would take over power from the bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That moment had not yet arrived because for the time being, the son culotte to accept that burgeois leadership.
But already the Bush Rasi needed.
Role names as the decisive role played by the Parisian populace and peasants in 1789 showed not to mention the subsequent great popular show day,
which brought down the monarchy, purged the moderate Gironde to force the convention into accepting terror.
Order of the day. And accordingly, in the year two at seventeen ninety three to four.
The bourgeoisie were prepared to acquiesce in a whole range of what became
known in the classic count as RTC pasticcio anticipations of future socialism.
But with the overthrow of Robespierre, the bourgeoisie shook off populism, turning finally to Napoleon to underwrite the triumph.
So who in this classic account were the French revolutionaries?
They were the ones who went the whole way, who triumphed in 1793,
who swore to the revolution's enemies at home and abroad and saved it from destruction.
They were the ones who introduced a progressive programme of economic.
Well, on everything that they've done since 1789, that track record of CVD and patriotism, they were the Montignac who ran the Jacobin Club, who saw.
It appears the raw myth of the French Revolution,
but Cobban made very little impact until the arguments of that lecture were incorporated 10 years later into his book,
The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution,
where he kicked off a debate whose effect was to blow a classic version of the French Revolution wide open.
Not only did he put a new interpretation on a broadly agreed set of facts, he challenged those facts themselves.
The story is familiar enough, and I'm sure I don't need to rehearse it in detail yet again.
He argued that most of the men of 1789 or 1793 were not capitalists,
that the revolution did not usher in all conquering capitalism, but was a triumph of the conservative landowning classes.
He made a wide range of other suggestions, too, most of which stood the test of time a lot less well.
But the most important thing he did was to trigger that wide ranging debate and waves of new research whose results called into question.
Many other aspects of the classic narrative is the founding father of what became known as revisionism.
Now, across the channel, a parallel role was played by Frost.
I feel a bit, whereas the main weight of Hobbins attack fell on the Marxist strand of the classic narrative.
The X Marxist fully denounced the Jacobins strain and what he called the revolutionary catechism.
Under the weight of a generation of debate and new research,
the classic story now reduced from canonical supremacy to the status of one disputable
interpretation amongst many held pieces so that by the time of the revolution's bicentenary in 1989,
most people working in the field had turned away from the social and economic categories,
which are so large in Cletis classicism to emphasise the more nebulous areas of political culture.
The role of ideas, language, discourse, a body of approaches which have come to be known as post revisionism.
Now, few revisionists seem prepared to come out openly and say it,
but basically they've taken this back to a very good idea and one that has a marriage of being acknowledged by contemporaries,
the revolution as the fruit of enlightenment. Now, everybody at the time thought that was self-evident.
Whether they were members of the assemblies or the Jacobin clubs,
claiming endlessly that the revolution was the product of philosophy and the abandonment of bigotry, superstition and routine,
and setting up a pantheon to glorify the remains of figures,
Lightfoot and Rousseau all counterrevolutionaries blame a conspiracy of godless
philosophers and Freemasons bent on destroying church king and the social order.
So what in these terms were the key ideas that the men of Eighty-Nine were hoping to establish?
If we're looking for who the French revolutionaries were, we need to identify.
What the first place to look is in the revolution's founding manifesto.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man on the Citizen and more generally in the new order that the
constituent assembly tried to lay the foundations of successive regimes between 1789 and 1795 revere.
That declaration, and when the convention moved from the Man Edge to the Thriller, is palace in May 1793.
The new chamber was dominated by a text of it in letters of Go.
So let's try to summarise this revolutionary ideology. The revolution is of some danjean, I believed in national sovereignty.
That's the essence of the. That's true on the 17th of June, 1789.
From that moment in their eyes, the king was no longer suffering.
That didn't make most of them antimonopoly. There was some Republicanism in 1789, but really not very much.
What the founding revolutionaries were against was despotism, despotism in any hands.
Excessive concentration. Vision of revolution was about establishing the rule of law in all circumstances.
And under the rule of law, power should emanate from below. Not absolved of.
Guarantees all equal. But it's.
He's a bit of a lag from Professor Doyle's You're Not Feed right now.
Constitutional implications to that doctrine rooted again in the thought of the Enlightenment.
Freedom to enjoy your property meant freedom to buy and sell it,
economic freedom and the whole record of the constituent assembly as a governing body shows.
I think that its members believed in what they saw as the economic law of nature as much as the political.
Economic activity should be free, unconstrained by feudal burdens.
Internal customs, corporate privileges, organised labour price controls, all these things were abolished, abandoned or prohibited.
Between August 1789 and June 1791.
Always in the name of a beneficial freedom.
So these principles that universal and their validity was what the revolution was supposed to be all about.
And the true revolutionaries were presumably those who believed in them.
Let's see then who this might letton and exclude. First to go, rather surprising ones.
But the case against some, it seems to me, is more than credit credible.
I mean, the song culotte. To start with the South, you lot didn't even exist during the constituent assembly.
Michael Sonnen shows has taught us that the name was first used and it's familiar
sense only in the spring of 1792 by the journalist Antoine Louis Goss',
US later a prominent and vocal Gironde.
I'll come back to that. Secondly, the assault lot ideology wanted to emerge,
rejected any idea that property was sacrosanct and indeed any link between property and political rights.
The subcu lot called for universal manhood suffrage irrespective of wealth.
And they believed that it was legitimate to limit the wealth of some in the interests of those who had less.
And in any case. Thirdly, they didn't really believe in representative government.
They preferred direct democracy despite the manifest impossibility of governing a country the size of France.
According to some principles. Falsely, they certainly didn't believe in any form of free market.
They believed in the maximum price controls, state guaranteed supplies of basic commodities.
Now, for some historians, all this has made them look like Proteau socialists,
although Sabu was honest enough to conclude with evident regret that they were not really proletarians.
Seems to me that with all these beliefs, they're much better seen as backward looking seekers' after a vanished world of governmental paternalism.
And what's obvious is that they were deeply opposed to much of the ideology of 1789.
There were a special interest group and not a large one in a country of almost 30 million people who behaved with indifference,
tells the interests or desires of the breast of French nation.
It's just that by the fortunate chance of having national authorities sitting unprotected in their midst and mercy,
they were able to enforce their will for a time. Now,
what gave them the reputation of revolutionaries was the praise heaped on them by the Montignac
who after initial hesitations claimed to be their spokesmen and protectors in 1793 or.
The Montana were the originators of the Jacobins strain in the classic version of the revolution.
But how far do they themselves really qualify as upholders of the ideology of somebody that you know?
They're the ones who run the terror. And the self-styled revolutionary government associated with it in the year two.
It was a centralised authoritarian system of government with almost arbitrary powers vested in those neo in tendency.
Representatives on mission.
There was next to no separation of powers under revolutionary government, executive ministries had been abolished in favour of committees of deputies.
There was no independent judiciary and the revolutionary tribunal was the sort of special court that the men of 1789 considered completely legitimate.
There was no freedom of the press or opinion, critical newspapers were closed down or had their presses smashed.
And a thoughtless remark in the wrong hearing could send someone to the guillotine.
There's little respect for property either in the year two with threats of redistribution,
redistribution to needy patriots and false loans on the rich.
And then finally, there's no free trade and perhaps the most tightly controlled economy the world had ever seen.
Till then, the regime of maximum.
The Republic of the Year to, in fact, was a dictatorship, embodying the opposite of almost everything that the men of 89 had set to step.
And in so far as some of the most prominent characters of the year, two men like Robespierre or Barra,
had also been amongst the idealists of 1789, they had abandoned the revolution's original founding principles.
And we can symbolise it, I suppose.
While the famous contrast between Robespierre of 1794 who sent opponents to the guillotine and his lonely denunciation of capital punishment in 1789.
The fact is that the government of the year to which called itself revolutionary, was nothing of the sort.
If anything, it's anti revolutionary government.
A very distinct version of this argument has been put forward to a good deal of scholarly outrage by Jonathan Israel.
Now, there's a soft answer to this sort of charge,
and it was offered right from the start in Robespierre's famous distinction between constitutional government for the enjoyment of the revolution,
fruits and revolutionary government for achieving them.
You had to be practical. This was an emergency.
And with foreign, domestic and domestic enemies threatening to overturn the the infant republic, normal constitutional government had to be suspended.
So what distinguished a Montignac or a Jacobin was a willingness to sacrifice principles to practicality.
In the emergency circumstances of 1792, before it was necessary to execute the king,
necessary to take extraordinary measures to pursue the war above all necessary to appease and not antagonise Paris and its turbulent populace.
Put another way. Those who saw these things as necessities were willing to sacrifice the principles of 1789 under pressure of circumstances,
even to the extent finally in June 1793 of allowing the Salkey Lott to urge the national
representation itself and get rid of the group of local deputies whom they hated.
This year under. Now, I'm not the first to suggest it.
That was perhaps found on Brodo in a throwaway line in the identity of France.
This whole thing was so good at stimulating that. Thoroughly unsubstantiated.
That the true revolutionaries, he called them, were not the Montignac and triumphed in June 1793.
They were the zeron down at whose expense? That triumph was achieved.
And if you look at the record, as Alison Patrick did as long ago as 1972, through an analysis of voting in the Convention on Pivotal Issues,
it's the zero Zealander who emerge as the ones not prepared to compromise its principles.
Just because the convention was surrounded in Paris by the city.
So Sheila Gironde believed in national sovereignty rather than the self conferred
popular sovereignty of a few thousand persons representing provincial constituencies.
They they couldn't see why Paris had the right to dictate to the rest of the nation,
especially when the deputies of Paris numbered amongst them people like Mao,
whose solution to every problem was massacre and whose followers had put that reflex into practise.
In September 1792. Although it's taken popular action.
All right, to bring down the Bastille massacre. And mobs taking the law into their own hands had not been what the revolution was supposed to be.
Paris also wanted the king killed. Indeed, ideally, Paris wanted no trial either regarding the monarch.
Sighs You stand, Robespierre argued, as guilty by the very act of insurrection.
It's the zero order who insisted on a trial. All right.
So they voted him guilty along with everybody else, because there really was no other possible verdict.
But they then wanted to proceed in an extremely regular and principled way if the sovereign nation at large really believed him guilty as well.
It should have the chance to conform its representatives decision.
And if the nation was sovereign, it should have the chance to exercise the clemency,
which was always a sovereign's inalienable prerogative, especially when the condemned man was the nation's former king.
The way proposed for doing it was by referendum. It's a political idea with a long but ambiguous future.
First floated as a way of consulting the sovereign nation by the.
PTO in 17, if nine secret.
But all these are questions of principle.
Questions of law, which should be beyond the transient pressures bought by a Parisian bubbs, they lost votes on these issues.
But the Gironde so often still referred to as moderates, were nothing of the sort.
They indignantly rejected the description at the time.
They were radicals who stood for first principles rather than forced principles.
And the same is true if we turn to economic questions this year, Rhondda opposed the maximum.
They genuinely believed in the enlightenments economic doctrine that production and exchange should be allowed to operate naturally,
freed of artificial constraints. Quite apart from the fact that price controls were an interference with rights of property,
controls disrupted the market, made it function less efficiently.
The revolution had provided the opportunity for the principles of economic freedom to be embraced wholeheartedly.
After 30 years of governmental dithering, uncertainty, second thoughts on the part of the dying old regime.
No wonder the sunk zero for them, the revolution had brought an opportunity.
Just stop all that flirting with fancy theories which pushed up the cost of
living and to get back to a moral economy of just prices and assured supplies.
Well, eventually, after much foot dragging, the Montignac accepted that they had to go along with this.
It was the only practical thing to do. And so the maximum was introduced in the teeth of Jiron, the opposition.
In fact, a lot of things happened over that winter in the teeth of German opposition.
And this is the greatest of all the lessons taught us by Alice and Patrick.
But again, one that doesn't seem to have sunk in fully. They did not have a reliable majority in the convention.
They were not even the largest voting bloc.
They lost most of the big votes on those they won were largely achieved because so many Montani are right at home in April to get things done.
Were absent from Paris on mission.
So the purge of 29 Gironde our deputies on the 2nd of June 1793 was not necessary to clear the way for a Montignac majority.
The Montana could normally muster that already.
And that makes all the more sense of the doubts that so many even avam had about the legitimacy of the purge,
the necessity from the fact that some culotte seem to be threatening the very existence of the convention if they're all too vocal.
Critics were not silenced. It's a choice between a purged convention or perhaps no convention at all.
And things have come to this pass in the view of many more, Jenya, because this year on that seemed incapable of keeping their mouth shut.
Don't even bend. Just shut up and stop attacking Paris.
But talented orators, as several of them undoubtedly were, they found it hard to resist the allure of windy rhetoric.
It's the oratory of future Jiron time which whipped the Legislative Assembly into war,
fever against the lonely advice of Robespierre and the Jacobin Club.
Over the winter of 1790, one to two, and then when the French began to win battles the following autumn,
it's at Gironde urging that the convention offered paternity and help to all people seeking to recover their liberty.
A wildly open ended offer which was discreetly rescinded in April 17 93.
That Montani our majority again. Some Montani are including Robespierre,
had even denounced Gironde dire rhetoric about human rights for provoking the great slave rebellion in Sandman.
It's true that several months after this year on that went to the guillotine,
it was the Montignac convention which promulgated the first general slave emancipation in history.
But again, that was a practical response to the situation on the ground in sand demand rather than evidence of any long standing convictions.
Several futures here. And I, by contrast, had been very active during its brief existence in the Army.
Then, while the French abolitionist society co-founded by Briseno and in fact emancipation was
first proclaimed incentivised by commissioners chosen and sent out on the recommendation of.
And after the purge of this year on down the Montand, ya had recalled those commissioners as suspects.
But by then it was too late. Then a further example of their radical credentials is offered by the surplus of so much
play was once made by left wing analysts with this radical debating club of 1792 one.
And its newspaper, the Bush Defamer writers from Marx to match yes.
Saw it as a its deliberations as the cutting edge of social and political radicalism.
A foretaste of Jacobin ism of the year, too. But as long ago as 1985, Gary Cates reminded us that it was largely fut. young Dan Rather, the Molton Ya,
who ran the surpluses and continued its work as a publishing house after it was closed down.
In the reaction following the flight to Burhenn, its founder, Fouché, who struck through,
stuck with the Constituent Assembly's religious policy long enough to become a constitutional bishop.
He went to the guillotine as as you know, the.
As I noted earlier, the very term South culotte was first used by a Jiron down and at that stage with positive approval.
Michael Sonnenschein, who reminded us this as intriguingly,
discovered that the Robespierre initially denounced Fut. year on DA as protectors of the Salkey LA.
It's also been shown, I think, that the man who would emerge as Gironde in 1792 23 had already, on the eve of the revolution,
begun to think about representative government rather than the direct democracy that Rousseau declared was the
only legitimate sort of Republicanism on which the Montoneros and some culotte kept mouthing allegiance to.
Throughout the two. These theorists in the circles around umbrage, so who's the first identifiable leader of those late to the court and Clavier,
whom we shoehorned into the finance ministry in the spring of 1792?
For that, the values articulated by Rousseau could only be made through a sort of moral dictatorship that would
smother all the other values that a proper system of government should be committed to protecting.
They thought it obvious, as indeed Rousseau himself admitted, that his ideas could not work in any polity larger than a small city state.
Or take all the work that's been done over the last generation or so on the revolution and women.
What it's shown is that the more Tandia, again, along with Rousso, we're extremely wary of women's involvement in public affairs and politics.
But then a woman's place was at home looking after the men, having children, bringing them up as patriots this year.
By contrast, were much more liberal towards the private and public claims of women.
It was the zero down dominated last rump of the Legislative Assembly, which legalised divorce in September 1792.
The Zeron down were supported by the most prominent revolutionary so-called Amazons like Golab,
the Googe Ortel one year they're married to one of their political powerhouses, was a household of Madam Ronno, whom the Montani I really hate.
And the leading intellectual spokesman for values that this year on that espoused in the legislative and the convention,
Kondor say, had a long record in arguing for complete political equality for women.
Now, that really was revolutionary. So much so that it was not achieved in France until 1944.
It was doubtless no more than a coincidence, though, a striking one that the Montignac convention closed down women's political clubs on the
very day that the leading Zerelda were condemned to death on the 30th of October 17,
93. And it's instructive to read the transcripts of the trial.
Despite insistent calls from the Socky Lotter over the summer, the Montana were very dilatory in bringing them to trial at all.
Even they recognised that at the moment of the purge, none of its victims had really done anything deserving trial before the revolutionary tribunal.
And Lee Whaley as persuasively argued, in fact, that this year on down perished for what happened after the purge rather than before it.
For the way many of them evaded very loose arrest to throw in their lot with the provincial rebels of the so-called federalist revolts.
And they were thereby were presumed to have incited Charlotte Coday from the federalist hotbed of Qom to murder the son culotte hero.
Mara, this conduct was enough to open them to the charge for which they were eventually condemned,
that of conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of the republic.
But if I'm right about their basic radicalism, it makes their cries from the DOP of Vive la Republique seem more than just the bitter reaction of
victims of a rigged show trial and their defiant singing Lamar SAYES on their way to the guillotine.
A final heroic gesture. Now, in the light of all this year, too far from being a radical high point,
looks much more like a conservative crack down during the defeat and aftermath of a civil war,
a suspension of liberties in the name of national security.
Now, that doesn't make it the culmination of a long led plan for a dictatorship by a Machiavellian Robespierre and his friends,
as Jonathan Israel has argued. But he is right. I think in arguing that the zero represented the core values of the revolution.
So far from being the essence of the revolution, the republic of the two looks much more like an aberration, much more like a loss of direction.
They are the quintessence of the revolution. Lay elsewhere as the deputies in the convention recognise when in the months after Thermidor,
they dismantled revolutionary government, relaxed central control,
scrapped the maximum,
and not least released the so-called 75 deputies who had been suspended and later imprisoned for protesting against the purging of the year.
In June 1793. Amongst them was Tom Paine,
the greatest international revolutionary of the age who'd been closely associated with this year on air since the
days of the Southcliffe socio and the crisis of the fight to Varenne land had voted with them in the convention.
These zero on our sympathisers now played their part in draughting, the Constitution of the Year three,
a clear attempt to try to get French political life back to first principles with its divided executive.
Strict separation of powers and new elections. And a franchise heavily dependent on property qualifications.
It was the 1791 constitution modified in the light of intervening experience, which would expose certain fundamental mistakes.
But one mistake the Thermidor INS did not recognise, perhaps because at this stage in the revolution,
it didn't look like what had really gone wrong, what had really blown the revolution off course and undermined the principles of 1789 was the war.
Now, war had not been on the revolution's original agenda.
70, 90, in fact, the constituent renounced war as an instrument of national policy except in self-defence.
It was those only now coming to be called your own time in the Legislative Assembly
who introduced war as a way of resolving the problems bequeathed by the constituent.
They were full of bombastic confidence that a revolutionary people would sweep all before it.
And it was this year on the WHO in the euphoria of victory after a decidedly shaky start,
offered fraternity and help to all peoples seeking to reclaim their liberty and proclaimed that wherever the French armies went,
they would impose their anti aristocratic social programme of the revolution.
Now, the practical and pragmatic Montignac were much more equivocal about what war might do, and once it began to go badly.
As Robespierre appeared warned it might. It was they who recognised that defeat could only be averted by extraordinary emergency measures.
And the sheer Onda had hardly begun to confront this problem before they fell.
They thought that the revolution's principles were or ought to be proof against all circumstances.
They thermidor Dorians, with foreign enemies now in retreat on all fronts, might be forgiven for thinking the same.
In 1795, the great nation seemed unstoppable.
So it was time to give it a constitution enshrining the revolution's original principles which had been so subverted.
After the zero had been purged, and for all the scorn that the directorate tracked, from almost every ideological standpoint,
I think there is a sort of pathetic heroism about the way that despite all its obvious inadequacies,
those who designed it tried to make the constitution of the three work.
They still believed, however dimly, in both the rightness and the strength of the revolutionary principles of 1789.
But war launched to defend them had fatally exposed their inadequacies.
And it had also led through the unavoidable creation of a powerful army.
After half a decade of military decay and neglect to the emergence of a new power
for which none of the revolutionary constitutions made much explicit provision.
It's certainly ironic, but perhaps appropriate that the man who finally destroyed the republic was a general thrown up by the wall,
which this year on our launched and someone who had begun his successful career in 1793 as a Jacobin.
And a protege of Spir. Thank you, Bill, very much.
Can you hear me? Yes, yes. I'm just the video is just coming now.
That's it. Hello. Good evening. I'm Nicholas Krunk.
I'm the director of the Volter Foundation. And thank you, Bill, so very much for that wonderful lecture.
What you've just given us is a absolutely magisterial overview of the revolutionary road map for us.
What happened in the revolution.
You've also remapped what is for literary scholars like myself, almost the oldest question that I started with as an undergraduate,
which is how do the writers of French literature that is essentially linked to the revolution of the first authors I read as a literature student,
Gustav Lost Soul. And of course, his favourite people, Daniel and Mosley.
The question they first ask was what was the connexion between the philosophy of the Enlightenment question,
which you couldn't really ask in more recent years, and you've actually legitimised a whole new area of enquiry.
Thank you very much. That was a wonderful lecture. And now for this.
I'm sure that will provoke lots of questions. And it's a huge pleasure to hand over for the Q&A.
I'm passing over and I should say just before I had never once.
So thank you for mentioning Hugh Trevor Roper. I don't know whether you knew, but he was one of best.
He was best, was literary executor.
And when we began the best of lectures not 20 years ago, he came to the early lectures and was it was a very Clearville presence.
It was only lectures. So it was a very nice link. And now a very good friend, Lauren Clay, who is professor of history at Vanderbilt.
We know each other from being researchers together in Paris. So it's nice to be talking to a Nashville, Tennessee, Lauren.
Lauren is a bit of a specialist of the onset regime of the revolution.
She's written a wonderful book, Stage Strike, about the business of theatre and the Assad regime in its colonies.
And she's an author in the Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. And it's my huge pleasure, Lauren, to to you to organise the questions months.
Thank you, Lauren. Wonderful. Good.
Am I am I up and running? You are OK.
Good. I just want to remind all the audience members who are watching this through YouTube that your you can
write your questions or comments into the comment or live chat and they will be transmitted to me.
And I'd like to briefly thank Nicholas Cronk and Greg Brown for inviting me to participate in this 2020 Best
Truman lecture and especially to Professor Doyle for delivering such an elegant and provocative lecture.
I notice that in his discussion of the historiography of the French Revolution,
Professor Doyle admitted his own essential contribution to the revisionist critique of the Marxist paradigm origins of the French Revolution,
which has been a staple of Puchi comprehension of exam lists for generations now again and again throughout his career.
Professor Doyle has written scholarship that has demanded that scholars rethink what they know about the revolution,
about the aristocracy, about venality. And I could go on.
And today's talk was really no different.
In this lecture, Professor Doyle asks the question, who were the French revolutionaries before offering up an unexpected answer,
seeking to rehabilitate the allegedly moderate Jew Honda.
As the real true revolutionaries he sets out to rescue them from both the malice of their Jacobin enemies and from the condescension of posterity.
I was especially struck by Professor Doyle's argument that she hometown's credentials as true
revolutionaries were stronger than the Jacobins because they were more deeply committed to,
quote, establishing the rule of law in all circumstances. As early as 1776 in the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, The Futures You Hold Down,
sympathiser Tom Paine articulated this as a bedrock principle of democratic revolutions.
He argued that, quote, For as an absolute governments, the king is law.
So in free countries, the law ought to be king.
In the French Revolution, as we have seen today, the fundamental legal principles were laid out in the Declaration of the Rights of man and citizen.
Over the next few years, however, the rule of law confronted exceptional challenges both domestic and foreign,
including the direct interventions of the people of Paris. So I wanted to ask you, Professor Doyel, if you might develop for us a bit more.
How does your phone down conceptualised a law as the expression of popular sovereignty?
To what extent did they focus on ideals and to what extent were they concerned with institutions and everyday practises?
And I think this may come to mind, given certain ongoing circumstances in which we realised the value of both
ideals and institutions and practises for upholding representative government.
And moreover, it is this account of the jawbone done as well as the true revolutionaries,
perhaps complicated by the fact that during the directory the latter does show up on that
proved willing to undermine law and popular sovereignty by repeatedly voiding election results.
So that's that's a question that I wanted to pose.
Yeah, well, I think I remember saying right at the beginning that the fundamental the fundamental revolutionary act is the 17th of June,
1789, when national sovereignty is proclaimed.
And the point that the zero and I make repeatedly is that the convention represents the
whole nation rather than just the people of Paris and the people of Paris kept talking.
And so the people want this, the people want that and so on. And the zero.
And I kept saying, well, look, you know, you are not the people. You are just parts of the people.
You are dominating the representatives of the rest of the nation.
And we're not really getting a say in what's going on.
And in that sense, I think, you know, they are trying to go back to the original founding principle of the whole revolution of national sovereignty.
Well, when it comes to the that the letters you're onto the when the convention what when they are after Thermidor,
when many formers you're on restored and so on.
And I've argued that they tried to get back to the principles of 89.
The real problem there is that the.
Voters to whom? Whose who's who embodied the will of the nation.
That's right. Well, liable to vote for a.
And that was the real problem first.
The first time you get anything like proper elections under the post, them Dorien regime is the elections of the spring of 1797.
When they produce less great right wing majority, which.
You know what it's going to do? It's going to bring back the king unless you stop it from from that.
And therefore, you get the coup of fruit to go up.
And they realise that actually the only way that the Constitution can work is by repeatedly being remodelled from the from the centre.
It feels like it is a betrayal in some ways. But as I said at the end, as a sort of pathetic heroism in some way, saying, you know,
we've got to keep this constitution going even if we have to violate it repeatedly in order to do it.
But, you know, they don't say let's scrap the whole damn thing. It's Napoleon who says that, who comes along and said, let's let's scrap it.
They say, no, we've got this constitution. And although we we are playing with with it all the time to prevent royalists from getting a majority.
Nevertheless, it's still worth doing. No. Thank you.
Thank you so much. So I now have the pleasure of calling on and introducing three colleagues who have been
invited to comment briefly on Tresser Doyle's lecture and also to offer their own questions.
So first, I would like to introduce Brian Banks, who is assistant professor of history at Columbus State University.
Brian is the co-editor of the French Revolution and Global Perspective Freedom and Faith.
He is also the co-founder and executive editor of Age of Revolutions, an online journal.
So thank you, Brian. Thank you, Laurin.
Thank you. Convenors for asking me to come along and ask a question, make a comment and thank you.
Built oil for such a thoughtful paper. When I first received your paper, I actually went over to my bookshelf to revisit your your vast corpus.
And I found that I have three copies of your Oxford history of the French Revolution,
which I think is a real testament to just how important it is that like an invasive species or something.
That's what I call look up all the very, you know, a good compliment.
Bill, like his teacher, Hugh Trevor Roper says you should never give away too much in a title.
The title of the paper we've heard today is Who were the French Revolutionaries?
Which after hearing this paper, I think we all realise is deceptively simple.
In our age of search engines and data analytics, though,
I can tell you that we need to give away far more in your title if you want people to find you,
especially if you don't have that kind of historiographical cloud that bill does.
So, as a historian of the French Revolution and an editor of Age of Revolutions,
a digital publication, I thought I'd alter Bill's title just very quickly here, too.
Who were the French revolutionaries? Question mark. This year on Dun's period.
And like Laura and I was I was surprised to come across this interesting argument.
One of the questions Bill hints at throughout the paper, I think, is actually who is French revolutionaries?
The Marxist saw the mountain yards as the true revolutionaries and inheritors of the class
conflict which brought the ascendancy of the capitalist bourgeois French Revolution of 1789.
Bill points us to this year on duns building on the work of post revisionists who
researched the context and contingency of the political debates of the revolution.
Specifically, if you cut away all the politicking this year on Dones and Doyle's account,
where the staunchest defenders of the ideas of 1789 as borne out in the debates themselves,
they were radicals who stood for first principles rather than forced principles.
And I really liked that. I really liked that line.
This was the story this year at Dun's also told themselves to write, issuing claims of their moderate politics and claiming the mantle of 1789.
In doing so, both historically and historia graphically, each group also defines what 1789 stood for in order to define the true revolutionaries.
So Bill's answer to the question who were the French revolutionaries? Is interesting and framed in a novel fashion.
I wonder if Bill might address a connected question, a kind of maybe a larger one.
Why specifically should this year in Dunns be given so much credit for their self identification?
Other groups imagined themselves as defending the ideals of 1789 to.
And they crafted those ideals to to serve their purposes.
Right? Certainly the mountain yards did, as did the radical some Koula as did to some extent, the enslaved masses in Santa Mangler or colonial Haiti.
Some scholars are calling it now, as did the Quaker condition to the National Constituent Assembly in 1791,
which I've written on as two women marching on their side,
claiming to hold fast to the ideals of 1789 as a political statement in and of itself, I think.
So if I might then don my Rouget Schult t.A hat for a moment.
Why should we be focussed on identifying this year on Dun's as the quintessential French
revolutionaries rather than examining the field of constructions of revolutionary identity?
Some retrospective and others born from the revolutionary culture of 1789 itself.
Thank you, Bill. Well, what are we looking at? It is a body which claims to be speaking for the nation, which has been elected by the nation.
The convention.
I mean, most of the this this debate revolves around what happens between the fall of the monarchy and the purge of the zero and June 1793.
And this is the point at which that body. The convention is if anybody is in control of what's going on in France and therefore who's important there.
And what they stand for is is really central to the history of the revolution.
Now, you're quite right. And all sorts of other areas far from far as far from the convention.
There are people interpreting what the revolution means in their own way.
That's absolutely right. But but the general be looked at too often, it seems to me, as as as the moderates who were defeated by the radicals.
And this is such a central question to the whole history of the revolution.
That this is what I felt we thought too old to be concentrated, really ought to concentrate on.
And the idea here and our moderation is keeps coming up.
I mean, is there and Jeremy Pumpkin's most recent survey, it's an excellent survey of the revolution.
But Jeremy says, though, that the euro and the moderates you know, what I'd like to do is.
Kill that idea, a future textbook writers, as it were.
And therefore, that's why I concentrate on that.
But I would certainly wouldn't deny that that the other groups and much wider areas for whom the revolution stands for something much different.
Thank you. Wonderful. Excellent.
For our next guest, I am pleased to introduce Christy Picky.
Carol Christy is associate professor of history and French at George Mason University.
She is a literary scholar and cultural historian specialising in race, gender and war.
In the early modern French Empire. Welcome, Christy.
Thank you so much, Lauren. And thank you so much, Bill, also for this wonderful paper and these incredible ideas that we have come to expect from you.
So thank you for delivering. So my question sort of takes up some of the themes that that Brian just brought up in a slightly more pointed way,
taking up your primary query of who were the French revolutionaries.
And what I'd like to do is sort of weave together two of your analytical gestures that I find particularly
significant and generative in turning our gaze toward the future of French revolutionary studies.
The first is you're revisiting the historiography and highlighting of the historians and arguments
that challenged scholarly doxa and affected monumental epistemic shifts and revolutionary studies.
You yourself, of course, have been a driver of this and engage in such an exercise with these questions that you put forward.
What was the revolution really about? And Art, those who believed in these principles, the real revolutionaries.
And then I think this critical question, who might this analytical framing let in and who might this exclude?
In your answer, as we've seen you challenged quite persuasively, I think the predominant focus on the soul culotte the Jack and Hobbes Pyo in
favour of a serious re-evaluation of the beliefs and works of the all of them.
So thank you for that. This leads me to the second gesture that I'd like to highlight.
And this goes to what Brian has mentioned. That of mentioning women revolutionaries and also the critical question of slavery and human rights.
So considering your criteria for rehabilitating the jewel there as the true revolutionaries, would it to individuals like a vessel,
Oji and Julianne Moore to mixed race planters from Sando man who fought with
pendent sword for the extension of revolutionary principles to those like them,
not to all, but to those like them? Should not these figures be also included in the list?
How might we consider Dudi Boukman or Cecil Fátima, who led the ceremony?
A book came out in August 1791 that preceded the slave revolt in central Mali and we have to send to go to jail for SWAT and George.
Yes. So my my question is,
if we think of the collective biographies of great men and women that the French
so liked to compile during the 18th century and a broader chronology than that,
but that we all use as sources, how might we begin to envision a different pantheon of revolutionaries that includes the varied position,
maladies and real commitments to those first principles of the French Revolution?
Thank you so much. Yeah, well, I mean,
so the names which you have mentioned are absolutely central to current debate Sunday about the revolution in the Caribbean and so on.
And it's much of it boils down to the question of agency.
It's no time agency is central to the discussion of that.
And although I can quite see and you talked about people like O.J., you talk about people like Boukman and so on,
who clearly have it enormously important in in pushing forward that seat.
It's always seemed to me that if authority had not collapsed in France, a lot of that agency would have had no opportunity to burst out.
Now, I'm sure that's a controversial thing, but it seems to be so much depends on that.
And those who are putting forward the most sympathetic line in front.
Not not not not very many since that headlines are coming out of France and they're not very radical either.
But those who are most sympathetic to people like Bushi, perhaps not Boukman, but certainly O.J. are does you enter, in effect,
the Amidi Noir resew and his friends who are all the time saying, you know, we must, first of all give equal rights to people of colour.
And then we think about the questions and sides as well and so on.
And who is criticising them all the time about this Robosapien? Robert Baer, is that you are stirring the blacks up?
And is your rhetoric which is doing it or, you know, they.
So the idea that the Montani are being radical on that one, it seems seems to be it just doesn't fit if you're looking for a radicalism.
There are people with minds open to widening political rights to people who aren't white.
Then this year on diet, the people you need. Thank you.
Wonderful. So we have a third colleague I'd like to introduce.
Finally, here is Dr. Minshall Kim, assistant professor of history at Soon Kyun Kwan University in Seoul.
Professor Kim is an intellectual historian of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Thank you. Thank you so much for this fascinating and stimulating lecture.
As a student, I've always read your books. And this is a this is an honour for me to be questioning you.
Well, then, well. All right. Well, you've just criticised the classical or say, Marxist assessment of revolutionary factions.
And you have claimed that you don't dance as the true revolutionaries on the basis that
true revolutionaries were those who believed in the principles of the revolution.
And following this, you've also questioned if the Montoneros really qualify as upholders of the ideology of 1789.
And I'll say, yes, the general doubts were radicals, and in many respects they were indeed more radical than any other factions in the revolution.
And this is all made very clear by recent scholarship as well.
And dubbing the moderates doesn't work anymore. And that's sad.
I must confess,
I feel a it's all about measuring the trueness or say sincerity of the revolutionaries by their ideological commitments to certain principles,
even though as intellectual historian, I cannot agree with you more that it's important to acknowledge the revolution was a child of enlightenment.
So what I mean is what is a revolution if it is not about actually realising the principles in spite of practical obstacles?
As you've made clear that you don't, as were most deeply committed to the revolutions,
agreed first principles and carried them further than anyone else.
However, the Montano's were also committed to the principles of the revolution.
And we remember Robespierre shouting Betties like all in the end, rather than simply abandoning the principles.
The Montano's, I think, tried to channel the passions of popular rage or at, say,
the irresistible forces shows towards protecting the seas of the cherished principles against the calamities of international and civil wars,
as you've mentioned. So to sum up, say, could you develop further if if we are to label all of this,
all the Montoneros and the revolutionary or what you've just called the anti revolutionary government as an abandonment of.
Or abandonment of truly revolutionary principles and uphold as your own down that the true radicals against a mountaineer's,
what would be the interpretative merit of such a framework in understanding the revolutionary dynamics?
Thank you so much. Well. If you are committed to the range of values which which are established in 89, this is why I tried to say,
you know, that they put up a copy of the declaration in the new convention hall in May.
You know, as these are our basic principles, we're all committed to those and so on.
What the hereunder appeared to think, as far as I can see, you know, is if these principles are sound and if they're good and if they work,
they should be applicable and they should be proof against all circumstances.
Whereas what the Montignac was saying is, look, you know this, let's be practical.
They have got to be suspended because we are facing an emergency.
And that was the worst of that emergency. That would work. The country was facing actually came after the purge, you know, after the purge.
You've got the federalist revolt, the fonderie vote going on all the time, the fall of too long and everything like that.
It really looks really bad. Now, most of that happens after the you on down have been purged this year.
And we're not actually faced with the problem of of other practical response to a national emergency.
It's just beginning when they are thrown out.
And one reason that's ruled out is I think because they say, no, no, no, we can't suspend things.
We can't have an emergency suspension of our principles because our principles are the ones that really matter.
And it all seems to work when you are invading other countries.
And they they are armies of the despots of falling back beyond that showed, you know, that a free people can do this sort of thing.
But when that is going wrong, when when it's a time of of defeat, which it is from from February 93, right through to the end of the year,
then you've got the practical man, the Montignac say, look, you know, we have just got to suspend things.
And literally they do suspend them there. They bring out the Constitution and they suspended from wires from the roof of the convention hall, in fact.
Because until the war is over, you know that the proclamation of revolutionary government is good.
The government of France is revolutionary until the peace. But what that involves is is turning upside down the whole range of principles which
have been established and actually done that suspended because of the emergency.
And if you like, the difference between the zeron down the Montoneros this year on starry eyed believers and the Montani and say,
look, we've got to be practical about this.
What I don't believe, if I may add to that, what I don't believe is is, you know, part of what I've said chimes in very well with Jonathan,
Israel's arguments about revolutionary idea in a sense,
because I think he would agree with me or although I don't agree with him, you know, about the radicalism of the year on time.
But what he also says is you've got a determined and ambitious plot by Robespierre and
his friends to take over the government and turn the country into a dictatorship.
I don't think that was there. I don't think that was what was really happening. They do see it as temporary.
But, you know, how do you get out of it? And that's the problem that they face in the spring of 1794.
And the only way they can find a way out of it is to find a scapegoat.
And Robespierre is there for that. Yeah, I can see.
I can feel that was more tragic than what's all for Israelis.
Thank you so much. OK. Thank you so much.
So there are a number of questions in the chat, and I think more are coming in.
So let's turn to some of those. So here's the first.
Given the popularity of this ship on down the provinces and the federalist revolt,
is it fair to suggest the provinces were more liberal and revolutionary than they have been given credit for?
Yes, I think it is. Except that, you know, there's one area of the provinces where they're certainly not liberal and that's the vote day.
But that is the West. That is the royalist west. And that's that's that's somewhat different than the this zero on that.
We're always at pains in so far as they could make their their voices felt.
After after the 2nd of June 1793, I was at pains to say we are not royalists.
We are Republicans. And we don't want to be identified with royalists.
But the Molton, your response to that was you may not want to be identified with them, but they are you are doing their work.
You are useful idiots if you like that. And that's why you must stop.
Here's another one. Thanks, Bill. Although Concorde could the sister republics be a neoadjuvant, an attempt to introduce national sovereignty.
So reconnecting the exigencies of the war with the first principles of 1789.
Well, it's the Sister Republic, a difficult business.
Really, I mean, said the first of the of the Sisler Republics as it is, in fact the the the Dutch republic.
Italian republic, in effect. And that comes out of.
Many native Dutch circumstances, as it were,
and it proved very difficult to graft French principles onto what's happened to
the historically formed set of of of of political life in the Dutch republic.
The other sister republics are created by Napoleon.
And he says, you know, OK, we're going to have these. They're all going to represent a national sovereignty of their own.
But basically what they are are strategic buffers for France.
That's how Interpol is a soldier. That's how Napoleon actually sees it.
So I don't think he's you look at the way he treats the Sisso fine republic, for example, you know,
he's not interested really in instituting a sound Republican values there so
much as making sure that this state actually serves French strategic purposes.
I have another. Thank you for your lecture.
To what extent can we speak about the Qimonda as a group when there's limited cohesion in saidon hands in her 60s,
in their public votes before the commission of wealth?
Well, this is this is one of the basic problems that the historian, free from sitting them onwards,
has actually addressed the question of how far there is uniformity and there isn't uniform.
They don't pull together as a party.
I mean, say, if you like, the inner core of the more time, you are far more like a political party than anything that Your Honour ever do.
But does this sort of. This is a sort of Baghi attitude, if you like Bagis terrible word, but it sort of it sums it up really.
You know, it's it's a collection of attitudes which overlap some degree and sometimes don't.
But but they the group comes together and I mean, say.
If you if you look know how someone talks about that, that certain number of people, but in fact,
if if you look at Alison Patrick's calculation, not whole definition of what a zero is, it's it's it's it's much bigger than that.
It comes to something like 170 or something like that or so it was not Sydenham is absolutely right.
And and Patrick accepts that. But they are not a political party.
And they shouldn't be treated as a political party.
They represent that, if you like, a bundle of related attitude, that's supposed to be a bundle of related attitudes,
which Borup with which are different from those espoused by the Montone are certainly over the winter of seventeen ninety two to three.
Here's another thank you very much for your brilliant lecture.
Could you please explain the difference of your interpretation to that of a ferret?
Well, theorises, that is over. Oh, overwhelmingly and intellectual arguments.
And that's the essence of what Fuera is saying, is that terror is inherent from the start in revolutionary ideologies.
It's inherent from the start.
In the in the proclamation of national sovereignty and the the inability of of of the revolutionary ideology to to accommodate the idea of opposition.
That's the difference. This seems to me I can't see the the the terror as inevitable from the start at all.
Seems to me it arises out of the circumstances of the war, and the war is certainly not inevitable from the start.
So that's the difference. Führer's is a unity in the whole thing.
The whole it is back to Georgia. George Clemenceau is famous argument.
You know, you've got take the revolution as a block. It's all one you've got to take it or whether you like it or not.
It all hands together and theory takes it back to that.
Whereas it seems to me that it's a series of events which many of which depend on contingencies and therefore are not predictable,
are not foreseeable right from the start. So that's where I would differ.
Wonderful. We have just more than five minutes left. Just to give everyone a sense of the time.
And still a number of questions in our queue. The next went up.
Can you tell us whether there's a basis in the retrospect of the revolution to see those who lost status or value from their prerevolutionary,
venal offices as having a particular political tendency during the revolution?
Is there any link that you can draw? No, I don't think so.
I think the thing that's always struck me and.
When I was working on the history of venality and I wrote a chapter on the on the abolition of venality and what struck me,
the interesting thing was the number of holders of offices and so on who are perfectly happy to see their offices abolished,
even though the compensation that they were voting was not in any way reflected, that did not in any way reflect the value of those offices.
They made a real sacrifice because they thought it was a good thing to get rid of those offices.
And I think this is one of the things which historians tend to underestimate about
the French Revolution is it is shot through with altruism of various sorts.
And some of that is is is is exhibited by this year on the.
Another question from from our chats.
Why should we define, quote unquote, real revolutionaries through the principles of a 1789 text instead of through the
practical actions in defence of the revolution by people across France in the years after?
What I have to throw that question back and say, well, you know, what revolution are they defending?
Practical actions? And, you know, I mean, the people who whom the questioner says are acting in defence of the revolution,
they're presumably trying to defend a set of principles as much as the the year on downhome.
I've been talking about, you know, it's a question of the.
Of how you define this revolution that you're involved in. OK.
Just time for one or two more. Thank you very much.
What can the study of transatlantic conversations or interactions reveal about the meaning of, quote, unquote, revolutionaries?
Well, I mean, Keith Baker has gone into this history of what the word revolution, hasn't it, and how how how it changes.
Is it worth it? It begins to change, obviously, with what happens in North America.
But I mean, to start with, the revolution in North America is conceived in the same terms that other 18th century revolutions were.
It's not seen as having the totally radical, total transformational meaning that it requires with the French Revolution.
Now, people can then look back and people do. People have I mean, look back and said, look at say,
the American Revolution is very revolutionary indeed in the way it challenges all
sorts of established institutions and attitudes throughout the former 13 colonies.
That's absolutely right. But until the French Revolution comes along, I think the modern idea of what a revolution is isn't fully developed.
But but but that the ambitions of the French Revolution proved to be so comprehensive, in effect, that they affect everything.
Whereas, you know, it's it's easy.
First of all, with the American Revolution say, well, this is actually just throwing off British authority and things carry on.
For now, we know that that actually removing British authority opens the way to all sorts of fundamental
questions about what sort of society or what sort of societies the 13 colonies are going to be.
But the French Revolution is like that is not throwing off an outside authority.
It's it's it's it's self transformation. It's like.
We could we could also see that question as relating to the revolution in sentiment as well, perhaps.
You know. Oh, certainly, yes. Yes. Wonderful.
OK. Well, this has been an extraordinary event,
and I would very much like to thank you for for such a wonderful thought provoking
lecture and also to the Voltaire Foundation for making all of this possible.
So I'm going to turn things over to Greg Brown to to kind of close this out here.
Thank you so much, Lauren. And I just want to. On behalf of the Voltaire Foundation.
Just thank everyone who was involved. Piano O'Brian, the director of the Division of Humanities and newest rocks for Professor Clay Mitchell.
Kim Christie, co-chair of Brian Banks. Thank you all so much.
And thank you to the Oxford Research Centre and the humanities and their staff for doing all the technical support that made this event possible.
And above all, thank you to Professor Doyle for your participation for this marvellous lecture.
And thank you. I should finally close with thank you to Nicholas Cronk, the director of the foundation for putting this all together.
Thanks again for participating. And please do continue to follow the Voltaire Foundation events, which are posted on the website.