Turgot's Argument

Turgot's Argument

Introduction

Keith Michael Baker is a highly esteemed historian (previously at U. of Chicago, now at Stanford) of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This book is a collection of essays that are unified by their subject matter, which can be described as "the intellectual and ideological origins of the French Revolution".

A few of these essays are more historiographical/theoretical in nature. That is to say, they are more concerned with questions of how historians approach this subject and the methods and intellectual tools they bring to bear on it. These are quite smart (and extremely influential) pieces-- and they have a general applicability to the subject of intellectual/ideological history, and not just to the French Revolution. However, like all works of historiography/methodology, the questions they pose are probably not going to be of interest to anybody other than other historians. (That's a pity really, as these are important questions that history buffs, and even just ordinary folks probably should take some interest in...)

Most of the essays in "Inventing the French Revolution", however, are case studies of particular ways in which political ideologies were deployed and contested before and during the Revolution. One of the most important of these has to do with the practice of writing history during the eighteenth century, as well as the collection of documents, the creation of archives, etc. Far from being a disinterested practice, Baker shows, the writing of the past was a way of engaging in partisan political debate. There were royal historians who presented the French past in such a way that tended to legitimize the claims of the crown over those of the aristocracy-- and other historians who took the opposite approach. Libraries and archives were created on both sides to serve as "ideological arsenals" to provide arms to conduct this ideological/political battle, which provided some of the "ground principles" on which the debates that led to the Creation of the Estates-General (and then the National Assembly) and other events in 1789 and beyond.

The last thirty years have given us a new version of the history of the French Revolution, the most diverse and hostile schools having contributed to it. The philosopher, Taine, drew attention to the affinity between the revolutionary and what he calls the classic spirit, that is, the spirit of abstraction which gave rise to Cartesianism and produced certain masterpieces of French literature. Moreover he admirably demonstrated the mechanism of the local revolutionary committees and showed how a daring Jacobin minority was able to enforce its will as that of "the people". Following up this line of research M. Augustin Cochin has quite recently studied the mechanism of the socieacute; teacutes de penseacute in which the revolutionary doctrine was developed and in which were formed men quite prepared to put this doctrine into execution.

Let us turn to two other of the most oppressive institutions that then scourged France. First the Corvée, or feudal rule which forced every unprivileged farmer and peasant in France to furnish so many days' labor ...