Changes

Lefebvre’s work focuses on the Revolution’s initial stages and ending with The October Days. Thus, this study of the Revolution encapsulates the 3 years of the Revolution into five separate sections or chapters. Beginning with its pre-Revolutionary stage, The Aristocratic Revolution, Lefevbre describes France as a country drowning in its own privilege. France’s economic expansion created a new form of wealth, difficult for the aristocracy to control. With this economic expansion, came a new class of Frenchmen, the bourgeoisie. Threatened by the success of this new class, aristocrats (nobles) sought to gain control of France, “In short, the nobility, not content with monopolizing the higher public employments, nourished an ambition to share in the central government and to take over all local administration, “ (Lefevbre, 19). While many Frenchmen grew in wealth, the government was losing money at an alarming rate. France’s social hierarchy, allowed nobles to escape taxation, “In short, under the Old Regime the richer a man was, the less he paid,” (23). The support of the American Revolution had cost the French government dearly, leaving its financial leader Calonne to a final conclusion, “Technically the crisis was easy to meet: all that was necessary was to make everybody pay,” (23).

However, the aristocracy did not wish to sacrifice its social distinctions and feudal rights, “The aim is evident; even in fiscal matters distinctions were to remain, despite equality, between the aristocracy and the commoners. There was all the more reason for wishing to preserve the other noble prerogatives. The petitions of nobility without exception called for the maintenance of the feudal rights and especially the honorific rights,” (36). Thus, Lefevbre argues, “There can in fact be no doubt that the aristocracy had entered into a struggle against absolutism in the name of the nation, but with the firm intention of governing the nation and especially not being absorbed into it,” (36). Therefore, while the aristocracy saw a need for reform, they wished to be the arbitrators of this reform. However, their obstinacy creates the first ebb in the French Revolutionary tide.

Much of Lefebvre’s thesis has been disproved. However, Jeremy Popkin praises Lefebvre’s work remarking, “his clear and readable thesis, The Coming of the French Revolution, published in 1939, introduced several generations of French and American students to Revolutionary history. Lefebvre offered a sophisticated Marxist analysis that explained the course of the Revolution in terms of changing alliances between four basic social classes: the aristocracy, whose blind resistance to necessary reforms set the Revolution in motion, the bourgeoisie, which provided leadership and a revolutionary program, the peasantry whose uprising in 1789 assured the Revolution’s success, and the urban working class, whose pressure drove the bourgeois leadership to take the measures necessary to protect the Revolution after 1792,” (145). Ultimately, The Coming of the French Revolution provoked discussion that eventually led to today’s understanding of the events in 1789.

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[[Category: French History]][[Category:Book Review]][[Category:18th Century History]] [[Category: Political History]][[Category:Videri.org]]