H-France List Archives

• Message-Id: <199612132253.WAA19203@listserv.rl.ac.uk>
• Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 09:16:27 -0500
• From: Jim Farr <jrfarr@purdue.edu>
• Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Strayer on Kaplan, _Farewell,

>From: mcarley@ccs.carleton.ca (Michael Carley)
>Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Strayer on Kaplan, _Farewell, Revolution_
>>Date: Mon, 9 Dec 1996 18:15:45 -0500 (EST)
>
>A comment by the author follows the review.
>
>M. J. Carley
>book review editor
>H-France
>___________________________________
>
>Steven Laurence Kaplan, _Farewell, Revolution_.  Ithaca, N.Y.:
>Cornell University Press, 1995.  2 vols.  Vol. 1: _Disputed
>Legacies, France, 1789/1989_.  xii + 573 pp.  Notes and index.
>$37.50 US (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-2718-5.  Vol. 2: _The Historians'
>Feud, France, 1789/1989_.  xiii + 234 pp.  Notes and index.  $27.95
>US (cloth).  ISBN 0-8014-3145-x.
>
>Review by Brian E. Strayer, Andrews University, for H-France,
>December 1996.
>
>               The Revolutionary Bicentennial
>
>In southern France, _adieu_ means both _bonjour_ and _au revoir_.
>Thus the original title of Kaplan's book, _Adieu 89_ (Editions
>Fayard, 1993), reflects the ambiguity of saying farewell to a past
>event which is ever present with us.
>
>                  Kaplan's purpose is to examine the French
>Revolution bicentennial events from many perspectives using a
>rigorous historical and ethnographic inquiry approach.  He wishes
>to refract the 18th century through the eyes of the 20th century
>without bowdlerizing or minimizing either the complexity of the
>_Ancien Regime_ or the rival claims, respective weaknesses, and
>multi-dimensional interpretations of 20th century parties,
>institutions, and historians.
>
>                  Yet this two-volume "tour de France" does not
>pretend to be exhaustive.  Kaplan limits his bicentennial coverage
>only to events in France from 1989 to 1995, excluding how the rest
>of the world commemorated the Revolution.  He focuses mainly on the
>historio-graphical debate that impacted directly on public
>consciousness, not on the 1,000 books (besides articles and essays)
>produced by scholars for scholars.  His sources represent a
>kaleidoscope of meetings, lectures, festivals, parades, and
>ephemeral literature such as programs, ads, brochures, interviews,
>and letters.
>
>                  Nonetheless, Kaplan's _Farewell, Revolution_ is
>a stunning tour de force of both popular and scholarly
>interpretations of the bicentennial experience in France organized
>into four "books". In Book One ("Framing the Bicentennial"), he
>examines the cultural-political climate in which the bicentennial
>took form: the debate concerning what strategies, themes, and
>approaches to take (ch. 1); the powerful resurgence of counter-
>revolutionary forces (clergy, Rightists, Royalists) who saw only a
>"godless revolution" (ch. 2-3); the Vendee as trope and idea-force
>of the anti-revolutionary campaign (ch. 4); the Church's "mixed
>signals", with most clergy wary of any 1789/1989 celebration while
>a few embraced the good in the past (ch. 5); Mitterand's attachment
>to the Revolutionary patrimony in his speeches (ch. 6); and the
>secular politics of commemoration played out in France's political
>parties, from the Parti communiste francais (PCF) on the Left to
>the Royalists on the Right (ch. 7).  Book Two ("Producing the
>Bicentennial") focuses on the inertia, obstructions, dislocations,
>fiscal extravagances, still-born ideas, and the tragedies (such as
>Mission President Michel Baroin's death in an airplane crash)--all
>of which nearly derailed any commemoration (ch. 1); on Edgar
>Faure's (Mission President #2) future-oriented bicentennial with
>themes of universal fraternity and  reconciliation and a focus on
>youth, Europe, science, and ethics--followed by his tragic death
>(ch. 2); how Jean-Noel Jeanneney (Mission President #3) embraced
>both the history and mythology  of the Revolution to reinvigorate
>the campaign (ch. 3); the bicentennial events of 1989, from a New
>Year's flight of hot-air balloons, a spring-time planting of 36,000
>Liberty Trees, and a re-enactment of the Estates-General in May to
>Jean-Paul Goude's July 14th extravaganza parade, the _Arche de la
>defense_ Declaration of Man celebration in August, and the
>immortalization in December of Henri Gregoire, the marquis de
>Condorcet, and Gaspard Monge to the Pantheon (chs. 4-7).
>
>                  Book Three ("The Bicentennial and the Nation")
>takes the reader on a selected tour of France to sample the
>diversity of commemorative expressions in Nord, Riom, and
>Montpellier as directed by CLEF89--Comites Liberte, Egalite,
>Fraternite (ch. 1); the quarrels, tensions, and hesitations among
>various provincial groups (ch. 2); the attempt by the PCF to take
>over local festive activities with VIVE89, colorful videos, a 17-
>panel tableau, and labor union involvement (ch. 3); the tension in
>Paris between Mayor Jacques Chirac's focus on the Eiffel Tower's
>centennial and Mitterand's bicentennial emphasis (ch. 4); and
>France's love/hate relationship with Robespierre and the Terror
>(ch. 5).
>
>                  In volume two, Book Four ("The Historians' Feud")
>takes up the historiographical battles over the French Revolution,
>focusing on three major protagonists--Pierre Chaunu, Francois
>Furet, and Michel Vovelle (ch. 1).  Kaplan closely examines
>Chaunu's counter-revolutionary rhetoric (ch. 2); shows his
>favoritism with a lengthy discussion of Furet's "93 in 89" theme--
>that the seeds of the Terror were already present in 1789 (chs.
>3-6); and explains Vovelle's pluralistic approach to the Revolution
>(ch. 7).  In chapter 8, Kaplan compares and contrasts these three
>historians' views against the backdrop of the international
>congress of scholars at the Sorbonne (which Furet pettishly
>boycotted).
>
>                  Kaplan's _Farewell, Revolution_ stands alone: no
>other extant work attempts to explain the wide spectrum of
>bicentennial activities and viewpoints, although one can gain a
>more complete and objective view of French Revolution
>historiography by  reading Jacques Sole's _Questions of the French
>Revolution: A Historical Overview_ (1989).  Yet Kaplan's purpose is
>not to examine  scholars' views of the Revolution, but the grass
>roots celebration of it.  Like the American Revolutionary
>bicentennial 13 years before, 1989 witnessed a wide range of
>unusual ways to commemorate the French Revolution: from the high
>brow (concerts, lectures, ballets, and films like "Danton") to the
>low brow (rooster-crowing, cake baking, and herring eating
>contests); from the sublime (rewrites of the "Marseillaise", re-
>enactments of Louis XVI's trial, tree plantings) to the ridiculous
>(a giant elephant of memory constructed, Marianne perfume, and tri-
>color soaps, soups, and condoms); from the morbid (poems and hymns
>to the guillotine, guillotines on parade, and guillotine board
>games) to the bizarre (600 fake heads tossed into the Seine River).
>It was commercialized in a theme park (Revoparc), a Tuileries 89
>festival, Revoscope, and a Rights of Man train.  The Rightists
>spent a day in mourning for the king's death; Leftists renamed
>streets and lycees after Robespierre; and everyone quaffed the
>bicentennial champagne from the Vineyard of Fraternity.  In short,
>there was something for everybody!
>
>                  However, despite its national and international
>successes, the bicentennial seemed constantly dogged by problems,
>threatened to derail it: lack of common ground among leaders; which
>"Revolution" to celebrate; vandalism; extravagance; a sometimes
>hostile press; lawsuits; the opposition of bishops, the PCF,
>Interior Minister Edouard Balladur, the Declinists, the Front
>National, and the anti-89 Cercle; and finally, committee
>absenteeism, illness, and the deaths of its first two directors.
>Hostile voices compared the Vendee to the Nazi holocaust and the
>Terror to a "genocide" of nobles.  Far from being a Chamber of
>Commerce promo on the bicentennial, Kaplan's account leaves one
>wondering how the French ever pulled together to celebrate the
>event at all!
>
>                  Indeed, Kaplan's examination of the multifaceted
>commemoration is so thorough that it appears as if he himself was
>ubiquitous in 1989, going everywhere, reading every newspaper and
>talking to every group.  He is even aware of planned events that
>did NOT happen during the bicentennial: reconstruction of
>mini-Bastilles from bricks; repainting the base of the July column
>at the _Place de la Bastille_ in blue, white and red; erecting a
>colossal Chair of Uranus 150 meters high; making a giant wandering
>turtle; and building a 900 meter footbridge to connect the _Pont
>Neuf_ to the _Pont du Carrousel_ with 11 towers.
>
>                  Unfortunately, Kaplan's difficult writing style
>places these two volumes in the camp of the specialists and
>advanced graduate students, well above the heads of most
>undergraduates, who will be puzzled by words like aporias,
>imbrication, mimetic, exiguous, razzia, longiloquence, dybbuk, and
>cabalomonolithic which appear on almost every page.  Kaplan's
>penchant for over-using the slash--as in R/revolutionary,
>charge/shibboleth, national/regional/ethnic, past and
>present/future, and integrity/necessity/destiny of the
>R/revolution-ary legacy--will annoy most traditionalists, who may
>see this attempt at nuancing deeper meanings as merely
>indecisiveness.  Sometimes he also gets carried away with his use
>of parentheses--as in (post)Revolutionary Vendee (re)constructed,
>(very early) Revolution, research would (eventually?) cause party
>(dis)harmony, possible (unintended? perverted?) consequences, a
>(f)rigid didactic lesson, and asked (re)fresh(ed) questions--to the
>point where on p. 22 he includes a six-line parenthetical aside.
>
>                  Yet Kaplan also writes with wit and humor, noting
>that "Public opinion is a constructed rather than a natural
>phenomenon, elicited by polls that are rarely of immaculate
>conception" (p. 28), and that Robespierre "the Incorruptible
>remained Inco-optable" (p. 444) for some bicentennial celebrations.
>He particularly likes Mitterand's _bon mots_: "A republic that
>forgets its origins will not be long in repudiating them" (p. 135);
>calling Baroin's conception of the bicentennial "a mishmash fit for
>pet food" (p. 193); and regarding Faure's extravagances, "I take
>note that President Faure is not short of ambition" (p. 212).  This
>latter point is well illustrated by Faure's own statement: "There
>were two men who might have been able to avert the Revolution--
>Turgot, who died before it broke out, and myself, who was not yet
>born" (p. 240).  He catches the ridiculous, for instance, when the
>top aide to the Uruguayan president at the G-7 Summit in Paris
>said, "Montesquieu, Moliere, they are nothing next to camembert"
>(p. 303), and the Bishop of Evreux's statement that the French
>Revolution was "the most important [event] since Jesus Christ" (p.
>129), as well as the silly commercial: "Louis XVI: Is it a revolt?
>Courtier: No, Sire, it's a Volkswagen" (p. 240).
>
>                  Francois Ewald, the Condorcet of 1989, once
>remarked, "As long as the Revolution is not over, as long as we are
>still in it, it would not be possible to undertake its history with
>objectivity, with the suitable detachment" (II: p. 130).  Perhaps
>so, but in this reviewer's mind, Kaplan has come close to a
>definitive evaluation of the multifaceted dimensions of a
>bicentennial which both divided and unified France in the last
>decade of our century.
>
>Brian E. Strayer
>Andrews University
>bstrayer@andrews.edu
>
>                  Copyright (c) 1996 by H-Net, all rights reserved.
>This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper
>credit is given to the author and the list.  For other permission,
>please contact H-Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.
>
>________________________________________
>Steven L. Kaplan comments (25 November 1996):
>
>          I am grateful for and flattered by Brian
>Strayer's sympathetic review of _Farewell, Revolution_.
>It is not precisely the same book as _Adieu 89_.  It
>contains some significant new material not available to
>me initially, and it is more frugal in its treatment of
>the grassroots commemoration.  It was also infinitely
>less trying to deal with the American version than with
>the French.  While many people in France welcomed the
>publication of _Adieu_, others resisted it, more or less
>aggressively--because they found it ideologically
>inhospitable, because they are allergic to criticism,
>because they resented a gai-jin's intrusion, because it
>raised questions that they did not want to see addressed,
>because they found its somtimes mordant tone distasteful,
>and so on.  A number of my antagonists appealed directly
>to my publisher to quash the book.  My in-house editor
>pressed me to suppress certain sections and passages ("Ca
>se dit pas en France," or "Il vaut mieux ne pas dire
>cela," or "c'est trop risque").  A panel of experts,
>including several of the protagonists in my book, who did
>not bother to recuse themselves, voted to refuse a
>subvention for the translation of _Adieu_, though they
>had generously accorded unction and subsidy to one of my
>previous books within the same program of assistance.
>Some Parisian dailies and news-magazines devoted
>substantial space and expressed critical enthusiasm for
>the project, while others boycotted the book entirely,
>following the principle that "taire" is always a better
>strategy than even a highly negative review which
>inexorably "en fait parler".
>
>          My chief adversaries made it clear that they
>would not appear in the same forum to which I was
>invited, effectively denying me the right to defend my
>arguments at certain crucial times and places.  The
>organizers of the colloquium marking the end of the
>_Institut d'histoire du temps present_ (IHTP)'s  multi-
>year investigation of the bicentennial paid for my trip
>from Ithaca, but denied me the right to reply after a
>direct assault upon me ("une attaque en regle" initiated
>with the colorful image of "le cowboy de Cornell," a
>bittersweet insult for a boy from the macadam of
>Brooklyn).  In a text submitted for one of the IHTP's
>informal research reports on the bicentennial a
>distinguished "contemporary" French historian, who
>professionally brandished the oriflamme of democratic
>pluralism,  asserted nevertheless, in my regard, "qu'un
>Americain ne saurait jamais comprendre ce que c'est la
>Republique en France," a bijou of ethnocentrist
>narcissism and a somewhat sweeping JacoboGaullien
>disqualification.  All this gives me a hint of what it
>must have been like in one of the _cellules_ of the 5th
>arrdt. in the bad old days.
>
>          The good news is that I have been practically
>rehabilitated, at least by certain of my old French
>friends who were provisionally obliged to break with me
>because they had even deeper links to my adversaries.  In
>a recent review of my latest book, _Le Meilleur pain du
>monde_, a very fine historian of the Old Regime writes
>indulgently of me--I have returned to my senses!--in a
>celebrated weekly: "Confondant les luttes de factions de
>la Convention avec les debats des historiens du XXe
>siecle finissant, il a ecrit un brulot de sans-culotte
>plein de verve mais aussi d'injustes attaques contre nos
>amis Francois Furet et Mona Ozouf, soupconnes de vouloir
>desesperer le Faubourg Saint-Antoine.  Apres cette erreur
>de parcours, il [Kaplan] revient a ses amours
>premieres pour nous donner son chef-d'oeuvre: chef
>d'oeuvre au sens premier du terme."  Safe history, like
>safe sex, has very real merits.
>
>          Earlier this year I jokingly wrote to my French
>publisher that I was disinclined to write the "Adieu,
>Clovis" for which he  ardently yearned.  The Clovis
>commemoration took place on an infinitely more modest
>scale than the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
>But the rancorous quarrels surrounding it remind us again
>how difficult a task commemoration is and how thoroughly
>politics and ideology pollute (and probably also enrich,
>however perverse the process) historiography, even at a
>distance of a thousand years.  Clovis crystallized deep
>anxieties about identity (Frenchness and French
>exceptionalism), about the role of religion, about
>national tradition, about belonging and community, about
>the putatively immutable rules of the game (_laicite_),
>etc. in ways redolent of the debates of the late 1980s.
>
>          Those debates were acrimonious and, in my view,
>they were important.  In _Farewell, Revolution_, I pay
>homage to the cunning that engendered the slogan "la
>Revolution est terminee," but I argue that on many planes
>the issues which constitute the Revolution remain far
>from resolved.  They are still being fought out in French
>politics, even if the Republic is institutionally
>anchored in the center.  They are still being fought out
>in historiography, even if many historians, mostly
>Americans, complaisantly assume that bicentennial
>revisionism is a done deal (let them peruse, inter alia,
>the recent studies of Margadant and Tackett--to the
>extent that empirical research framing robust conclusions
>still carries weight in these somewhat ethereal
>precincts).
>
>          This remark leads me to a final thought about
>the bicentennial (not directly the Revolutionary) legacy.
>Many questions seem to me to command our attention: the
>problem of managing memory; the density and geography of
>the "social demand" for commemoration; the relation
>between commemoration and history; the dynamics relating
>press and "opinion"; the extraordinary uneasiness of the
>politicians during the bicentennial season; the
>persistent malaise of the Church; the new grounds of
>legitimation of the counterrevolution, and the
>efflorescence of a larger, more diffuse antirevolution;
>the attitude of F. Mitterrand, especially in light of
>what we have learned about him in the past few years; the
>"identitarian" anguish; etc.  Yet, at the risk of
>succumbing to parochial concerns--we are after all on H-
>Net--it seems to me that the question of "doing history"
>is not the least of the grand issues at stake in the
>bicentennial confrontations.  I have in mind not
>primarily the glissando from history to politics and the
>displacement from past to present which lead to the
>forging of a usable past and the articulation of a moral
>catechism, though these matters are surely worth serious
>attention.  Rather I mean more prosaically ways of
>practicing the historian's craft.  The French revisionist
>offensive during the bicentennial period reminded us of
>a claim with which most historians of all stripes are
>uneasy, but which is perhaps worth addressing frankly in
>our graduate classes and in our colloquia: that certain
>genres and certain approaches to the study of history are
>manifestly and/or intrinsically better or stronger or
>more profitable or more prestigious than others.  If we
>historicize the question, we learn that this hierarchy
>shifts significantly over time, at once the cause and the
>effect of historiographical renewal, that is of various
>kinds of more or less fruitful revisionism.  Bicentennial
>revisionism was not content, however, to surf on the tide
>of a resurgent history of ideas.  It set out to show that
>social history was a pernicious as well as a mindless and
>futile enterprise in all of its expressions.  In my view
>this scapegoating and anathematization neither fortified
>the revisionist case nor advanced the task of critical
>inquiry.
>
>Steven L. Kaplan
>Cornell University
>slk8@cornell.edu
>