HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION: IDEOLOGY AND INTERPRETATION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

This dissertation examines the once generally accepted "social interpretation" of the French Revolution as a bourgeois class revolution; the recent challenge to it made by revisionist historians; and the responses of Marxists, for whom the concept of bourgeois revolution has been central to historical theory. It will be argued that a new, historical materialist analysis of the class society of the ancien regime is needed to explain the Revolution; and a methodological approach to the task will be offered.;While the revisionist perspective originates in a conservative ideological rejection of the analysis of class society, its historical criticism of the social interpretation is well founded. The idea of bourgeois revolution, however, is not Marxist at all. It was taken over by Marx from bourgeois-liberal history--the ideology of which he did not criticize in the way he criticized political economy. It was through the critique of political economy that Marx developed the essential principles of historical materialism. Through a study of his method, these principles may be extracted and applied to pre-capitalist societies in a way that Marx himself never did. Having criticized the Marxist interpretations of the Revolution which have so far been put forward, particularly by Marxist structuralists, a new interpretation will be suggested on the basis of historical materialist principles.;According to the social interpretation, a rising capitalist bourgeois class was compelled to overthrow the aristocratic ruling class in order to break the fetters of outmoded feudalism. On the grounds of extensive historical research, the revisionsts argue that there was no significant social boundary between the bourgeoisie and the nobility in the ancien regime; that there was no notable difference in their property or income; that both groups shared in much of the ideology of the Enlightenment; and that therefore the nobility and bourgeoisie formed a single "elite", not two opposed social classes. To maintain the interpretation of the Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, Marxists have turned to abstract analyses of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, begging the very question of whether fundamental social change in fact occurred.