Edited by Ferenc Fehér,University of California Press, 1990

Written from widely different perspectives, these essays characterize the Great Revolution as the dawn of the modern age, the grand narrative of modernity. The scope of issues under scrutiny is extremely broad, ranging from the analyses of the hotly debated class character of 1789 and the problem of the nation state to the "Cult of the Supreme Being," the emancipation of the Jews, and the cultural heritage of the Revolution.

The historiography of the French Revolution has been traditionally and rightly regarded as the major yield and the ultimate confirmation of the golden age of historicism, a success story in which every representative paradigm of writing history has had its own share.

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Introduction: 

And yet, in the postwar domestic research of the French Revolution, unmistakable symptoms of the decline of the traditional interpretations have been emerging for decades, the sole exception being Soboul's classic on the sans-culottes of Year II and the direct democracy of the Paris districts. Put bluntly, the domestic narrative became tediously self-repetitive. Until the publication of Furet's Thinking the French Revolution in the second half of the 1970s, which has become a turning point for friend and foe alike, innovating impetus came exclusively from outside. The Anglo-American "revisionism" successfully questioned the relevance of the major explanatory devices of the Marxist school, at least in the actual form in which they had been used. Via the accumulated experience of sociological research, the new American "social history" or "historical sociology," whose paradigmatic works were Tilly's The Vendée and Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions , gave an important stimulus to that particular style of writing history, which had been captive too long to a dubious method of "typology." In her celebrated, as well as hotly debated, On Revolution , Hannah Arendt has drawn such a sharp contrast between the "American" and "French" models of revolution that the after-effects of her challenge or provocation have been reverberating ever since in historical consciousness. Of the contributors to the present volume, Higonnet with his most recent Sister Republics is thoroughly indebted to Arendt's provocative gesture. English and Scandinavian New Leftist historians were the only worthy sucessors to Guérin's and Soboul's pioneering explorations into a hitherto unknown continent of anonymous militants (I have in mind the works by Cobb and Tönnesson). The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity , emerging from a special bicentennial issue of Social Research (the theoretical journal of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research) and with a majority of its contributors coming from outside of French research, tries to live up to the already very high standards of the new tradition.

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