Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century

I was assigned this book for a graduate level course. It is a crucial read for anyone studying the French Revolution. It demonstrates a particular side of the debate between social and intellectual historians.

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 creted on both sides to serve as "ideological aresenals" 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.All in all, this is an extremely smart, thoughtful, and insightful book. However, it is also a dense book. Though Baker writes clearly , he deals with a lot of heavy, complicated, and abstract concepts-- and he treats them with the seriousness and complexity that they require, rather than oversimplifying them. Consequently, this can sometimes be tough reading for those more used to graceful stylists (like Peter Gay). Also, it should be noted that this is a book about the creation of the *ideologies* that were deployed in both the pre-Revolutionary and Revoultionary era. As such, it's a work of intellectual history, and of political ideology in specific. This means that its a book about ideas, their development, and their function in political discourse. Those expecting a dramatic narrative of the French Revolution that includes the storming of the Bastille and bloody guillotines w