Abstract
The iconic status of the French Revolution does not exempt it from also being one of the most contested events within history; in fact, the latter is probably a pre-requisite for the former. One point of seeming agreement between theorists and historians, however, is the role of the French Revolution in what Furet terms, ‘the invention of the political form of modern society’ (1988 [1986): 18), or, more poetically, ‘the empirical modality through which the world of free and equal individuals has made its appearance in our history’ (1990: 798–799); that is, the invention of the modern nation-state. French revolutionary historiography has been central to the establishment of 1789, or then the period from 1789 to 1815, as the birth-date of a new historical epoch, the modern. As Furet (1981 [1978]) argues, the Revolution was not understood simply as an event within a complex of events, but rather, was seen as constitutive of the advent of a new age; one founded upon the idea of equality and expressed through the establishment of modern political institutions. This heightened the sense of the present as unique and unprecedented and, as a consequence, problematized the way in which the relationship between the past and present was theorized (Furet, 1981 [1978]; Crossley, 1993; see also Foucault, 2002 [1969]; Baehr, 2002). This chapter contests the dominant understandings of the nation-state that ascribe a particular significance to its emergence in the French Revolution and argues against the conception of cultural progress that locates ‘others’ within a history whose theoretical framework is predicated on the European experience.
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Bhambra, G.K. (2023). Myths of the Modern Nation-State: The French Revolution. In: Rethinking Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21537-7_5
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