The Melancholy of History: The French Revolution and European Historiography

Abstract

Lynn Hunt has aptly described the French Revolution as a ‘great talking machine’ (318). From the very beginning, the revolution was recognized as a profound and unsettling event. As such it generated extensive, often hyperbolic comment. At the end of July 1789, the English Whig leader, Charles James Fox, confidently declared the fall of the Bastille to be ‘much the greatest event’ that ‘ever happened in the world’ (Woodcock 5). Edmund Burke said much the same thing: the revolution was ‘the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world’ (92). Although many contemporaries believed they were seeing in France a gradual installation of rational rule by law, something that had already been accomplished in Britain or Holland or the United States, many more came to see the French Revolution as something quite different. The slogans scratched in pamphlets and painted on walls — ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death’ — indicated the conviction that the world could be remade on the basis of ideas. But the absolutist either/or also demanded that people in France and beyond take sides, particularly since revolutionary ideas required violence to realize themselves. Europeans talked constantly about the revolution, its transformative potentialities and its judgemental demands. It divided people even at home: ‘I side w/Father — against Mother + Ferdinand’, and against the revolution, confessed Regina Beneke, a young woman in Hamburg, in 1794 (Jäckel 82; also Trepp 271–2). And it continued to divide them right up to the eve of the invasion of Russia in 1812 when Count Pierre Bezukhov and Vicomte de Montemorte clashed over Napoleon at Anna Pavlovna’s soiree in the opening pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That people talked so much is one signal that events were not self-evident or familiar. They were appreciated, but with a measure of incomprehensibility. Indeed, Edmund Burke considered the revolution in France to be something ‘out of nature’ precisely because it overruled, as he put it, ‘common maxims’ and ‘matters of fact’ (O’Brien 9; Burke 92, 181–2). The revolution entered world history as something of an epistemological puzzle.