Interpreting the French Revolution

The French Revolution is an historical event unlike any other. It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage. But after two centuries, this central event in French history has usually been thought of in much the same terms as it was by its contemporaries. There have been many accounts of the French Revolution, and th...

The French Revolution is an historical event unlike any other. It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage. But after two centuries, this central event in French history has usually been thought of in much the same terms as it was by its contemporaries. There have been many accounts of the French Revolution, and though their opinions differ, they have often been commemorative or anniversary interpretations of the original event. The dividing line of revolutionary historiography, in intellectual terms, is therefore not between the right and the left, but between commemorative and conceptual history, as exemplified respectively in the works of Michelet and Tocquevifle. In this book, Francois Furet analyses how an event like the French Revolution can be conceptualised, and identifies the radically new changes the Revolution produced as well as the continuity it provided, albeit under the appearance of change. This question has become a riddle for the European left, answered neither by Marx nor by the theorists of our own century. In his analysis of the tragic relevance of the Revolution, Furet both refers to contemporary experience and discusses various elements in the work of Alexis de Tocclueville and that of Augustin Cochin, which has never been systematically applied by historians of the Revolution. Furet's book is based on the complementary ideas of these two writers in an attempt to cut through the apparent and misleading clarity of various contradictory views of the Revolution, and to help decipher some of the enigmatic problems of revolutionary ideology. It will be of value to historians of modern Europe and their students; to political, social and economic historians; to sociologists; and to students of political thought.

弗朗索瓦・傅勒：

生于1927，卒于1997，卓越的学者和思想家，他的一生享誉无数。前不久，他被评为法兰西学院“不朽的四十位学者”之一。他担任过高等社会科学学院的院长，被国际学术界称为“法国大革命史研究的领军人物”，托克维尔研究专家等等，他的学术影响远远超越了法国，遍及世界，芝加哥大学聘他为“社会思想”教授，他是美国艺术和科学研究院的院士，是哈佛大学和特拉维夫大学的名誉博士，等等。这些荣誉归功于他对法国大革命的研究成就，在这个领域，他几乎是无可替代的巨人，芝加哥社会思想委员会主席耐丹・塔可夫认为“没有任何人能比他更负责任地复活了法国的自由思想”。《思考法国大革命》这本书可以说是他最重要的学术著作。