Danton

Time was when the French Revolution was considered “a good thing,” a giant step toward modern participatory government, equality before the law, and otherfundamental freedoms. In recent years, however, a very vocal group of revisionist historians have persuaded many that the Revolution was more of “a bad thing” thanearlier generations of historians as well as the political left were willing to admit. Some revisionists tell us that the Revolution was “a tragedy,” overfullwith excessive violence, full of sound and fury signifying little but unfulfilled grand illusions. Historians of this persuasion will typically dwell atgruesome length on “The Terror of 1793-4,” evoking scenes of mass drownings in the Loire River, the bloody repression at Lyon, and the spiraling executions in Parisduring the Great Terror of spring 1794. Such excesses and violence, some emphasize, was the unavoidable outcome of the unforeseen intervention of “the people”in the revolutionary process. Liberal elites were on the road to peaceful reform but the force of popular violence blew the Revolution off course. FrançoisFuret, the most prominent French revisionist until his death in 1997, did not go this far but held, nonetheless, that The Terror was built into the Revolution fromit’s beginning in 1789 once the “absolute rule” of the King was replaced by “absolute rule” of the people. The Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution isa collective work by Furet and his (mainly) French colleagues. Published in the bicentennial year 1989, it represents a summary of French revisionism.