First Chapter Outline

At last, slightly later than I’d hoped, an expanded outline of chapter 1, Transitions. Critical comment, as ever, most welcome:

Opening with a classic, Sièyes’s views on the essential harm done to society by privileged orders; a powerful viewpoint, but one which reflects a largely static view of the social and political arena. Moving backwards into the Old Regime, we want to pick up on some of the ways it was already changing, and had changed, and how these were reflected on. One important aspect is the disaster of 1763 itself, and the loss of empire in North America and India – how this challenged definitions of the French place in the world that had been emerging during that imperial ascent.

Moving over the heavy lifting of attempted reform and the politics of perpetual crisis soon to settle over the finances (for later consideration), the chapter will then look at elite attitudes to their own identities and roles through the 1770s and 80s. This may well expose a self-contradictory mess – Kwass on taxpayers, Bossenga and others on venality and privilege would certainly suggest so; but when overlaid with real debates (as depicted by Smith, Blaufarb, etc) about noble social identity, this ‘mess’ shows that the monarchical order was undergoing some kind of evolution, even if its direction was unclear.

When addressing the constructive work of the Revolution, what they saw, looking back, emerges in part from what they wanted in its place. On the one hand, elitist programmes of reform such as the Committee of Thirty that begin the process; on the other the mixture of Rousseauist rhapsodies and nitty-gritty regulations that surrounded the Constitution of 1791, the intended ‘end point’. The unalloyed commitment to individualistic political participation sets a marker against the aggravations of privileged corporatism, while (perhaps implicitly) the philosophy of sovereignty and the general will exalts the active state over such collectivities. Such practical implications need also to be balanced against the more millennial aspects of the revolutionary creed emergent from 1792, but brought back into focus as the fate of the 1795 constitution points towards militarised force as an essential foundation of order. What were revolutionary political institutions intended to achieve, are there significant continuities beneath sharply-changing rhetorics – beyond merely the opportunity to assert a statist/international-relations view of outward-facing sovereign power?

Thus, arriving at Napoleon, we can deal with the same questions of what his regime was for, and what it was against, in the make-up of state and society. Was it merely a dictatorship riding on the back of political exhaustion and the rise of a ‘security state’, or a consolidation of revolutionary ideals? How far did the steady augmentation of its monarchical aspects indicate that the pre-revolutionary past still remained an important frame of reference for defining what Napoleonic France should be? Given the dramatic twists of 1814-15, with the installation first of a monarchy more ‘liberal’ than the Empire, and then the short-lived return of a ‘Jacobin’ emperor, did Napoleonic rule have any principles that were its own, or merely serve as a brutal parenthesis in a struggle ongoing since the 1770s? Drawing on ‘classic’ interpretations like Tulard, recent views such as Englund, Jourdan; Woloch’s work on the ‘collaborators’ and Brown on the ‘security state’…

In the debates of the Restoration decades, there is a serious and perhaps ‘world-historical’ innovation to consider: the rise of the ideological distinction encapsulated in the ‘parties’ of movement and order. Secular historical change as an ideology, or at the very least a frame of reference in itself, rises to prominence, and against it is enshrined a vision of the past that is constrictive, accessed by conservatives as a limit on what should be done, rather than, as in pre-revolutionary times, as a source of arguments about what might be done.

The revolutionary decades have also created groupings that see the monarchical order as fundamentally illegitimate, and the goals and methods of revolutionary and republican secret societies and publicists can be explored to show, again, the fundamental ideological change effected since 1789. But against this needs to be put the shenanigans of the 1830 revolution – how different power-blocs were able to use the idea of revolutionary change to create a more amenable monarchy. How this also created, and reinforced through the early 1830s, a politics of vengeful hate amongst ‘montagnards’ in contexts of rapid and disruptive social change (Harsin). Contrasting such views to those of Guizot, and the more reflective Tocqueville, would round out the chapter with a sense both of the immensity of change over the era, and its complexity and incompleteness, leading onto further thematic explorations.

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