Alfred Cobban

"It remained for Alfred Cobban to play the role of Copernicus and point out the emperor-theory's nakedness. At least his writings of some twenty years ago constitute the most apparent landmark of the revisionist school. Cobban's main points were that the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century — he did not question its existence — was neither (a) capitalist or industrial, (even in intent), nor (b) revolutionary. Rather than being a class of "industrial entrepreneurs and financiers of big business," the bourgeoisie was composed of "land-owners, rentiers, and officials." Itself a class deeply involved in privileges, it abhorred the thought of revolution. Moreover, this bourgeoisie was, he thought, not rising but declining. Cobban recognized the confusions in the situation and called for new, freshly directed research. He was sure that historians had imposed on the Old Regime a "sociological theory" drawn from a later age, one that did not fit that earlier epoch. They had looked into the mirror of their own age rather than into the past, and they had seen Rockefeller and Lenin rather than the real Necker and Voltaire, thus misreading the whole code. Cobban further noted the obvious fact that so far as France was concerned, the Revolution did not usher in a triumphant capitalism but in fact had impeded modernization, industrialization, technological innovation for a century or more. He added that when historians construed the Parisian sans culottes of the Revolution as an incipient proletariat they also mistook reality by importing later ideas, a point others had already made."

"At any point the course of the Revolution could be diverted by a chance happening or an individual decision determined by a freak of personal character. No adequate general history of the Revolution can fail to bring before our eyes a host of individuals, marking with their own idiosyncrasies the events in which they participated. The records are so ample that the deeds and personalities of lesser men as well as of the great stand out clearly. At the same time, the historian whose bias lies in the detection of great impersonal forces can write the history of the Revolution in quite different terms. It would be a mistake to suppose that either approach is exclusively right. The right approach is determined only by the nature of the questions the historian is asking and the right answer by the material of which he asks them."

"The circumstantial interpretation seems to be forced on us particularly when we look at the history of international relations during the revolutionary period. True, public opinion in all countries saw the struggle as an ideological one between revolution and established order; but those who actually determined international policies were free from this illusion, though they had to allow for and were prepared to make use of it in others. The history of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars can be told almost exclusively in terms of power politics and explained by the traditions of the countries involved and the personalities of their rulers and ministers."

"The frank recognition of the dominance of power politics in international relations has not been without its effect on the writing of domestic French history. One consequence is that the traditional admiration for Napoleon, and the effort to present him as something other than a military conqueror and dictator, has become difficult even for French historians. Emphasis on the ideological element in the policy of revolutionary governments has also diminished and the desire for territorial aggrandizement, and even more for economic change, come to be seen as a dominant influence over their foreign policies."

"Just seventeen years ago the late Alfred Cobban opened the case against the "orthodox interpretation" of the French Revolution. Ten years later, in 1964, he summed up that case in his brilliant essay on The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cobban's argument and works inspired by or complementary to his revisionism have profoundly affected the historiography not only of the Revolution but of the Old Regime as well. We are today still working out the implications of Cobban's position. Briefly, what Cobban did was to demonstrate that the empirical data gathered by historians, including "Marxist" and "Neo-Marxist" historians, had exploded the "Marxist" theory which purported to explain the Revolution."

"The "revolutionary bourgeoisie" as a class concept, Cobban found, dissolves under close analysis. What remains is a loose congeries of socially and economically disparate "middle classes." "Feudalism," whatever it had been, did not exist in eighteenth-century France. What was "overthrown" in 1789 was a vestige of feudalism—admittedly a hated and often onerous one—seigniorial rights. And it was the peasantry, not the "revolutionary bourgeoisie," which acted first and unanswerably against what they labeled "feudalism." In so acting, that is, without regard to and even in opposition to the desires of the Third Estate majority in the National Assembly, the peasantry cannot be subsumed "within the cadre of a bourgeois revolution.""

"In our present case of the historical paradigm, the outsider, Cobban, appeared and precipitated the overthrow of the old paradigm but unfortunately, if understandably, he could not provide a new one. That is the problem, the crisis now facing students of the Old Regime and the Revolution."

"The emphasis on the social grounding of politics was, moreover, something which Cobban himself shared, as he showed by developing a "social interpretation of the French Revolution" which highlighted the role of disenchanted venal office-holders (rather than a supposedly triumphant capitalistic grouping) as the true Revolutionary bourgeoisie. He and other Anglo-American scholars who followed in his wake invariably saw the eighteenth-century economy as traditionalist and uncapitalistic – a view which fitted in nicely with the "immobile history" preached by third-generation Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie."

"The revolution was to an important extent one against and not for the rising forces of capitalism. In addition it can be interpreted...in terms of a general tension and social antagonism between the poor and the rich."