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An Interview With Pierre Chaunu
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13465 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
4,743 Words |
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Bernard Mitjavile and Sheryl J. Brown
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Pierre Chaunu, who is descended from a French Protestant family, is one of France's most widely read and controversial historians of the Revolution. Together with another maverick scholar Francois Furet, he has tried to demystify the "cult of 1789" by stressing the Revolution's negative impact on French demography, economic development, and even political reform. Chaunu and Furet have also carefully documented the derivation of revolutionary ideology from eighteenth-century conspiratorial movements, particularly the Freemasons, and treat the terror of 1793 not as an aberration, but as the fulfillment of the revolutionary vision of a virtuous democracy of equals. In the interview that follows, Pierre Mitjavile questions Chaunu about his views on the Revolution.
Q: Wasn't the Revolution necessary to move France from a feudal monarchy into the modern era?
A: One should recall that Britain also went through this transition. In 1820, the British society was at least as "modern" as the French one, but the transition there did not involve the burning of castles, the killing of aristocrats and priests, and the desecrating of churches.
Also today we have detailed knowledge of French society during the period before the Revolution, mostly because of research done by English and American historians like Timothy Tackett from the United States and Allan Forest from Great Britain.
These studies of the prerevolutionary period have destroyed some clichés popularized by Jacobin historians. No one can say any longer that the monarchy before the Revolution exerted a tyranny over the people and had no respect for laws. In fact, the legal system was so powerful, with the parliaments playing the role of supreme courts, that it became almost impossible for King Louis XVI (who was beheaded during the Revolution) to implement any significant reform because of the legal battles it would have stirred. Louis XV planned to dissolve regional courts in order to implement some needed reforms, but the first major decision and the first blunder of Louis XVI was to restore these courts, which were under aristocratic control. This severely limited the possibility of implementing serious reforms.
It was once believed that the Revolution ended absolutism, but the central government and the administration became much more coercive and powerful after the Revolution, under Napoleon, than
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