Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:12:34.951Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

DEPUTIES, VOTERS, AND FACTIONS IN FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

ISSER WOLOCH
Affiliation:
Columbia University

Abstract

Becoming a revolutionary: the deputies of the French National Assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture, 1789–1790. By Timothy Tackett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+355. ISBN 0-69-104384-1. $29.95.

Elections in the French Revolution. By Malcolm Crook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+221. ISBN 0-521-45191-4. $35.00.

The notion of a revolutionary change in collective psychology has long been present in certain master narratives of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre deployed this concept in his analysis of the psychodynamics that propelled revolutionary crowds. He also introduced the notion more casually in discussing the ‘patriot’ elites who experienced a psychological upheaval when the parlement of Paris ruled in September 1788 that the forthcoming Estates General should be organized as in 1614, meaning that the third estate would be submerged under the weight of the two privileged orders. While William Doyle's revisionist synthesis has plausibly argued that the parlement's intention was less nefarious (it wished to prevent the king from using new ground rules to pack the Estates with pliant deputies), it does not change the fact that public opinion would never be the same after that consciousness-raising event. More broadly, R. R. Palmer, in trying to convey the uniquely revolutionary thrust of the French experience in 1789 – having already contextualized it in relation to other European and American upheavals – wrestled with that issue in a section that he called ‘The formation of a revolutionary psychology’.

Type
REVIEW ARTICLES
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)