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The Bourgeois Revolution in France: 1789-1815, by Henry Heller. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. $60.00. Pp. ix, 172.
The notion of bourgeois revolution has come under intense scrutiny in recent years, not least among contributors to this journal. In the world of history the study of the French Revolution as a bourgeois one, which was the theme of all the great historians from the Liberal Francois Guizot in the 1820s to the Communist Albert Soboul in the 1950s, has been discredited by waves of criticism motivated initially by the Cold War. The classic interpretation was essential to Marx's intellectual development in 1843 and to his critique of Hegel, as well as to the democratic heritage of the French left. It was the bedrock of the essential analytic categories of Marx's theory of history without becoming a model for all transitions to capitalism.
Henry Heller's defense of the Marxist interpretation is a comprehensive and important one that takes into account recent scholarship. He carefully deals with all the major criticisms of the classical view, linking the initial French ones, largely orchestrated by Francois Furet, to the propaganda war against the French Communist Party. The two singular virtues of the book are that it focuses on economic history, long neglected, and covers the broad sweep of history from the beginnings of the 18th century through the Revolution, Directory and Napoleon. A distinguishing feature of Heller's argument is his emphasis on wage earners, to the neglect of petty producers, smallholding peasants and the artisanal sans-culottes, and on the role of industrial rather than mercantile capital in revolutionary change.
The Revolution set up the legal and institutional framework for the expansion of capitalism from the Revolution of 1789 through the Napoleonic regime. The economy and mechanized industry expanded greatly over this period, except during the political instability that lasted from 1792 to 1799. Heller demonstrates how the rising forces of capitalism - financial, mercantile and industrial - were blocked by...