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Historical PapersCommunications historiques

Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and PoliticalConflict in the French RevolutionGeorge C. Comninel

Québec 1989Volume 24, Number 1, 1989

URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/030995arDOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/030995ar

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Publisher(s)The Canadian Historical Association/La Société historique du Canada

ISSN0068-8878 (print)1712-9109 (digital)

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Cite this articleComninel, G. C. (1989). Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests andPolitical Conflict in the French Revolution. Historical Papers / Communicationshistoriques, 24 (1), 36–52. https://doi.org/10.7202/030995ar

Article abstractFifty years after its publication, Quatre-Vingt-Neuf — Georges Lefebvre's classicstatement of the social interpretation of the French Revolution — is widelythought to have been discredited. Revisionist historians have effectivelychallenged the idea that the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary capitalist classoverthrowing feudalism, and this has been taken to repudiate both Lefebvre'sinterpretation and Marxist history generally.Yet the new revisionist orthodoxy has been unable to provide a crediblealternative account of the origins and course of the Revolution. A “new” socialinterpretation is therefore suggested which, ironically, is very close to thatoriginally offered by Lefebvre for, while the idea of a bourgeois-capitalist classrevolution clearly is refuted by the historical evidence, a return toQuatre-Vingt-Neuf reveals that this concept did not play a central role inLefebvre's account. Nor is it integral to Marx's historical materialist method ofanalysis. Indeed, a fresh historical materialist class analysis of the ancienrégime supports a very different social interpretation than that of “bourgeoisrevolution,” one largely consistent with Lefebvre's interpretation of thecomplex but integral social revolution unleashed in 1789.