The French Revolution

The first says this is where the modern world starts, and the claim is specific.

Before seventeen eighty nine, authority in France came down from God through a king. After the declaration, sovereignty is stated to reside in the nation. That is not a reform of the old arrangement. It is a replacement of it.

Everything that followed in Europe for a century and a half argued inside the vocabulary invented in those ten years. Citizen. Republic. Nation. Left and right, which are literally where people sat in the assembly.

On the Terror the republican account does not deny the killing. It points at the situation: foreign armies on French soil, a civil war in the west, and a government three years old.

The second account was published in London in seventeen ninety, and its force comes from its date.

Edmund Burke wrote his attack on the revolution before the Terror, before the king was killed, before the wars. He predicted the sequence.

His argument was not that the old order was just. It was that a society is held up by things nobody designed. Church, guild, province, custom, rank. Tear all of them out at once in the name of reason, and you have not freed the individual. You have left him alone in a room with the state.

What he predicted specifically was that this would end with a general. In November seventeen ninety nine it did.

The third account tested the first article of the declaration within eighteen months, and it did not test it in France.

Saint-Domingue, the French colony on Hispaniola, produced forty per cent of the world's sugar and sixty per cent of its coffee, worked by about five hundred thousand enslaved people.

When the declaration arrived, the colony's forty thousand white colonists and thirty thousand free people of colour began a legal argument about who exactly counted as a man born free and equal in rights.

On the twenty second of August seventeen ninety one, while that argument was still going on, the enslaved answered it themselves, in a coordinated rising across the northern plain.

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights was written in Paris. It was enforced, first, by people the men who wrote it did not have in mind.

The fourth account is about what Paris did next, and the dates are the argument.

In August seventeen ninety three a French commissioner in Saint-Domingue proclaimed emancipation there, without authority from home, because he needed soldiers against a Spanish invasion.

In February seventeen ninety four the Convention in Paris abolished slavery in all French colonies, and it was the first colonial power to do it.

It was ratifying a situation. The enslaved had taken the colony and the republic needed them on its side.

Eight years later Napoleon restored slavery in the French empire. Which tells you what the vote in seventeen ninety four had actually been.

The fifth account is the argument about the other four, and it has been running for two hundred years.

For most of the twentieth century the dominant reading was a class one. A rising commercial middle class overthrew a feudal aristocracy and built property relations that suited it, and the crowd in the street was the instrument.

Then that was picked apart. The people who made the revolution turn out to be lawyers, officials and professionals more than merchants, and plenty of nobles were in it.

What survives the argument is that no single frame holds it. It was a fiscal crisis, a food crisis, a constitutional revolution, a religious war in the west, a colonial revolution in the Caribbean and a European war, all inside one decade, and historians pick which of those is the spine.