5 - The Birth of a “Modern State Edifice” in France

Summary

The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature— organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour—originates from the days of absolute monarchy … Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of mediaeval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution … swept away all of these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern State edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.

Karl Marx

The Course Of the French Revolution was shaped by the consequences of a social-revolutionary crisis in which liberal stabilization proved impossible, and by the emergence through mass mobilization of centralized and bureaucratic state organizations. As in Russia and China, such state organizations served to consolidate the Revolution in the context of civil and international warfare. Our examination of the dynamics and outcomes of the French Revolution will emphasize these fundamental developments. As a prelude to this analysis, though, let me first enter into the ongoing historiographical debate about how the French Revolution as a whole should be characterized.

A Bourgeois Revolution?

What fundamentally changed and how in the French Revolution-these are subjects of much controversy among contemporary historians. Telling criticisms have been leveled against the until-recently dominant “social interpretation” —a view of largely Marxist inspiration, which holds that the Revolution was led by the bourgeoisie to displace feudalism and the aristocracy and to establish capitalism instead. No counterinterpretation of comparable scope and power has yet achieved widespread acceptance. This is true in part, perhaps, because debates over possible reinterpretations have remained largely within the socioeconomic terms of the established frame of reference. As Marxist notions about the centrality of the bourgeoisie and the transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production have been opened to question, the most vociferous debates about what to put in their place have merely tinkered with parts of the original argument, leaving its substantive focus and structure intact. New groups, other than the bourgeoisie, with economic interests corresponding to the not-so-capitalist economic outcomes of the Revolution have been sought out.