The School of Revolution
The Revolutionary Movement in France, 1815-1871. By John Plamenatz. (Longmans. 16s.) THE myths and historical memories of the French Revolution have dominated the political history of France for the past 150 years, and often the myths have been as important as the facts. Later genera- tions of revolutionaries, infinitely more self-conscious and doctrinaire than their models, have struck the same postures as were struck (or were believed to have been struck) by that heroic generation of 1789-1794 ; they have re-enacted performances which somehow never quite yielded the results expected ; and there is historical nostalgia in even the names of the Restored Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire. The second cycle of political experi- ments, from legitimist monarchy to constitutional monarchy, to democratic republic, to consulate, to Bonapartist dictatorship, to repentant " liberal empire," was stubbornly repeated between 1815 and 1871 in precisely the same sequence as between 1789 and 1815.
This repeat performance was staged by that motley company of revolutionaries, ranging_from conservative liberals like Thiers to the excited students of the Latin Quarter and the professional fanatics like Blanqui, which repeatedly rejected any regime that denied the basic republican ideals. What were these ideals and ideas ? How were they interpreted at the successive phases of crisis ? How were they disseminated among the French people until, after 1871, republicanism triumphed decisively ? These are the questions which Mr. Plamenatz sets out to answer historically in this valuable and stimulating little study.
There are very great difficulties in treating this theme of the " revolutionary movement " as a continuous entity, yet that is how it must be treated if it is to be understood. Not only must the precise balance of forces at each revolutionary moment be analysed, but the evolution of the republican movement during the long intervals when it was forced to work underground, or in at least semi-secrecy, is extremely difficult to trace. It became under Charles X, Louis Philippe, and partly under Napoleon III, the property of secret societies and clubs, producing a multitude of little papers and quarrelling endlessly among themselves. The history of underground republicanism has been studied by several - French historians from the Press and police reports of the time, but it has not been readily available in English. One value of this book is that it makes this story more available for the English reader.
But another, and greater, value is that it presents the story stripped of the tendentious Marxist interpretations of the revolutionary movement in France which have come to be accepted so widely as accurate. The author brings to the story an acute mind, and a refusal to accept the doctrine that class-struggles are necessarily conflicts of irreconcilable interests. He sees how events often took even the professional revolutionaries by surprise, but how in differing circumstances one section of the whole revolutionary movement tended to take the lead, even in opposition to other sections. If he is at times betrayed into incisive generalisations which are too sweeping, or virtually unverifiable, he also formulates others which throw cross-beams of light on the nature of French development. He generalises about the origins of the Third Republic beyond the point at which his evidence justifies such generalisations. But here is a most useful book for the student both of nineteenth-century France and of political science, which fills more than one gap in the books about the subject in English. DAVID THOMSON.
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