Francois Furet, who died on July 12 at the age of 70, was the greatest living historian of the French Revolution, and far more. In an era when most of his peers were either dedicated subspecialists or social historians, Furet sought to revive the grand historiographical tradition of the 19th century, with its focus on political, personal, and intellectual forces. Through his powerful historical understanding, Furet often found himself at the center of public discourse in France as he helped to reshape his nation’s understanding of itself.
In the 1960s and 1970s, most French schoolchildren were spoonfed a Marxist hagiography of the Revolution. Before Furet, as it were, the events of 1789 had been presented as the inevitable clash of economic forces: a rising bourgeoisie relegating the ancien regime, the by-product of an agricultural society, to the dustbin of history. The totalitarian violence of the Jacobin Terror of 1793 was seen as a patriotic attempt to secure popular rule by unifying the nation state. Historian Albert Mathiez’s 1927 interpretation, parroted in textbooks for decades, simply projected Soviet propaganda onto the France of 1793, justifying the murderous tactics of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety as an understandable consequence of civil and foreign war.
Given the cachet of Marxism among intellectuals in France — and the pride that the French/ themselves placed in the justice of their revolution — it took no small amount of courage for Furet to openly question what he termed the “revolutionary catechism” in the mid-1960s. To be sure, the Revolution had many critics of monarchist or counterrevolutionary stripe. But Furet was no reactionary: He had been an active member of the French Communist party, which he quit after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
In his numerous volumes, most notably The French Revolution (coauthored with Denis Richet), Interpreting the French Revolution, and Marx and the French Revolution, Furet rejected economic determinism and the belief that the French Revolution was primarily a class struggle.
Furet noted that the revolution was at first a call for representative government in the face of a monarchy increasingly bent on consolidating power. But any hope for a liberal democratic revolution was quickly dashed. Furet argued against the idea that the Jacobin Terror was a response to either class conflict (there was none between Jacobins and other revolutionaries) or external aggression (the most violent stage of the Terror occurred when the foreign threat was long gone).
Furet found the most convincing explanation for the Terror in the works of Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin, both of whom understood its ideological character. Rather than ordinary tyrants who killed for personal gain, Robespierre and his ilk were a new breed of man, secular idealists, under the sway of intellectuals, who were willing to sacrifice their countrymen in the name of the regeneration of mankind.
Having fallen prey to this utopian spirit in his own dalliance with communism, Furet remained obsessed with coming to terms with it. In 1995, he published The History of an Illusion.” An Essay on the Communist Idea in the Twentieth Century, a French bestseller now translated into sixteen languages. In it, Furet examines how antibourgeois ire drew millions to view the Soviet regime as the best hope for mankind, and willingly blinded them to its tyrannical character.
Having discredited Marxism, Furet played a central role in France’s rediscovery of its long forgotten classical liberal tradition. 1789 had brought France the benefits of a democratic social state. But the revolutionary upheaval caused this democratic society to spend more than a century seeking a suitable regime of civic equality and political liberty. To understand this turmoil, in Revolutionary France, 1770-1880, Furet turned to such men as Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, and Francois Guizot. He sought to give French liberalism an intellectual home in 1985, when he founded the Raymond Aron Institute for Political Research in Paris, which quickly became one of France’s pre-eminent institutions of learning.
Furet’s devotion to the liberal democratic tradition led him to teach each year at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Like Tocqueville a century and a half before, Furet believed that liberal democracy in France could be invigorated through a deeper appreciation of America. But for all his admiration of America, Furet was increasingly worried that it was drifting away both politically and intellectually from Europe.
Furet was also perturbed by the postmodern corruption of American university life, fearing that it would rebound, as has often been the case, in a more virulent form in Europe. Furet vehemently denounced political correctness and France’s creeping multiculturalism, which hid under the guise of le mouvement antiraciste. For these pronouncements and his antirevolutionary historiography, Furet came to be, in the words of one friend, “the most attacked man in France.” When a writer denounced Furet last year in the French press as the toady of certain “fascist” (i.e., politically conservative) American foundations (most notably the John M. Olin Foundation in New York) that supported his work, he sued for defamation and won in court.
For years, Furet stood largely alone in his attempt to impartially evaluate, and thereby moderate pride in the Revolution. More recently, though, he began to garner long overdue accolades. Just last March, Furet was awarded France’s highest cultural honor: election to the Academie Francaise. But the title of academicien was arguably only the second-greatest honor that France bestowed upon him. Its greatest honor by far was bestowed informally in 1989, during the French Revolution’s bicentennial, when it became apparent to all that Furet had won over the minds of his countrymen and had come to be seen as the Revolution’s pre-eminent interpreter.
Kenneth R. Weinstein is director of the government reform project at the Heritage Foundation.
