French Revolution: Scale and Sociohistorical Perspective

Extract

[...] Such was the case for the French Revolution. One could say that the event has even surpassed the boundaries of genre by surpassing the barriers of time and disciplines. Beyond politics, truth, and history, Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix adds to the iconography of the event even if this painting had as its motif the July Revolution of 1830: in the collective imagination this painting remains associated in the minds with the Revolution of 1789 adding an element to the paintings and the emblematic figure of the Storming of the Bastille. [...]

[...] The anthropology of institutions, as evidenced by Vincent Dubois' anthropology of life in the gichets, reveals a low-level basement of institutional functions that are linked to local and empirical proximity at the most immediate level of the terrain: adjustments between the first echelons of administration and applicants or users generate a spontaneous order between the users of a service and the administrative functions defining local rules for the application of procedures, regulations, decrees, and superior ministerial acts. Thus, for the case of the French Revolution, beyond existing analyses, we could be tempted to make an anthropology of local events: either within a Parisian neighborhood with the neighborhood archives or to show its non-eventuality or relative eventuality: administrative functioning in a province. [...]

[...] Thus, the question of scales is no longer the question of why? but for whom? For whom does the event make sense? We have seen that scales can express variations in meaning and power stakes, but that the revolutionary event beyond the overflows can testify to a form of homogenization of scales that prevent the formation of a power game in this period for the losing groups that are the nobilities and the clergy, attesting to a change of regime or rather to a substitution of two losing groups with two winning groups, peasants and bourgeoisie against nobilities and clergy. [...]

[...] Social, political, and historical phenomena seem to be anamorphoses: the viewpoints on the phenomena operate a transposition, a projected version onto a surface that is not the analogue of the original. As a perimeter of public intervention defining institutional or politico-administrative levels: agglomeration communities, commune, department, we might be tempted to analyze the French Revolution according to a geographical and institutional or politico-administrative inscription scale: Did the French Revolution take place in the commune of Boulogne-sur-Mer, located on the edge of the Channel, or in the port of Rouen? [...]

[...] It is still astonishing that the French Revolution is presented as an event that totals nothing less than the origin of the modern State1 by the exit of the Ancien Régime, the place of the formation of the French Republic and the ability of a people to become a political subject of history bursting onto a political stage: Is the French Revolution really all that at once the origin of the modern State, the ability of a people to become a political subject of history, and the first moment of the Republic? Did it really exist as it is presented? In other words, to answer this, we will seek to present the expertise of the sciences social sciences. [...]