Becoming a revolutionary: the deputies of the French National
Assembly
and the emergence of a revolutionary culture, 1789–1790.
By Timothy Tackett. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+355. ISBN 0-69-104384-1. $29.95.Elections in the French Revolution. By Malcolm Crook.
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+221. ISBN 0-521-45191-4. $35.00.The notion of a revolutionary change in collective psychology has long
been present in
certain master narratives of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre deployed
this
concept in his analysis of the psychodynamics that propelled revolutionary
crowds. He
also introduced the notion more casually in discussing the ‘patriot’
elites who
experienced a psychological upheaval when the parlement of Paris
ruled in September
1788 that the forthcoming Estates General should be organized as in 1614,
meaning that
the third estate would be submerged under the weight of the two privileged
orders.
While William Doyle's revisionist synthesis has plausibly argued that
the parlement's
intention was less nefarious (it wished to prevent the king from using
new ground rules
to pack the Estates with pliant deputies), it does not change the fact
that public opinion
would never be the same after that consciousness-raising event. More broadly,
R. R.
Palmer, in trying to convey the uniquely revolutionary thrust of the French
experience
in 1789 – having already contextualized it in relation to other European
and American
upheavals – wrestled with that issue in a section that he called
‘The formation of a
revolutionary psychology’.
Martin S. Staum, Cabanis. Enlightenment and medical philosophy in the French Revolution, Princeton, N.J., and Guildford, Surrey, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. xi, 430, £15.10.