I

The historiography of the French Revolution has been traditionally and rightly regarded as the major yield and the ultimate confirmation of the golden age of historicism, a success story in which every representative paradigm of writing history has had its own share. From Jaurès to Lefebvre and Soboul, the Marxist chronicles transpired as proof positive of the validity of their master's paradigm. The liberal partisans of the thesis of "limited but infinite progress" thrived on an apparently inexhaustible treasure trove of the hagiography of the "Republic." In their accounts, an indestructible and constantly resurrected republicanism signaled "progress," and the surreptitiously surviving and occasionally reemerging "ultramontanism" or "royalism" meant "regression." The advocates of historical decay, from Bonald and De Maistre to Maurras, found their explanatory principle continually confirmed by their nation's intermittent loss of gloire and its incessant internecine strife. Prior to Nietzsche, the mythology of the superman demonstrated its seductive power through the exploitation of the material of the French Revolution in Carlyle's celebrated work. And the particularly French branch of "skeptical liberalism," initiated by Tocqueville, continued by Cochin, and inherited by Furet, felt itself confirmed by every new disastrous turn of a permanently shaky French democracy.

And yet, in the postwar domestic research of the French Revolution, unmistakable symptoms of the decline of the traditional interpretations have been emerging for decades, the sole exception being Soboul's classic on the sans-culottes of Year II and the direct democracy of the Paris districts. Put bluntly, the domestic narrative became tediously self-repetitive. Until the publication of Furet's Thinking the French Revolution in the second half of the

1970s, which has become a turning point for friend and foe alike, innovating impetus came exclusively from outside. The Anglo-American "revisionism" successfully questioned the relevance of the major explanatory devices of the Marxist school, at least in the actual form in which they had been used. Via the accumulated experience of sociological research, the new American "social history" or "historical sociology," whose paradigmatic works were Tilly's The Vendée and Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions , gave an important stimulus to that particular style of writing history, which had been captive too long to a dubious method of "typology." In her celebrated, as well as hotly debated, On Revolution , Hannah Arendt has drawn such a sharp contrast between the "American" and "French" models of revolution that the after-effects of her challenge or provocation have been reverberating ever since in historical consciousness. Of the contributors to the present volume, Higonnet with his most recent Sister Republics is thoroughly indebted to Arendt's provocative gesture. English and Scandinavian New Leftist historians were the only worthy sucessors to Guérin's and Soboul's pioneering explorations into a hitherto unknown continent of anonymous militants (I have in mind the works by Cobb and Tönnesson). The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity , emerging from a special bicentennial issue of Social Research (the theoretical journal of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research) and with a majority of its contributors coming from outside of French research, tries to live up to the already very high standards of the new tradition.

A very serious trend, at once historical and philosophical, lurks behind the decline of the French domestic narrative. The end of World War II marked the simultaneous collapse of the great paradigms of nineteenth-century historicism, which, without public recognition, had been philosophically eroded already for a long time. The Hegelian-Marxian paradigm of a progressive conclusion of (pre)history was hard, later outright impossible, to maintain in the face of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Paradigms of historical decay had profoundly compromised themselves by their often close association with the "heroic" efforts of Fascism and Nazism to "overcome decadence." The paradigms of limited (mostly technological) progress, which had for a while fared best, ran into the insurmountable hurdle of the apparently ineliminable poverty of the postcolonial world and the skeptical "ecological consciousness." Although on the academic scene of "mass society" historical research has expanded to an incredible extent; although its methodological selfawareness has been immensely refined and its tools sharpened; although the walls of national segregation have been pulled down within the global institution of academe, historians have been increasingly at a loss concerning the extra muros relevance of their research.

In the meantime, however, a beneficial change has begun to develop in

the professional-historical consciousness under the impact of the widespread acceptance of hermeneutics in the social sciences. This acceptance has influenced the historian, whether or not the historian was consciously preoccupied with philosophy. The nineteenth-century paradigms of history operated with the concept of an objective, uniform, homogeneous and coherent process comprising its "meaning" (which was to be "scientifically" deciphered by historians). They often used the hypothesis of objective historical laws, and they ascribed an unambiguous (although divergingly explicated) direction to the integral process. True enough, several constituents of these theories, above all its "objectivity," had already been profoundly questioned in the nineteenth century, primarily by Nietzsche. The methodological consequences of this challenge, however, dawned on the historian with excessive delay. But now we are living in an age of "hermeneutical consciousness," the spirit of which, transpiring in the present volume, can be summed up in a term that none of the participants uses and some of them would object to: posthistoire .

Posthistoire , a term coined in the process of exploring "postmodernity," seems to be a particularly inept category for the use of historians if it is meant in the facile and misleading sense of "history having come to a standstill." But there are other possible interpretations of the term. If "postmodernity" is understood not as an epoch subsequent to modernity, but as a position and attitude within modernity which confirms modernity's "arrival," its final settling-in, while at the same time making inquiries into modernity's credentials and efforts to render meaning to it, the concept posthistoire will emerge from a taboo and a barrier for the historian into a stimulus. In this understanding, history will transpire as a text that we read together, but each of us in his or her own individual way. This collective, at the same time personal, reading does not recognize any "distinguished" reader. (Such a position could only be achieved by the absolute transcendence of our common world: modernity.) But although there are only myths of and arrogant claims to a "distinguished position" and "absolute transcendence," there is indeed a shared core in the reading of the same story by every community of readers.

Despite the conspicuous—theoretical, methodological, and political—differences between the contributors to The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity , the "shared core" of the story read and recounted by them, individually and collectively, is palpably present. It is comprised in the title of the volume, and it provides this collection of papers with a strong internal cohesion. The shared core is the authors' recognition that after several crucial antecedents and preludes, modernity has been born out of the French Revolution; further, that modernity "is here," it has arrived; and, finally, that it has to be given a meaning. It is at this point that the often heated debate between the seemingly isolated papers in the volume begins.