II

The first complex issue, about which there is a considerable degree of disagreement among the authors, but discussed in the "subtext" rather than in the text itself, is the question of whether the process of birth of modernity had actually come to an end or whether it is still a delivery-in-progress. This "merely" subtextual issue is of crucial significance. Its evaluation will ultimately decide the tone, the method, and the style of the contributions, the distance that has been taken in them to the collectively recounted story. Put briefly, this will define whether the subject matter of the narrative, to use a wise category that Agnes Heller coined in her A Theory of History , is "the past of the present" or past pure and simple, which, as such, is dead.

As is well known, Furet holds the view that the French Revolution has already come to an end and therefore has to be treated as a "cold issue" by the historian. In this context, it will suffice to assert about this regularly misread aperçu that it is not a hostile statement against the Revolution and that the thesis of the fait-accompli character of the Revolution is not an obstacle to Furet in participating in the "shared core" of the story, in "rendering meaning to modernity." On the contrary: it is precisely on this basis that he can formulate what he regards as the main message of our age. For my part, I have insisted in The Frozen Revolution that at least in one respect, concerning its inexhaustible and still active energy of generating Jacobin and neo-Jacobin blueprints, the revolutionary process should come to a halt (which by definition means that as yet it has not). In my contributions to this volume, I have repeated this warning. Higonnet has also been thinking along similar lines. His paper reconsiders the historical-cultural causes of the threat of what he calls "the universalist illusion" of French radical revolutionaries, which is for him evidently still topical. Other contributors to the volume clearly understand the French Revolution as a process still active, at least in its aftereffects, and, as such, uncompleted. Both in Tilly's and Skocpol's understanding, the Revolution was about the immense reinforcement of the nation-state, a process that, as Tilly stresses and proves in his paper, had been underway since the mideighteenth century. Moreover, the process has just commenced in certain areas of the world, as Skocpol pinpoints with regard to Iran. The alternative views of our present, as either a dead or a merely extinguished volcano—that is, in a less metaphoric language, as either the consolidated end result of revolutions no longer in need of major change or of the aftereffects of a still lively revolutionary dynamic generating constant change—are undoubtedly crucial with regard to what kind of meaning is rendered to modernity.

The second major issue of controversy among the contributors concerns the terms of interpretation. Of them, Hobsbawm is the only eloquent champion of the traditional understanding in terms of "class," whereas the rel-

evant parts of Furet's paper serve as the most articulate refutation of the traditional position. Without rehashing their arguments, it has to be stated that, first, the "revisionist" thesis set forth primarily by Cobban decades ago seems to have broken through and now stands uncontested. Marc Richir's aperçu concerning the French bourgeoisie as the result, rather than the cause, of the Revolution, has in this volume been accepted by Furet and Wallerstein alike, although they hold widely divergent political views. Furthermore, the precise class identification of the actor has in the meantime lost a considerable degree of its topicality, unless someone regards the present as a mere prelude to the real drama. The major term of explanation can equally be "the nation-state," which is Tilly's option, "the world system" (this is Wallerstein's explanatory device, whereas Skocpol picks a bit of both), or the capability of a revolution to generate "master narratives" that, in turn, trigger the generalized learning processes of modernity. (The latter is the framework in terms of which both Higonnet and this writer understand the afterlife of the Revolution as well as its lasting impact on the present.) It goes without saying that the different key concepts imply different readings of the "text of history" and thus different meanings rendered to modernity. But in each case, they are selected and used with a view to the "shared core" of the readings.

The genuine clash among the authors, one which sheds a dramatic light on the nature of modernity, is the conflict between the "purely political" and the "social" interpretation of the Revolution. The latter is represented in several different versions in the volume and is in turn criticized both by Higonnet and Furet. Without claiming the position of umpire, it is this writer's conviction that only a combined interpretation, in which neither the political nor the economic (the "class") factor plays the role of primus movens , would uncover the unique achievement of the French Revolution, namely, the creation of a universal framework of political action in result of which the French Revolution has remained the master narrative of modernity. The lasting character of this achievement was for a long time covered by the bloody confusion of the revolutionary decades, the actual collapse of the French Revolution, and the complicity of a long line of history-writing that generated and circulated narratives of the great event not less one-sided and blindfolded than the actors' own accounts had been. But now, in the process of "rendering meaning to modernity," the framework resurfaces from under the debris of history. And the various contributions to The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity , taken in their entirety, provide sufficient clues to the understanding of the framework.

The initial steps of the French actors were characterized by a surprising degree of both political naiveté and arbitrariness. They were naive insofar as they innocently believed that the sole, albeit gigantic, task awaiting them was the deed of a merely political reconstruction. Once the "fact" (more properly:

their revolutionary projection) that "every man is born free" had been recognized; once la nation , the new universal which is preexistent with regard to both individuals and corporations, had been established; once the state is "free" insofar as it proclaimed a new type of (collective) sovereign; once everyone was recognized as equal before the law, their task was done and completed. Like the American Cincinnati, they thought they could return to their homes. This belief in the cure-all character of the primary act of emancipation was extended by them to the economic domain as well. One of the as-yet-unwritten stories of the Revolution is the initial volte-face of even those economists who had been brought up in the school of an enlightened but firm state regulation of the markets during the last decades of the monarchy. This turnabout appears in light of Tilly's account of the increase in the direct rule of the state, accelerated by the Revolution, as sheer illusion. But in the early atmosphere of general enthusiasm, even the former étatistes became partisans of the complete deregulation of the markets.

The revolutionaries were also excessively arbitrary. On certain counts, in particular concerning the victims of religious prejudice, their generosity seemed to have no bounds. Gary Kates tells here the story of Jews having been turned into Frenchmen almost overnight. If slowly and inconsistently, they still did incomparably more for the emancipation of the slaves than the American founding fathers, exalted to high heavens by Arendt, had ever considered to do. On other counts, their record was appalling from the start. Their electoral system was drafted in the spirit of a patronizing and authoritarian Enlightenment; as a result, a considerable part of the poorer strata of the populace was excluded from it. The women's issue, as a problem to be addressed, was never put on their agenda. And in a pathbreaking study, Richard Andrews has shown quite recently that their first penal code contained such limitations on the freedom of speech that the government during the Reign of Terror needed very little imagination to amplify its rigor.

Naiveté could have been overcome and arbitrariness rectified, however, had it not been for the monumental and bitter surprise caused by the unruly behavior of the newly emancipated crowd. Both Singer's analysis of the centrality of the crowd's violence with its specific claim to popular justice and Skocpol's emphasis on mass mobilization make the crucial role of this "unruly behavior" of the crowd in the whole process sufficiently clear. Once recognized as citizens, the crowd seemed to be exclusively preoccupied, above all on the urban scene, with such vulgar issues as the price of bread. And at a well-known, crucial point, the urban poor proposed and imposed the total abandonment of both political and economic freedom in "putting the terror on the agenda" and forcing the introduction of le maximum général .

With this, the initial naive harmony of the first days exploded, never to return again. The Revolution embarked on the fateful course of navigating between the Scyllae of a strong, often terroristic state whose actual socioeco-

nomic policies varied (hence the legitimate stress on the state in Tilly and Skocpol) and the Charybdis of the wish to return to the self-regulatory mechanisms of a market system (which has remained a pious or impious wish of French politics for a long time but which has never regained the position it had enjoyed and abused in the early days of the Revolution). And it is thus that the framework of modern politics, the extremes between which it has been moving for two centuries and the space between them wherein modernity worked itself out, have been created.

However, the "homecoming of modernity"—the historical moment in which "the rendering of meaning" can be undertaken—is to be achieved only if the two inherent trends of this cycle, political freedom and the management of the "social question," were reconciled at least to the degree of a peaceful cohabitation. For this, two requirements had to be met. First, the primacy of political freedom, the principle of the free state, had to be maintained. Neither the dialectical idea of a "tyranny of freedom" nor a streamlined form of tyranny pure and simple can solve "the social question," or, for that matter, any social issue. But they can eventually destroy modernity. It belongs to the greatness of the French Revolution, as long as it had remained a revolution and had not yet been turned into an autocratic-charismatic rule, that at least the principle of freedom and popular sovereignty was never abandoned by any of its representative statesmen. Robespierre gave a short symbolic expression of this reluctance to transcend the threshold in the famous question of Au nom de qui? on the last night of his life. And Saint-Just, before being silenced by the Convention for good, emphasized that twothirds of the legislative work of the Assembly during the most lunatic days of the Reign of Terror had been aimed at strengthening, instead of extinguishing, civil society. This hesitation before the fateful threshold elevates the story of the French Revolution to the rank of modernity's master narrative over the Bolshevik "second and expanded edition."

The second requirement of "the homecoming of modernity" has been formulated by Furet in a paradoxical manner. In a lecture given at New York University in October 1988, he set forth the postulate of democracy "forgetting its origins." The prosaic meaning of this dictum reads as follows: the bitter struggles, which had torn asunder the initial harmony of the great Revolution and had propelled its actors as well as its successors onto a cycle of permanent civil wars, must come to a halt in an act of reconciliation, or else modernity will be destroyed. I am in complete agreement with Furet's postulate, but I deem it feasible only on the basis of creating a legitimate space for the constant renegotiation of "the social question" on the basis of political freedom as an absolute precondition.

Three major issues of the political culture of the Revolution have been discussed in the volume, each in turn contributing considerably to the present physiognomy and "meaning" of modernity. The first is the problem of

"the republican legacy," dealt with in the papers by Smith, Furet, and this writer. The issue at stake is far more than purely terminological in nature. Whether democracy would tendentially move toward the Kantian res publica noumenon or remain the rule of the majority pure and simple (or even, as Sieyès feared, a facade for a new oligarchy) was perhaps the most crucial alternative the Revolution had to face. The "terminological hairsplitting" aiming at the definition of the new state formed an organic part of the bitter internal struggles of the epoch. The second issue, the "resacralizing" of the political sphere after it had been thoroughly secularized and rationalized, as recounted by this writer, has been joined and complemented by Miguel Abensour's analysis of the "cult of heroism" in the Revolution. On the surface, it transpires as a purely French story having no continuation in the political history of the continent. In fact, both the resacralizing of the political sphere and the cult of heroism, separately and conjointly, were the prelude to that major nightmare haunting modernity ever since: charismatic rule. Finally, the issue with which revolutions have never ceased to be associated since the French drama, namely the violence of the crowd as a constitutive part of political action, is, in its whole complexity, the subject matter of Singer's paper.

This political culture was "domestic," intrinsically and often chauvinistically French. At the same time, it was universalized in the (intentional as well as unintentional) efforts of the Revolution to impose itself on what it understood as the modern world. To regard the Napoleonic Grande Armée as the exclusive vehicle of this conquest would be an error and a simplification. From a certain aspect, modernity can be viewed as an aggregate of representative narratives that, as a rule, spread far beyond national borders and served as blueprints for, and thus implicitly conquered, other nations and national imaginations.