of the English bourgeoisie was at odds with Guha’s portrayal. It was not antifeudal because there was little left of the feudal agrarian structure; it was either indifferent to or contemptuous of subaltern interests in the actual conflict, accommodating them only when absolutely unavoidable; and its political strategy, during the campaign and after, was to exclude the lower order from politics. These facts are very well known. What is remarkable is that Guha seems unaware of them, and even more so, that the historical profession has allowed these misconceptions to pass uncontested.
Guha would seem to be on surer ground in his characterization of the French Revolution than of the English. For most of the twentieth century, the events of 1789 were taken as paradigmatic of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary capture of power. If any revolution was antifeudal, devoted to liberalism—indeed, was it not inspired by Enlightenment ideas?—and paradigmatically modern in its political discourse, surely it must be the French. But in fact, here too the historiography has not been kind to Guha’s interpretation. To be sure, the revolution did culminate in the end of centuries-old seignorial rule in the agrarian economy, and, in that sense, yes, it was genuinely antifeudal. And true, it also opened up the space for political contestation in the direction of liberalism to a greater extent than any preceding revolution. In these respects, the French Revolution was a decidedly epoch-making event. But while these characteristics of the revolution do make it unarguably significant, closer inspection reveals little to confirm Guha’s specific propositions concerning its significance: namely, that it was led by a rising capitalist class, that this class launched the conflict in order to install a liberal economic and political order, and that it did so by attracting the peasants and workers to its program.
THE REVOLUTION AND THE BOURGEOISIE
The English Revolution could not be antifeudal because it occurred after the transition to capitalism had already been completed. In France, capitalism had barely begun to sprout by 1789. Hence, there was every possibility for the revolution to be antifeudal, and in fact, this was one of its defining characteristics. The problem is that it was not led by actors who in any sense could be described as capitalists.
In some respects, the background to the French Revolution is remarkably reminiscent of the English experience of a century prior. Much as was the case with the Stuarts, the ruling Bourbon dynasty was confronted with a catastrophic imbalance between the military and geopolitical demands being made on the state, on the one hand, and the revenues available to fund them, on the other. In the course of the eighteenth century, France had been locked in almost perpetual conflict with England, the most recent of which—the Seven Years’ War—had resulted in humiliating defeat. The root of the fiscal weakness was an agrarian economy still encased in precapitalist property relations, unlike the more dynamic English agriculture. Backward agriculture, of course, made for a slow-growing revenue base, a situation aggravated by the fact that the French nobility was largely exempt from taxation. Over the centuries, the French state had been able to expand its reach only through the expedient of reaching an accommodation with regional landed magnates, granting them state office and exemptions from taxation in exchange for their political support. Consequently, the flow from an already low revenue base was reduced even further, as monies that could have buoyed the exchequer went instead into the nobility’s coffers. By the end of the century, what had originated as an expedient had turned into a curse. The panoply of exemptions and perquisites had locked the state into perpetual fiscal crisis.29
Faced with a treasury verging on collapse, the Crown had no choice but to push for greater revenue. The most feasible approach was to reconsider the myriad privileges and tax exemptions that had been granted to the nobility over the centuries. But the landed magnates would hardly relinquish their prerogatives without a struggle. Faced with a serious crisis of governance, Louis XVI agreed to convene the Estates-General, a national assembly that brought together representatives of all three orders—the nobility, the clergy, and the so-called Third Estate, the 97 percent of the population that belonged to neither. The twelve hundred delegates were chosen through a national electoral process and converged on Versailles in May 1789. Within days, it was clear there would be no simple way out of the crisis. The delegates found themselves at loggerheads.30
At the heart of the impasse was a divergence of goals among the delegates to the Estates-General. On some basic points regarding the desired direction of reform, opinion did converge. Virtually all the delegates agreed on the need to scale back the arbitrary use of power by the monarchy—in other words, that Bourbon absolutism needed to be dismantled. But beyond this, the vision of the new order fractured. For the nobility, the goal was to pare down the Crown’s powers while retaining as many of their own privileges as possible; their desired new regime would be a constitutional monarchy, but geared to the preservation of noble power and dominance. For representatives of the Third Estate, reform would be pointless if noble privileges were left untouched. Louis XVI certainly had to accept a diminution of his powers, but this would be of little use if not accompanied by more opportunities for professional and social advancement for non-noble moneyed groupings—the strata represented at the convention under the rubric of the Third Estate.31 So, while the latter rallied to the nobility’s call to hem in monarchical arbitrariness, they also raised the cry for equality before the law and an end to noble privilege, thus directly pitting themselves against most of the noble delegates.
What had begun as a call to discuss avenues for fiscal reform rapidly turned into a campaign to dismantle the absolutist state. It is important to stress, however, that almost none of the delegates construed this goal as a call to revolution. There was a commitment to political change, to be sure, but even the most radical of the delegates imagined nothing more drastic than turning France into a constitutional monarchy.32 Certainly, the bourgeois delegates of the Third Estate showed no ex ante commitment to popular sovereignty.33 Much as in the English case, the horizons of even the most refractory elements in the reform coalition were confined to expanding their own power. This amounted to a diminution of arbitrary use of power by the state and an expansion of political space for whichever elite group the delegate happened to represent. For the Third Estate, reform thus meant greater political and social scope for themselves, but with no commitment to greater rights for subaltern groups. Indeed, in the most famous tract to emerge from the Third—Abbé Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?—there was an explicit rejection of political rights for those without property.34 Nobody came to Versailles in 1789 carrying a program for bourgeois revolution.
If the Third Estate was not revolutionary, neither was it capitalist. For purposes of assessing Guha’s argument, this is perhaps the central point. Of those who represented the Third Estate, from whom would emerge the leaders of the French Revolution, the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with capitalist production. There were 610 representatives of the Third Estate, and only ninety of them had anything to do with commerce. Even here, most of the ninety were petty bourgeois—shopkeepers, merchants, and so on. Only about ten were involved with industrial production, and most of these were from traditional, heavily protected sectors. Even more damaging, those who would later emerge as the Jacobin faction were among the poorest of the delegates, closer to the plebeian world of the Parisian masses than to the glitter of the moneyed classes. The vast majority of the delegates who came representing the Third Estate were people who today would be called the salaried middle class. In fact, of the 610 delegates, some five hundred were associated with the legal profession.35 If the social background of the delegates to Versailles is relevant to the characterization of the revolutionary coalition—and surely it must be—then there is little to warrant labeling it as “bourgeois” in the modern sense of the term.
The lack of correspondence between the use of the word and its current meaning was also true in the larger society. The delegates of the Third Estate were often referred to as “bourgeois” only because their occupations were assimilated within that category. It is well understood in the historiography of the ancien régime that “bourgeois” was a
