The French Revolution
by Ian Davidson, Profile, £25
In the popular imagination, the French Revolution was a bloody episode that witnessed France’s dishevelled and impoverished rise up against a hated and spoilt aristocracy, whose heads they proceeded to chop off. It’s a narrative laid down by Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and the stories of the Scarlet Pimpernell, and later cemented on stage in Les Misérables. It’s a perception that Ian Davidson seeks to challenge and dismantle.
As every schoolboy learnt, the Revolution’s origins lay in middle-class discontent. It had begun as a bourgeois protest against the inequity of the tax regime, from which the nobility had earned outrageous exemptions under the centralising reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV as a compensation for their loss of powers. Middle-class anger was also fuelled by the fact that they were effectively barred from taking posts in the army and the Church, the two traditional avenues of advancement in France. It was the muscle-flexing bourgeoisie, in the guise of the Third Estate, who forced the hand of the nobility and king. They initially sought mere reform, not revolution or regicide.
