![]() ![]() Most historians, however, do not grant Kuhn’s account of paradigm shifts its full dizzying power. If historians really have abandoned the past paradigm, then there may no longer be a “French Revolution” to analyze. When we operate within a new paradigm, Kuhn claimed, we actually “work in a different world.” The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, for example, did not change the interpretation of “phlogiston” he invalidated it as an object of study. According to Kuhn, we could not merely say that we have changed our interpretation while the object remains the same. Rumors of the past paradigm’s death should lead us to ask: Was there a French Revolution? For if we take seriously the notion of “paradigm” developed in Thomas Kuhn’s famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, then our answer to this question might well have to be “no.” Or, rather, we might say that there had once been something we knew as the French Revolution, but there is no such object now. the present moment is not notably bright for the French Revolution.” Even historians who have devoted their careers to the topic admit that the field appears “in disarray” and that its sounds are those of “undeniable cacophony.” The past “paradigm”-we are told-has collapsed and no new one has taken its place. A senior scholar at a major research institution observes that “in the American academy. If the past decade’s review essays are to be believed, historians of the French Revolution are suffering badly from a disintegration of past certainties and a loss of intellectual direction. Repeated claims about methodological innovation and paradigm shifts have prevented us from seeing just how much our new interpretations owe to the old-and hence have condemned us to repeat what we do not fully understand. It is one contention of this essay that the considerable commotion over rival interpretations has obscured the extent to which the revolution in the study of the revolution has left a much grander historical narrative, about the characteristics and chronology of “modern” life, largely untouched. This underlying consistency contrasts sharply with the view, commonplace among specialists, that few fields have been as subject to revision and debate as has the study of the French Revolution. Pre-modern history, it is implied, flows away from the revolution to empty into some primordial sea of pre-history modern history runs the opposite direction, to reach the shores of the present. An evocative but, in this non-geological context, far from precise word-watershed-has provided one popular metaphor for conveying some sense of the revolution’s relation to modernity. Said to mark “the beginning of modern history,” the French Revolution is deemed “a decisive event in world history” that initiated a “century of rapid and tremendous change” after the events of 1789–1815, “the clock could not really be set back.” Authors may emphasize different aspects of this modern period-political Liberalism, triumphant individualism, nationalistic militarism-but their accounts coincide in treating the revolution as an identifiable period of rapid, irreversible change. The wording may vary, but the substance does not. ![]() ![]() From classics of Cold War “Western” historiography to recent efforts to write history within a global framework, the fundamental message remains the same: the Revolution of 1789 is the turning point of the modern world. How surprising it is, then, to note how remarkably constant textbooks have been in assessing the import of the French Revolution. Structuralist approaches associated, at least in part, with the Annales school, have been superseded by the notionally poststructuralist turns of the linguistic screw total history has yielded to micro history we all recognize Eurocentrism when we see it. Cliometrics has come and gone the new social history has become old hat narrative has been revived. It is a truth, widely acknowledged, that the study of history has changed dramatically since the end of World War II. ![]()
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