The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution byJohn MarkoffReview by: Philip DawsonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Dec., 1998), pp. 1605-1606Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2650027 .

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Modern Europe 1605

cation: claims that in 1774, Lord North spent 8,000 guineas to delay the publication of Marat's Chains of Slavery until after the British election; that Jacques Necker offered him a bribe of one million livres; that in 1791, the French government was pursuing him with five spies and two thousand assassins. The charge against Marat is not that he was inclined to exaggerate but that he was either a deliberate liar on a massive scale or that he inhabited a fantasy world in which he was always St. George, the only man capable of taking on an endless succession of dragons.

The skepticism generated by Marat's unreliability on matters of fact extends to every aspect of his career. Conner dedicates his book "To the wretched of the earth, for whom Marat lived and died." There was not much evidence of that in those years before the revolution, when Dr. Marat's expensively treated pa- tients were drawn mainly from the aristocracy and he himself was attached to the household of the Comte d'Artois. On the other hand, he spent a very harassed and uncomfortable three years on the run after 1789, when he would not have found it difficult to strike some sort of a deal with the revolutionary authorities.

Whereas the assessment of most people's motives is a matter drawing fine distinctions, in Marat's case only the absolutes seem plausible, and one's choice of extreme is liable to be influenced by one's political inclination. In this dilemma, it is tempting to try to assess Marat's actions on their own merits, and it is here that Conner scores his most striking success. In one hundred carefully researched and closely argued pages, he shows that, during the 1780s, Marat was not some kind of charlatan but a serious scientist, even if, as Conner concedes, he was also an "aggressive self- promoter." The negative side of this achievement is that Conner leaves himself with little more that an- other hundred pages in which to explore Marat's political career. As a result, his study of the politician amounts to little more that a summary of his attitudes and actions during the main crises of the revolution, and there is no serious attempt to examine the content and influence of his newspaper.

It is not merely shortage of space, however, that leaves the reader skeptical about Conner's claim that Marat provided the Montagnards with indispensable leadership. That was probably his view, but it was certainly not theirs. As one follows the development of Marat's hostility to one popular leader after another, culminating in his denunciation of Jacques Roux, who had sheltered him when he was on the run from the police, the futility of trying to separate motive from achievement becomes obvious. This raises the question of whether Marat's real concern-as he himself once admitted-was not the pursuit of personal glory, whether as the man who confounded Isaac Newton or as the unchallengeable savior of the sans-culottes. This returns us to our original dilemma: if we are not to take Marat at his own estimation, it is difficult to take him seriously. Conner has presented us with the case for the defense. Even if it fails to convince the jury, his

exposition of Marat's scientific work may be held to constitute some sort of extenuating circumstance.

NORMAN HAMPSON University of York

JOHN MARKOFF. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. Uni- versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1996. Pp. xviii, 689. Cloth $85.00, paper $25.00.

When the National Assembly declared that it was entirely abolishing the feudal regime in France, some may have imagined that this was a clear act, simple to execute. But it rapidly generated a whole industry of debate, commentary, theorizing, research, and expla- nation that has proliferated over two centuries and poses some of the major issues of modern social science.

John Markoff's contribution to the historical litera- ture on this topic is by a wide margin the best. He has carried out a thorough exploration of public opinion and collective action, giving contingency the place it deserves, distinguishing long-term trends from short- term struggles, and constructing explanations of the peasants' and the legislators' comportment to conform to rather than supersede the evidence he has found.

Indeed, the book is based on a mass of evidence. In all, 1,112 cahiers de doleances were translated into an artificial code so that their statements could be counted by computers. (The code was devised by Gilbert Shapiro and Markoff, and is explained in their book, Revolutionary Demands [1998].) For accounts of collective violence by country people from 1788 to 1793, Markoff drew information from 130 secondary works, beginning with Anatolii Ado's Russian-lan- guage thesis. He found more than 4,000 instances, which he painstakingly classified by their motives and tactics into twenty-one types of anti-seigneurial action and more than sixty other specific types. Markoff followed the legislative history from the glorious night of August 4, 1789, through subsequent laws of March 15, 1790, August 25, 1792, July 17, 1793, and a score of lesser enactments. In elucidating bourgeois attitudes toward peasants, he found an illuminating discussion in a report by two commissioners, Jacques Godard and L6onard Robin, sent to investigate peasant turbulence in Quercy at the end of 1790.

On the basis of the cahiers, Markoff is able to analyze in detail what the peasants were prepared to say they wanted at that moment, what the urban notables speaking for the Third Estate wanted, and what the nobility wanted. The peasants spoke princi- pally of the burdens placed on them by institutions outside of the village: state, church, and lord. The Third Estate expressed many concerns, most promi- nently their opposition to privilege and to hindrances to free markets. The nobles displayed their sensitivity to individual liberty and constitutional questions. Some nobles sought to defend seigneurial rights in terms of property and individual rights (not as immu-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1998

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1606 Reviews of Books

table tradition); many noble assemblies omitted any discussion of seigneurial rights.

Inherent in the cahiers, therefore, was the potential for an anti-seigneurial alliance once the issue of taxa- tion became less inflamed than in April 1789. Markoff offers valuable methodological lessons on how to read and interpret these documents. He makes short work of a historian who "had a habit of making quasi- quantitative statements without actually counting any- thing" (p. 598).

The cahiers by themselves did not cause the legisla- tors to adopt the decree abolishing the "feudal re- gime." Markoff found that "the greatest waves of rural insurrection were all followed by major legislative acts. Seigneurial rights were placed on the agenda by insur- rection" (p. 511). At times when Paris was quiet, lawmakers did not make concessions to peasants. On the other hand, insurrection in Paris but not in the countryside brought no important legislation on rural issues. To bring about anti-seigneurial legislation, peasant insurrections had to be large and widespread but did not have to display anti-seigneurial themes.

In his concluding chapter, Markoff refers to two interpretations commonly found in historical writing: the first, "that the plebeian violence was but a tragic sideshow in a history primarily driven by elite reform. The second, the view that the elite reform was nothing but a fraud" (p. 588). As a whole, his work will persuade readers that both those views are wrong.

In the course of reaching his conclusions about the ending of the seigneurial system, Markoff develops a view of the process of revolutionary change that brought about that result. The anti-seigneurial alliance "was made, as rural communities and legislative fac- tions each learned how to use the other. What un- folded, then, was a process of bargaining ... The alliance came to exist as radical legislators and militant peasants both seized the moment. The revolution was not, however, a single moment, but a prolonged series of moments when the actions of a subject population and a group of power holders created new opportuni- ties for each other" (p. 514).

In the attempts during recent decades to dismantle the traditional Jacobin account of the French Revolu- tion, what has been largely missing is a different narrative scheme with any credibility. It is not the least of Markoff's accomplishments that he suggests some elements of what such a scheme must include.

PHILIP DAWSON EMERITUS City University of New York

KEN ALDER. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 476. $59.50.

Ken Alder takes a Tocquevillean line in this book. He asserts that French engineers, notably those of the artillery of the Royal Army, promoted meritocracy under the ancien regime and continued to do so, more

successfully, under the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes. The book consists of three parts. In part one, the engineers convert "capital into coercion"; in part two, they convert "coercion into capital"; and in part three, centered on the Terror and Thermidor (1793- 1795), the engineers are "at the head of the revolu- tionary state" and effect a partial "technocratic Revo- lution" (pp. 19-20).

If Alder's initial explanation of his work is somewhat obscure, he quickly clarifies matters. He shows that the "disaster" (for the French) of the Seven Year's War (1756-1763) brought home to the king and his minis- ters the key role that the artillery engineers must play in army modernization. Louis XV named Jean-Bap- tiste Vaquette de Gribeauval director of engineers. (A hero of Schweidnitz, Gribeauval had been praised by his enemy, Frederick the Great, who recognized his skillful use of artillery. After some political infighting, Gribeauval became inspector of artillery under Louis XVI. His system included lighter, more maneuverable cannon (and carriages); packaged shot and powder, making for more rapid fire; and interchangeable parts, devised by Honor6 Blanc (which were, however, re- jected as too expensive). The "Gribeauvalists" were supported by the military theorists of the time, includ- ing J.-A.-H. Guibert. The budget for artillery was expanded, while that for the line army was reduced.

Meanwhile, the artillery had initiatsed commission- ing and promotion of officers on merit. Its engineering school was the first sponsored by the crown (1720). Perforce, one might say, officers were rated by merit both in school and thereafter. Alder shows that the artillery recruited from the upper bourgeoisie and the lower nobility. Unlike members of the court and upper nobility, they disdained neither study, nor technical work, nor dealing with manufacturers and artisans. Alder gives a fine statistical picture of the artillery corps under the ancien regime: fourteen percent were commoners and eighty-six percent nobles, but not high nobles. Many were descendants of judicial and finan- cial officers ennobled by the king, including Gribeau- val himself (p. 76). In September 1792 (after Louis XVI was deposed), only eighteen percent of infantry and cavalry officers remained in the army, but forty- two percent did of engineers (p. 83).

Promotion in the artillery was slow, but it became the elite corps. The engineers failed to "sell" inter- changeable parts for cannon (and later muskets) to provincial manufacturers because they demanded quality and efficiency (while private and semi-private producers respected profits).

The triumph of the engineers came during the Terror (1793-1794), when two former Royal Army engineers-Lazare Carnot and Claude-Antoine Prieur-masterminded the military effort that "saved" the republic. Carnot has been celebrated as the "Or- ganizer of Victory," because of his introduction and management of the lev&e en masse and activities to supply the army and to inspire and instruct the new recruits through representatives-on-mission (which

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1998

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