A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin

Reviewed by: A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin William S. Cormack Popkin, Jeremy D. – A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2019. 627 p. This detailed and lively survey of the French Revolution provides a summary of modern scholarship aimed at a popular audience. It is in the same genre (and has a similar length) as Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), but the focus and intent of Jeremy Popkin’s book are very different. Popkin seeks to move beyond older interpretations and provide a balanced assessment of the period as the beginning of modern democratic society. Moreover, as an eminent authority on the revolution’s history in both metropolitan France and the Caribbean, Popkin attempts to fully incorporate recent research on the struggles over women’s rights and the colonial questions of race and slavery into the wider narrative of the French Revolution. The fact that every chapter addresses these issues is the book’s most impressive accomplishment. The first five chapters examine French society on the eve of revolution and the developments behind the crisis of the Old Regime. In discussing the Enlightenment, Popkin includes the diversity of opinion on questions of women’s rights and racial [End Page 663] equality. The threat of bankruptcy led Louis XVI’s government to propose sweeping changes to the kingdom’s fiscal and administrative organization. If the Assembly of Notables resisted royal reforms, the resulting political ferment encouraged the expression of more radical hopes. In 1787, Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Société des Amis des Noirs, a group dedicated to the abolition of slavery, which Popkin terms the first revolutionary club because it provided the model of political activism for the Jacobins. Financial collapse in 1788 forced the monarchy to concede elections for an Estates-General. Questions regarding its composition and operation ignited conflict between the privileged orders and the Third Estate that Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès identified with the nation. Popkin notes that the cahiers de doléances included calls for women’s equality and slavery’s abolition. Chapters 6 through 9 trace the shift in the Revolution of 1789 from the elite resistance of Third Estate deputies in the Estates-General, who declared themselves the National Assembly and swore to give France a constitution, to the popular revolution that included the storming of the Bastille in Paris, peasant revolt in the countryside, and the women’s march to Versailles. While sympathetic to the people’s revolution, which consolidated the National Assembly’s success and led the deputies to abolish privilege, Popkin recognizes the ambiguity of popular violence. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen proclaimed universal principles of liberty and equality, but the distinction between active and passive citizens based on wealth provoked radical opposition. Olympe de Gouges and other female activists protested women’s exclusion from active citizenship. Popkin also examines colonial slavery’s survival and how its contradiction with revolutionary values posed a continuing dilemma for the National Assembly. Chapters 10 through 12 examine the developments that brought about a second revolution. If fear of the émigrés and the proliferation of political clubs radicalized the revolution, Popkin emphasizes the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the imposition of the clerical oath as dividing France into hostile camps. Women were as deeply divided as men over church reforms that included the abolition of religious orders. Louis XVI’s attempted flight on June 20, 1791, provoked a crisis: although the National Assembly rejected demands to remove the king, the Constitution of 1791 faced strong dissatisfaction when it was implemented in September. While some deputies in the new Legislative Assembly hoped to make the constitution work, patriots demanded war with Austria. Popkin argues that the declaration of war on April 20, 1792, rendered political conflict explosive. Metropolitan revolutionaries were also confronted with a colonial crisis: a massive slave revolt had erupted in Saint-Domingue. On August 10 a coordinated insurrection in Paris forced the Assembly to suspend the king and to call elections for a National Convention. Chapters 13 through 15 address the new Republic...

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