Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fifty years after its publication, Quatre-Vingt-Neuf — Georges Lefebvre's classic statement of the social interpretation of the French Revolution — is widely thought to have been discredited. Revisionist historians have effectively challenged the idea that the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary capitalist class overthrowing feudalism, and this has been taken to repudiate both Lefebvre's interpretation and Marxist history generally. Yet the new revisionist orthodoxy has been unable to provide a credible alternative account of the origins and course of the Revolution. A “new” social interpretation is therefore suggested which, ironically, is very close to that originally offered by Lefebvre for, while the idea of a bourgeois-capitalist class revolution clearly is refuted by the historical evidence, a return to Quatre-Vingt-Neuf reveals that this concept did not play a central role in Lefebvre's account. Nor is it integral to Marx's historical materialist method of analysis. Indeed, a fresh historical materialist class analysis of the ancien régime supports a very different social interpretation than that of “bourgeois revolution,” one largely consistent with Lefebvre's interpretation of the complex but integral social revolution unleashed in 1789.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".