A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Perspectives on the French Revolution 477

tion also contributed to the accentuation of British nationalism in the face

of a perceived threat by its old Catholic enemy in a new guise.
The French conquests in Europe were themselves an exercise in statemak­
ing, largely unanticipated and unwanted by the local populations. Between
1 795 and 1799, the Directory established satellite “sister republics” directly
administered by France. The Helvetic Republic (Switzerland), the Batavian
Republic (the Netherlands), the Cisalpine Republic (Milan), and the
Parthenopean Republic (the Kingdom of Naples) were founded with the
goal of shoring up alliances against the other great powers. But in the Italian
states, only the Cisalpine Republic generated any local enthusiasm for the
French invaders, and then only briefly. People “liberated” from the rule of
kings and princes found themselves governed by a revolutionary bureaucracy
administered from Paris.

The French found support and hired officials principally from the middle
class, which had already provided officials in the old state structure. But the
French invasions gradually generated a hatred for the revolutionary invaders
and in some places a concomitant nationalist response. This was especially
true within the German states, where many writers and other people in the
upper classes hoped one day that “Germany”—300 states, 50 free cities, and
almost 1,000 territories of imperial knights of the Holy Roman Empire—
would one day be politically unified.

Fiistorians Views of the Revolution

Marxist historians long dominated the historiography of the French Revolu­

tion. They have described the Revolution as the inevitable result of a bour­

geois challenge to the Old Regime, dominated by nobles. Thus, Marxists

have interpreted the Revolution in terms of the rise of the bourgeoisie and

its struggle for social and political influence commensurate with its rising

economic power during the eighteenth century. Marxists have insisted that

the nobility compromised the authority of the absolute monarchy by refus­

ing to be taxed; then, according to this interpretation, the emboldened bour­

geoisie allied with urban artisans and workers to bring down the absolute

monarchy. They have described the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the

dominant social class in France, insisting on its growing role in the country’s

increasingly capitalist economy.

This traditional Marxist economic interpretation of the French Revolu­

tion has been largely discredited. Some historians have noted that differ­

ences between aristocrats and bourgeois, and within both social groups, had

become considerably blurred during the eighteenth century; that most of

the “bourgeois” members of the Estates-General were not drawn from com­

merce and manufacturing but rather from law; and that, in any case, the

upper middle class and nobles by the time of the Revolution shared a com­

mon obsession with money, not privilege. Thus, one cannot accurately

depict the Revolution as having been simply a victory for the bourgeoisie.