ABSTRACT
It is now thirty years since Alfred Cobban, the ‘father of revisionism’, published his short book, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, provoking a fierce reaction from marxisant historians.1 Cobban’s attack was directed not so much against the importance of social and economic history as against the imposition of determinist, historical (that is marxist) laws of development. It is revealing that the socialist historian, Georges Lefebvre, came out relatively unscathed compared with the onslaught directed against the ‘marxist-leninist’ Albert Soboul. The attack upon Soboul reveals the implicit, often explicit, agenda of many revisionist historians-the rejection of the idea that revolutionary action advances the cause of ‘progress’, whether ‘bourgeois’ action during the English Civil War and the French Revolution, or ‘peasant-proletarian’ action during the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the present century. The collapse of the communist system in Europe over the past few years appears to have provided revisionists with historical justification for their antimarxisant approach. Alfred Cobban rejected the notion that revolution was the essential midwife of the new bourgeois society in 1789, hence his emphasis upon the economic failure of the Revolution. In other words, revolutions actually impede, rather than advance, the capitalist process which, Professor Cobban agreed, had been developing in Europe over the previous three or four centuries. However, many present-day revisionist historians are, at best, only the illegitimate offspring of their father, placing far less emphasis than Cobban did on the importance of the social and the economic. For these historians, semiotics is more important than social history, vieux-style.
