Europe: Early Modem and Modem
army satisfied the genealogical conditions mandated
by the regulation of 1781 (namely four generations of
patrilineal noble descent). Cherin had inherited the
position on the death of his father in 1785 and had
purchased a further ennobling office in 1788, so he
could be said to personify the employment practices of
the Old Regime. It might also be thought that his
world collapsed four years later when the principle of
"careers open to talents" was established by the National Assembly. Yet it turns out that the revolution
opened up a fast track for Cherin. He took advantage
of the emigration of noble officers to get himself a
commission in 1792, rose rapidly thanks to his aptitude
for military service, and by 1795 was a general. Had he
not died in action in 1799, leading a cavalry charge, he
would almost certainly have achieved the noble status
so generously bestowed by Napoleon Bonaparte on his
senior officers.
Cherin exemplifies the paradoxical nature of the
French army's officer corps. The "Segur Ordinance" of
1781 used to be paraded as one of the crassest
examples of the "aristocratic reaction" that allegedly
brought the bourgeoisie to boiling point in 1789. Rafe
Blaufarb confirms and strengthens the argument of his
dissertation director David Bien that, in reality, the
ordinance was directed not against commoners but
against a particular section of the nobility. It was
designed to protect poor provincial nobles against the
courtiers who used their wealth and influence to
leapfrog the junior grades and become colonels by
their mid-twenties. The French Revolution may have
broken the noble monopoly of the officer corps, but its
abolition of venality and the court, together with the
reservation of places at military schools for the sons of
serving officers, also opened the way for poor nobles
who in the past rarely got beyond the rank of major.
That may help to explain why so many noble officers
waited so long before emigrating, as Patrice Higonnet
revealed in Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles
during the French Revolution (1981 ), although Blaufarb
does not discuss this possibility.
As in so many other spheres, the French revolutionaries combined fiercely radical rhetoric with pragmatic
action. There was a real break with Old Regime
practice only after August 10, 1792, when the National
Convention severed all the ties with the past. Meritocracy made way for egalitarianism, as the deputies
abolished existing institutions for officer education,
recruitment, and promotion to the extent of allowing
the common soldiers to elect their own officers. Not
surprisingly, this turbulent interlude did not last long.
The Thermidorian regime paid lip service to Jacobin
principles while purging the officer corps of all but
dedicated professionals, thus laying the basis for General Bonaparte's system. Especially during the empire,
Napoleon went a long way back to Old Regime
practice and principles. This did not mean that the
idea of merit had been abandoned, but then neither
had it been disregarded before 1789. It was rather that
merit was defined not simply as pure ability but rather
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1533
more collectively as what Blaufarb defines as a "sociopolitical order grounded in sentiments of fidelity and
justice." It had worked before the flaccid hand of Louis
XV allowed the court nobles to seize the lion's share,
it worked for Napoleon, and it was to work for the
restored Bourbons, too.
This is the first time that access to and promotion
within the officer corps have been subjected to such
close scrutiny. Blaufarb has diligently worked his way
through a colossal amount of archival material, both in
the Archives Nationales and at Vincennes, as well as
mastering a formidable amount of contemporary
printed material, so his conclusions carry real authority. Moreover, as he reasonably claims, this book is not
just about the army but has a wider relevance as a
social history of ideas such as equality, talent, and
merit. Whether intellectual historians will open a book
with the word "army" in the title is a different matter.
For the military historian, the focus is perhaps rather
narrow. This is very much a book about France. There
is no consideration of Prussian influence on Old
Regime practice, for example, and next to nothing
about the war after 1792. One big issue that might have
been addressed is why French military effectiveness
went from rags to riches to rags in such a short space
of time. Significantly but sadly, no work by the late
Richard Cobb is cited in the (rather short) bibliography.
TIM BLANNING
Sidney Sussex College,
University of Cambridge
MICHAEL P. FITZSIMMONS. The Night the Old Regime
Ended: August 4, !789, and the French Revolution.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
2003. Pp. x, 245. $49.95.
TIMOTHY TACKETT. When the King Took Flight. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 270.
$24.95.
Both Michael P. Fitzsimmons and Timothy Tackett
treat dramatic events that profoundly shaped the
French Revolution: the emotion-drenched night of
August 4, 1789, during which the National Assembly
abolished feudalism and corporate privilege in an
ecstasy of generous renunciation, and Louis XVI's
failed attempt, on June 20-21, 1791, to escape from
Paris and the revolution by fleeing to the frontier of
the Spanish Netherlands. Both books are written by
seasoned historians of the French Revolution and are
based on prodigious research in Parisian and provincial archives. Each is a welcome contribution to revolutionary scholarship.
Fitzsimmons is eager to rescue the night of August 4,
1789, from what he sees as the skepticism and neglect
of recent historians, who have tended to attribute it to
cynical and self-interested motives and have failed to
recognize its centrality in the history of the revolution.
He argues, in my opinion convincingly, that events of
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Reviews of Books
that night unified the National Assembly around an
agenda of radical social and constitutional reform that,
in spite of second thoughts, setbacks, and conflicts,
continued to guide the assembly's majority throughout
the two years they devoted to writing a constitution for
the kingdom. It is true that the renunciations of
August 4 arose from a scheme hatched by "patriot"
deputies, who hoped to calm the peasant uprisings of
late July and early August by having prominent nobles
offer up their seigneurial dues in exchange for gradual
cash redemption. But the planned initial renunciations
soon inspired others, and by the end of the all-night
session, not only the seigneurial system but the entire
array of privileges of the nobility, clergy, townsmen,
and provinces-which, taken together, formed the very
integument of French society under the Old Regimehad been declared abolished. These manifold abolitions opened the way to the assembly's Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizen and to its elaboration of
a constitution based on civic equality.
Fitzsimmons's account of the session itself is curiously bloodless, however, conveying little of its extraordinary character or high-pitched emotionality.
Moreover, I fear that readers not already familiar with
the significance of privilege in the architecture of Old
Regime society may fail to grasp how great were the
stakes of the renunciations. Here, and in general,
Fitzsimmons seems to be writing for specialists rather
than general educated readers or even historians of
other periods. But his analysis of the night's political
and legislative consequences is systematic, novel, and
studded with fascinating archival finds and astute
judgments. In successive chapters on the assembly
itself, the church, the nobility, the countryside, and the
guilds, Fitzsimmons sets forth the status quo ante,
indicates what was renounced or proposed during the
August 4 session, and then recounts the often slow and
tortuous path that led from dramatic renunciation to
legislative or constitutional enactment. In addition to
using records of the legislative debates and the archives of the assembly's various committees, Fitzsimmons has methodically tracked down correspondence
between deputies and their families or constituents in
dozens of local archives and libraries. These archival
exploits enable Fitzsimmons to put together a particularly thorough and nuanced legislative history. For
example, there are splendid accounts of the continued
distinction of orders in the operations of the National
Assembly until the middle of August 1789; of the
clerical deputies' fall from grace following their opposition to the abolition of the tithe; of the months of
procrastination and confusion surrounding the abolition of the guilds; and of the surprise and outrage
expressed by former deputies of the nobility when
hereditary nobility was suppressed altogether on June
19, 1790. There is much in this book that will delight
and surprise specialists on the French Revolution.
What is missing from Fitzsimmons's book is a sense
of the night of August 4 as an event, a dramatic turning
point. The narrative of the legislative session itself is
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
not only bloodless but nonconsecutive: it is parceled
out into the five topical chapters. Nor do we get a good
sense of what in the political context of early August
might have made possible the emotional, epochal, and
systematic renunciation of privileges. Fitzsimmons says
virtually nothing about the widespread theme of "regeneration" in the political discourse of 1789-which
seems to prefigure the renunciation of privilege-nor
about the extraordinary hopes and anxieties that affected the assembly in the aftermath of the taking of
the Bastille. Moreover, his discussion of the Great
Fear, the immediate precipitant of the night of August
4, is postponed until chapter four, which deals with the
ramifications of the renunciations in the countryside.
This book is a triumph of archival research, but it is
disappointing as a narration of a great historical event.
Tackett's book, by contrast, is something of a page
turner. The author clearly has tried to write a book
that will at once satisfy specialists and appeal to a
larger public. Like Fitzsimmons, he is a dogged researcher who has not only combed Parisian archives
and libraries but has also done extensive work in
provincial collections. Yet he has systematically subordinated his scholarly digging to the production of a
readable narrative. His account begins in media res, on
the evening of June 21, 1791, with the fateful decision
by the municipal officers and national guard of the
small town of Varennes, some forty miles south of the
border of the Spanish Netherlands, to stop a coach
believed to be carrying the king and his family, and to
compel its passengers to spend the night in a secondstory apartment while awaiting further instructions.
After presenting enough political history of this small
town to make us understand why its officials and
people were willing to stop the king of France and hold
him under house arrest, he circles back and tells the
story from the point of view of the king, his family, and
the group of conspirators who organized his flight.
Tackett deftly narrates the royal family's nocturnal
escape from the Tuilleries Palace and their progress
toward capture in Varennes. He then recounts the
excruciatingly slow return of the royal carriage, surrounded by a motley troop of thousands of national
guardsmen and curious provincials, proceeding
through a gauntlet of silent and hostile Parisians, and
ending with the royal family's virtual captivity in the
Tuilleries.
If the first three chapters are a narrative of the
dramatic events of the king's flight, the remaining five
chapters deal with its effects on the politics of the
revolution. At the time the king fled, the National
Assembly was putting finishing touches on the Constitution of 1791, which was to make France a liberal
constitutional monarchy. The king's flight was not
merely an implicit abandonment of the revolution and
its proposed constitutional system; Louis left behind a
"declaration" in his own hand denouncing the National Assembly's reforms and explicitly renouncing
his oath of loyalty to the constitution. This put the
assembly in a conundrum: the deputies had either to
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2003
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
scrap the constitution they had spent two years writing,
depose Louis XVI and establish a regency in the name
of the child dauphin, or ignore his perfidy and go
forward with a constitutional monarch who had proven
his disloyalty. Meanwhile, as various committees of the
assembly deliberated at length on what to do with the
recaptured king, the country, already deeply politicized by the events of the past two years, began to
make judgments of its own. In Paris, the radical
political clubs and the sections called for the deposition of the king and the declaration of a republic,
mounting a campaign that deeply frightened the moderate majority of the assembly. As one of Tackett's
most original chapters demonstrates, responses in the
provinces were also intense. Stories about Austrian
troops invading to avenge the king spread a panic
analogous to the famous Great Fear through much of
eastern France. All over the country, revolutionary
militants stepped up their attacks on nobles and on
clergy who had refused to take an oath to the constitution. Meanwhile, hundreds of declarations poured
into the National Assembly from all over the country,
most of them sharply critical of the monarch, some
disdaining even to mention him and simply declaring
their support for the assembly. When the assembly
opted to exonerate the king and go forward with the
plan for a constitutional monarchy, the provinces seem
to have accepted this decision with good grace, but
republican agitation in Paris surged, until the Champs
de Mars Massacre on July 17, 1791, and the subsequent campaign of repression reduced it to sullen
silence. The National Assembly got its constitutional
monarchy, but the king's flight and the intense bout of
political activism to which it gave rise destroyed the
political unity and good feeling that might have enabled it to succeed.
Among its other virtues, Tackett's book restores
Louis XVI's centrality to the history of the revolution.
His portrait of the king-as pathologically indecisive
and politically and socially maladroit-is sympathetic
but ultimately damning. In Tackett's account, Louis's
weak and vacillating will led the monarch, his family,
and the nation of France into disasters that might well
have been avoided. Tackett even suggests at one point
that the history of the French Revolution might have
been less tragic and bloody had the king's flight
succeeded, because an unambiguous act of treason
would have united all revolutionaries against the king
and his foreign supporters, rather than leading them
into bitter divisions among themselves. Tackett's
thoughtful, beautifully written, and meticulously researched account of the king's flight makes it clear that
while the French Revolution will always cry out for
broad theoretical explanation, it also requires us to
ponder the vagaries of personality and the fundamental contingencies of political events.
WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.
University of Chicago
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
LESLIE A. ScHUSTER. A Workforce Divided: Community,
Labor, and the State in Saint-Nazaire's Shipbuilding
Industry, 1880-1910. (Contributions in Labor Studies,
number 58.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2002. Pp. x,
233.
In recent years, American women scholars studying
French labor history have increasingly focused on the
"gendering" of work and the rise of gender discrimination in French industry in the twentieth century. In
this thoroughly researched monograph, however, Leslie A. Schuster returns to more traditional concerns
about working-class formation, the origins of strike
activity, and the dynamics of the French labor movement in the years preceding World War I. Her specific
subject is the city of Saint-Nazaire. In the late nineteenth century, Saint-Nazaire emerged as France's
leading center for the construction of ocean-going
steamships as the site of the Compagnie Generale
Transatlantique's Penhoet shipyard (for some reason,
Schuster spells this "Penhouet" throughout). While
Penhoet was achieving world renown at the turn of the
century by building sleek, stylish oceanliners such as
the France, the company's workers were gaining a
reputation for militancy that attracted the attention of
leading socialist politicians like Paul Lafargue and
Fernand Pelloutier. For a time, it looked like the
shipworkers of Saint-Nazaire might play a leading role
in the coming proletarian revolution. The principal
achievement of Schuster's book is to explain why the
Saint-Nazaire workers ultimately shunned this role
(and, by inference, why there was no proletarian
revolution in prewar France).
Schuster begins by outlining the business history of
Penhoet and the other Saint-Nazaire shipyards and by
describing the formulation of government policies to
stimulate and to protect domestic shipbuilding in
France. These policies were especially important, in
Schuster's estimation, because they exacerbated the
cyclical nature of ship construction and thereby contributed to the recurring crises of unemployment that
undermined the shipworkers' commitment to labor
activism. After laying out the larger economic and
political setting of the shipbuilding industry in the first
two chapters, Schuster turns in the remaining four
chapters to the social formation of the Saint-Nazaire
workforce, workplace dynamics, labor politics, and the
history of strike activity in Saint-Nazaire between 1881
and 1913.
As the book's title indicates, Schuster believes that
the key factor in the history of labor at Saint-Nazaire
was the presence of two distinct communities of workers. One of these consisted of peasant workers who
came from, and continued to live in, the marshlands
north of Saint-Nazaire known as the Briere. Their
close-knit community had long depended on peat
cutting for its livelihood. However, as the demand for
peat for fuel declined after 1850, the Brierons moved
into ship construction, secured training for their sons
as skilled shipwrights, and soon established themselves
DECEMBER
2003