Historian Michel Vovelle looks back at the “battle” provoked by the Bicentenary of the French Revolution throughout the 1980s. In this period of ideological bipolarization, the work was undermined, between political conflicts and academic rivalries.
In 1982, historian Michel Vovelle was commissioned by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then Minister of Research, to “conduct an exploratory survey on the participation of research in the celebration of the Bicentenary”. Who better than him to return to the historiographical battle of the bicentenary of the Revolution and the role he played in it? As an actor and informed witness of the conflict, he describes a generation engulfed in the passion of the debate, the genealogy of which he traces here, and recalls that examining and commenting on the French Revolution for a republican historian, in a period of ideological bipolarization, was an unparalleled challenge.
“Communist responsibility” or plural approach?
This book describes the historiographical stakes of the events called to commemorate the Bicentenary of the Revolution, but also the institutional stakes of such an event: which historian to choose for a responsibility heavy with political stakes? Where do the elected historians speak from? So many questions which reveal, in view of the stakes of such a commemoration, that “the site was mined” (p. 28).
Mr. Vovelle rushes in and takes on this responsibility on a regional, national and international scale: “For nearly ten years, including extensions, my personal life would now blend into the battle of the Bicentennial” (p. 40), he confides at the end of the chapter, leaving the blank space on the page to express the place taken by such a responsibility.
Since it was known that Michel Vovelle had taken out his Communist Party card at such a disastrous time as 1956, an unparalleled scientific suspicion hovered over the historian. Yet it was he who was chosen by the left in 1981, rather than Albert Soboul who had headed the Institute of the History of the Revolution at the Sorbonne before him. Mr. Vovelle’s work was attacked by his own camp, among others in the Assembly, in December 1986, in a conference organized by Laurent Fabius’ “Modern Solidarities” club, during which Marcel Gauchet made a simplistic and divisive statement: “The socialists have the historical responsibility of having placed commemoration under communist responsibility” (p. 80).
Until 1993, the American historian Steve Kaplan of Cornell University – who signed Goodbye 1989 at Fayard — referred to Mr. Vovelle as a “solid Marxist Jacobin.” However, in organizing the ambitious World Congress of July 1989, which Mr. Vovelle prepared tirelessly for several years, he ensured the assembly of a diversified committee, committed to defending a plural approach to the history of the Revolution.
Competition in the academic world
In addition to the ins and outs of his mission, Michel Vovelle details the parallel development of his career as a historian, in particular his election to the Sorbonne in place of Albert Soboul, who died in September 1982. This new chair – the term has been banned since May 68 – causes a break in the Aix routine that he had maintained for 23 years, forcing him into a “pendularity” that academics know well, to be subjected to it almost systematically when new responsibilities and inductions arise.
Mr. Vovelle was knighted by his mentor Ernest Labrousse, who had the elegance to invest him with boundless confidence, and who wrote to him with simplicity – against Furet – that, in such an adventure, “science and fervor are reconcilable” (p. 36). Tossed between his institutional and university responsibilities, Mr. Vovelle experienced the unpleasantness that elected officials experience, the difficulty of being considered “parachuted from the socialist government for some, clandestine from the Communist Party for others” (p. 46).
In his introduction, Michel Vovelle does not hesitate to cheerfully settle his scores with the academic establishment and its disloyal smugglers. He compares the cacique Albert Soboul, holder of the prestigious chair of history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, to the hero of Diderot’s comedy, Is he good? Is he bad? who multiplies promises to one and all without keeping any of them (remember that the work is subtitled He who serves them all and satisfies none).
He teaches us – or rather, reminds us – that the academic seraglio, with its intrigues, is like a nest of vipers that multiplies the “Beware of So-and-so”, the “Don’t count on” and the “I promise you” whispered maliciously. He describes these intrigues as being the foundations – human, all too human – of the writing of the history of the French Revolution.
Historiographical battles and wars
The great originality of Mr. Vovelle’s report was to place the Revolution in a global perspective: the overvaluation of the international actors contacted for the commemoration is assumed. A bulletin was launched in 1984, colloquiums multiplied from 1985, a world congress culminated in 1989 to celebrate “The image of the French Revolution before international opinion from 1789 to the present day”.
But the anti-Bicentennial mobilization was not long in making itself heard, particularly on the right, which found in Pierre Chaunu a “thunderous and excessive” spokesperson (p. 64), as well as within the editorial nebula around Pierre Nora, won over by “Furetist ideas” (p. 65). Mona Ozouf had contested the very principle of the celebration in The Debatewith “Can we commemorate the French Revolution?”
In 1986, cohabitation obliges, the institutional and media resistance that Mr. Vovelle describes as “counter-revolutionary” rears its head. As a wise epic prose writer, he lists his enemies, starting with the misnamed “Madame Bonnamour”, then director of the Fontenay-Saint-Cloud School where F. Chevènement had the idea of appointing him as “provisional administrator” – a crazy idea, even downright clumsy, given the many responsibilities that had already fallen to him at the time. We also find “our neighbors from Paris-IV » (the “bastion of the Counter-revolution”, p. 97), “the commissions of the CNRS “, Louis Pauwels, author of an insolent “To simply end the French Revolution” in the Figaro Magazine which he directed in 1986, as well as the magazine’s managers History.
In terms of publications, Mr. Vovelle insists on the fact that before the commemorations of the Bicentenary, the critical or “revisionist” discourse prevails. He cites in particular the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolutionedited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, available in paperback since 1988 and which has become the Bible of many students. In 1987, from “pendular”, Mr. Vovelle turns into a gyrovague, because the commemoration requires means and support that he strives to seek all over the world. He multiplies the trips abroad and takes stock of these years of hard work: in 10 years, 550 conferences, half of them abroad.
After Gorbachev’s visit to the Sorbonne on July 5, 1989, the World Congress officially opened on the 6th, and its slogan was “Neither anathema nor liturgy.” The Revolution remains a field open to all fronts, assures Mr. Vovelle: what matters is that the ideas of the entire world collide.
Days after the party
From the start of the 1989 school year, there were receptions, private, individual or collective congratulations, and official ones, at the Assembly, in the Institutes, at the Centre Pompidou, etc. Stunned by the number of administrative and research responsibilities accepted by the author, the reader is tempted on many occasions to ask himself: “But what was he going to do in this mess?” Mr. Vovelle details the overwhelming schedule he had in the 1980s and 1990s, as a professor and director of masters and doctorates: up to 15 thesis supervisions in 1993, around thirty masters theses in the same year.
After 20 years at the head of the Institute of the History of the French Revolution, Mr. Vovelle, bitter, says he is abandoning “a sinking ship” when he retires, regretting that his final approaches to the administrative management of the CNRS to perpetuate the Institute prove useless. In view of its record, it conceives the suppression of theIHRF as a “revenge” on the part of competitors who are envious or eclipsed by its activities.
And to conclude, mythologizing his career (but who wouldn’t?):
Cincinnatus returns to his plow, after forty years of labor. (pg. 157)
Saddened by this state of affairs, he nevertheless bequeathed the management of the Institute to Catherine Duprat, student of Maurice Agulhon and author of a thesis on The Time of Philanthropists (1770-1840)who had supported him with absolute devotion during his prosperous years.
If Michel Vovelle finds himself, in describing the “Bicentennial Battle”, on a deserted battlefield (as he deplores in the foreword to the book), he breathes new life into a time when Solidarity posters could be found at the entrance to the meeting rooms of the Institute of the History of the Revolution: it is impossible to talk about 1789 without claiming the relevance of its heritage in the present.
Ultimately, Mr. Vovelle notes a return of politics, the success of biography, the emphasis placed on cultural domains and on that of mentalities, of imaginations. Who says imagination says image: Mr. Vovelle took into account this pedagogical dimension, which he devoted in the 5 volumes (1,800 pages) of The French Revolution, images and storyhis “personal museum” of the Revolution. The ambition of this book was to bring the Revolution to life in its stages, its actors, its representations, from the crowd of images and all the figurative representations. It was his last pride.