Henry Heller - The French Revolution and Historical Materialism

This collection of essays by Henry Heller builds, and in part incorporates, his earlier work on the French Revolution. In previous books and articles Heller has put a classical Marxist argument - that the French Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution, the "founding moment of modern history". His argument was in the face of mainstream contemporary "revisionist" thought, which argued that this was not the case. In writing his earlier works Heller explains that he had to continually reassert a Marxist position because the cause of revisionism went further than simply attacking the concept of the bourgeois revolution but its aim was to "not only to challenge the Marxist view of the revolution but to put into question its narrative of modern history, whose denouement looks toward a revolutionary transition to socialism".

The essays in this book mostly come from Heller's defence of his position and his polemic against others. Most of the chapters originate in articles in the journal Historical Materialism and as such are often more specialised than the reader with a passing interest in the Revolution will want. So while the book lacks even a short account of the French Revolution itself, the opening essay is a reprint of Heller's introduction to the most recent edition of Jean Jaurès' classic A Socialist History of the French Revolution. This was the first explicitly Marxist account and its importance to Marxist histography and Heller's own studies is abundantly clear.

Because they originate in a strident defence of Marxist thought on the Revolution, these articles are highly academic and detailed. As such they are somewhat inaccessible, though close reading will find important insights. For instance, Heller places the French Revolution in a much wider context, arguing for instance that:

West European advance came directly at the expense of Eastern Europe and Asia, Africa and Latin America. The process of West European transition throughout its early history entailed turning other areas into dependence economies and colonies. Seizing resources from less advanced areas or later on from colonised regions became an intrinsic feature of West European development. In other words, the emergence of capitalism has to be understood in terms of an ongoing world-wide process of appropriation based on uneven development both within and outside Europe.

Elsewhere Heller continues the critique of other Marxist historians such as Robert Brenner, that he developed in his book on the Birth of Capitalism. Here he notes that their failure to identify an early capitalist class in France in the Early Modern era, has "greatly reinforced the currently popular revisionist" views that argues the Revolution wasn't bourgeois. In contrast to Brenner, Heller argues:

[Brenner] overestimated the durability of the victory of the French peasantry at the end of the Middle Ages. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, most of this class in northern France was clearly placed on the defensive by both the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie. In this context, what proved structurally determinant was the redistribution of properly among the commoners themselves at the expense of the lesser peasants and to the benefit of the bourgeoisie, both urban and rural. Brenner rejects the importance of the process of peasant social differentiation to capitalist origins in the case of English agriculture. Single-mindedly insisting on the importance of class struggle, he rejects the idea that social differentiation among peasants might have been important to the establishment of capitalist social relations.

Thus Heller argues for the centrality of the Marxist concept of primitive accumulation - the changes to land ownership which fuelled early capitalist accumulation. He sees the emergence of a manufacturing class in the cities alongside the rural capitalists. Capitalism develops "within the interstices of the seventeenth-century absolutist regime". He argues for a dynamic process of change - "the notion that contradictory economic and political processes could be at work within a given social system". This process, which culminates in the Revolution, helps create the capitalist class as a class-in-itself. But it was the "convulsions" of the revolution itself that would "produce the sense of the bourgeoisie as a class" for itself.

In exploring these themes Heller takes up many other issues - including arguments around the existence of a "working class" within the Revolutionary period, and the nature of the Jacobin regime and its attitude to manufacturing. In putting his argument Heller marshals much detail to bolster his case, and in places this made for heavy reading. Nonetheless Heller gives a real sense of a dynamic, developing economic system of (open and hidden) class warfare were capitalist relations are slowly developing in the period, until the Revolution allows them to break free.

While this is very much a specialist book aimed at those interested in debates about Marxism and the history of the French Revolution, and as such many readers might be put off, there is much here of interest and Heller makes an excellent defence of his central point, and the importance of Marxism to the study of the Revolution for today.

Related Reviews

Heller - The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective
Heller - A Marxist History of Capitalism
Jaurès - A Socialist History of the French Revolution
McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Birchall - The Spectre of Babeuf