Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge

Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based.

In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolu...