The central issue in analyzing the French Revolution traditionally has been whether it was a class revolution. Historians from Jaurès to Lefebvre said yes, analyzing the Revolution as a class struggle between a feudal old regime and a capitalist bourgeoisie. But three revisions have disputed this. Since Cobban (1964), empirical studies showed that the Revolution began as old regime factional fighting and continued under nonbourgeois leadership. The second revision, centered on Behrens (1967) and Skocpol (1979), sees the Revolution triggered by a fiscal crisis caused by Great Power rivalry. Only through this fiscal crisis did class struggle emerge. The third revision, offered by Ozouf (1976), Furet (1978), Agulhon (1981), Hunt (1984), and Sewell (1985), sees the Revolution as essentially ideological, driven by ideas, emotions, and cultural forms, classes being mobilized more symbolically than materially. This has become the new conventional wisdom: codes have replaced classes among historians of France. The intelligentsia has turned inward.

I accept some of all these arguments. As usual, my explanation entwines ideological, economic, military, and political power networks. The Revolution did not begin as a class struggle, except for the peasantry, but it became a class struggle, just as it became a national struggle. Classes were not “pure” but also were defined by ideological, military, and political forces. The Revolution became bourgeois and national, less from the logic of development from feudal to capitalist modes of production than from state militarism (generating fiscal difficulties), from its failure to institutionalize relations between warring elites and parties, and from the expansion of discursive ideological infrastructures carrying principled alternatives.