Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables and Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Causes of Social Revolutions in France, Russia, amd China
- Part II Outcomes of Social Revolutions in France, Rusia, and China
- 4 What Changed and How: A Focus on State Building
- 5 The Birth of a “Modern State Edifice” in France
- 6 The Emergence of a Dictatorial Party-State in Russia
- 7 The Rise of a Mass-Mobiliang Party-State in China
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Birth of a “Modern State Edifice” in France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables and Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Causes of Social Revolutions in France, Russia, amd China
- Part II Outcomes of Social Revolutions in France, Rusia, and China
- 4 What Changed and How: A Focus on State Building
- 5 The Birth of a “Modern State Edifice” in France
- 6 The Emergence of a Dictatorial Party-State in Russia
- 7 The Rise of a Mass-Mobiliang Party-State in China
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour—originates from the days of absolute monarchy … Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of mediaeval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution … swept away all of these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern State edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.
Karl MarxThe course of the French Revolution was shaped by the consequences of a social-revolutionary crisis in which liberal stabilization proved impossible, and by the emergence through mass mobilization of centralized and bureaucratic state organizations. As in Russia and China, such state organizations served to consolidate the Revolution in the context of civil and international warfare. Our examination of the dynamics and outcomes of the French Revolution will emphasize these fundamental developments. As a prelude to this analysis, though, let me first enter into the ongoing historiographical debate about how the French Revolution as a whole should be characterized.
A BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION?
What fundamentally changed and how in the French Revolution — these are subjects of much controversy among contemporary historians.
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- Information
- States and Social RevolutionsA Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China, pp. 174 - 205Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1979