By Peter James Hudson, The Boston Review
A decade before his assassination at the
hands of a nationalist in 1914, French socialist Jean Jaurès completed a
historical work that radically changed the study of the French Revolution.
Where others had focused on disputes over politics and political ideology,
Jaurès’s four-volume Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française took as its
subject the transformations wrought by an emergent capitalism, foregrounding
irruptions within the French economy. Through a Marxist lens, Jaurès emphasized
the conflict between the ancien régime and the newly empowered bourgeoisie and
excavated from the archives of the revolution the struggles of French workers
and peasants.
This article is available at The Boston Review.
