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.
