Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
1 On the problem of the ideological origins of the French
Revolution 12

Part I. French history at issue

2 Memory and practice: politics and the representation of
the pass in eighteenth-century France 31
3 Controlling French history: the ideological arsenal of
Jacob-Nicolas Moreau 59
4 A script for a French revolution: the political
consciousness of the abb Mably 86

Part II. The language of politics at the end of the

Old Regime
5 French political thought at the accession of Louis XVI 109
6 A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux:
Guillaume-Joseph Saige 128
7 Science and politics at the end of the Old Regime 153
8 Public opinion as political invention 167

Part III. Toward a revolutionary lexicon

9 Inventing the French Revolution 203
10 Representation redefined 224
11 Fixing the French constitution 252

Notes 307
Index 357

vi i
 Acknowledgments

In the years during which these essays have been written, I have bene-
fited from generous institutional support, as from the warm encourage-
ment and criticism of friends and colleagues. It has been a distinct plea-
sure to acknowledge these contributions to each of the essays previously
published, as they appeared. The opportunity to reiterate those ex-
pressions of thanks here simply adds to the enjoyment of publishing a
volume such as this.
My research and writing have been supported at various stages by the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities; the John M. Olin Foundation; the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton; the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford; and the University of Chicago. I am grateful to each
of these institutions for the generous facilities and stimulating environ-
ments I have been privileged to enjoy in consequence of their support.
Two groups of friends and colleagues, in Paris and Chicago, have been
of particular importance in offering regular critical responses to this
work as it has taken form. In Paris, I owe much to the participants in the
seminar on eighteenth-century French political culture directed by Fran-
9Dis Furet and Mona Ozouf at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (and now the Institut Raymond Aron), and especially to Fran-
Furet, Mona Ozouf, and Ran Halvi. In Chicago, I am aboye all
grateful for the intellectual support and critica] stimulation provided by
colleagues and students. To Jan Goldstein, Harry Harootunian, Robert
Morrissey, Peter Novick, George Stocking, and (again) Franwis Furet, I
wish to express my particular appreciation and thanks. And I could have
wished for no better scholarly colleagues and critics than that group of
students who participated in the workshop on the history of political
culture, particularly Thomas Bellavia, Daniel Gordon, Jim Johnson, Alan

ix
x Acknowledgments
Kahan, Matthew Levinger, and Kent Wright. I am grateful, too, for the
technical help received from the project for American and French Re-
search on the Treasury of the French Language at the University of
Chicago (a joint project of the Centre Nacional de Recherche Scienti-
fique and the University of Chicago).
The publishers who have permitted me to reprint and revise essays
previously published are identified as appropriate at the beginning of
each essay. I wish to thank them formally here. I wish, too, to thank the
editors who lavished scholarly attention on those essays in their original
form, particularly Steven Kaplan, Jack Censer, and Colin Lucas. I am also
grateful to William Sewell, Dena Goodman, Carroll Joynes, Jeremy
Popkin, William Doyle, Dale Van Kley, Dominick LaCapra, Elizabeth
Eisenstein, Lionel Gossman, and John Bosher for help and information
at particular points.
I owe a special deb of gratitude to Cathrine and Terence Murphy,
and to Thomas and Maureen, for the unfailing warmth of their welcome
in Paris.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Terry, and my sons, Julian and Feliz,
who have helped in so many ways to bring this volume about.
 Introduction

The essays presented in this volume have been written over the span of a
dozen years that have seen remarkable changes in the manner in which
historians are approaching the study of the French Revolution and its
origins. In the most general terms, the reorientation that has occurred
can be characterized as a shift from Marx to Tocqueville, from a basically
social approach to the subject to a basically political one. Twenty years
ago, the prevailing historical interpretation of the French Revolution was
social. It started from the assumption that the Revolution marked the
critical point of transition from a feudal to a capitalist society; that it was
essentially the product of the long-term social changes usually summed
up in the notion of the rise of the bourgeoisie; and that its fundamental
significance lay in the creation of a political and legal order appropriate
to the needs and interesas of the new dominant class. Thus the principal
aim, in explaining the Revolution, was to derive its character as a political
event from social phenomena that were held to be more basic. This was
to be achieved by tracking economic and social changes in eighteenth-
century French society; by identifying the latent social conflicts that
found open political expression in 1789; and by reading off the subse-
quent political history of the Revolution from the class conflicts initiated
by the efforts of the bourgeoisie to throw off the remnants of a feudal
regime and institute a political order that would ensure its dominance.
The year 1789, in other words, was seen as the moment of rupture; the
point at which subterranean social developments that had long under-
mined the foundations of the Old Regime broke to the surface and swept
away the entire political superstructure.
In the lasa decade or so, this social interpretation of the French Revo-
lution has been increasingly abandoned by historians. There are many
reasons for this shift, which is now widely recognized, and only some of
the more obvious ones need be suggested here. First, as a result of

1
2 Introduction
incensive research, the social interpretation of the French Revolution
and its origins virtually collapsed under its own weight. As hundreds of
local and specialized studies accumulated, it became increasingly difficult
to discern anything resembling a coherent class explanation amid the
proliferation of social categories required to make sense of an incredibly
complex society, subject to extreme regional and local variation. Alfred
Cobban's bold call, in The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution,' as
early as 1964, for a new vocabulary for the study of social history was in
par a recognition of chis situation, which became increasingly clear in
the decade following the publication of his work. In Kuhnian terms, the
paradigm was becoming increasingly cluttered with anomalies. 2
In Kuhnian terms, too, the shift to a new approach was fostered by
changes in the larger intellectual environment. Particularly in France,
where the social interpretation was always strongest, there was a growing
disenchantment with Marxism, both politically a development ulti-
mately culminacing in che collapse of the French Communist Party as a
major electoral force and intellectually witness the range of doc-
trines, structuralist, poststructuralist, or deconstructionist, that denied,
in one way or another, che essencial Marxian dichotomy becween base
and superstructure. Given the extent to which Marxist categories were
grafted upon che revolutionary legacy, these developments were bound
to lead co a full-scale reevaluation of che accepted wisdom regarding che
French Revolucion. Afcer some inicial skirmishing, that reevaluation was
announced by the publication of Franlois Furet's Penser la Rvolution
franaise in 1978. Cobban had argued earlier that our understanding of
the French Revolution had been fatally muddled by the conflation of
political and social categories inherent in the Mancist historiography and
by a failure to disentangle a narrative account, cast in terms familiar to
the actors themselves, from an analytical account, subjecting those terms
to critical scrutiny. This same argument became the starting point of
Furet's analysis. But whereas Cobban was principally interested in disen-
gaging a social interpretation of the Revolucion from the political catego-
ries he found confusing it, Furet insisted on the importance of grasping
its characcer conceptually, as political event and cultural creation. As a
series of acts that transformed the situation making them possible, as the
creation and experiential elaboracion of an entirely new mode of political
action, the Revolution had a logic and a dynamic of its own, not derivable
from the necessity of social conditions or the ineluctability of social
processes. Furet made it the most essencial task of revolutionary histo-
riQgraphy "to rediscover che analysis of the political as such." The price
to pay for chis, he argued, was a double one: "On the one hand we must
stop thinking of the revolutionary consciousness as a more or less 'natu-
ral' result of oppression and discontent; on the ocher, we must be able to
 Introduction 3
conceptualize this strange offspring of philosophie (its offspring at least
chronologically)."3
Two further implications of chis program for the rediscovery of the
political are worth noting in passing. First, in aralition to its repudiation
of the assumptions of Marxist historiography, it involved a no less pro-
found shift within the powerful tradition established in France by the
Annales school, a tradition that had conventionally set aside the study of
political events in their immediacy (including those of the French Revo-
lution), on the grounds that they constituted little more than the inciden-
tal foam on the oceanic configurations of long-term structures and pro-
cesses. 4 Second, it opened up a new creative synergy between French
historiography of the revolutionary and prerevolutionary periods and an
English-language historiography in which politics, political theory, and
the history of ideas had remained a master of more vital concern. The
results of that synergy are only now beginning to appear. 5
Finally, any complete account of this rediscovery of the political in the
historiography of the French Revolution must also recognize the impor-
tance of the eruption of the political imaginary into the academic life of
the late 1960s. Scholars in universities throughout Europe and the
United States suddenly got a close look in some cases, too close a look
at the dynamics of politics in its immediacy, at the power of political
rhetoric, at the workings (often unpredictable) of the political imagina-
tion. Nowhere was chis more true than in Paris, in May 1968, where, for
a few days, revolution suddenly seemed possible not revolution con-
ceived as a rather mechanical change of political regime or as the neces-
sary end result of a conflict between social classes, bus revolution experi-
enced as an ultimare moment of political choice, in which the givens of
social existence seemed suspended, the only power was the power of the
imagination, and the world could be made anew. After 1968, it became
easier to conceive of che power of che political imaginary. The logic of
revolutionary utopianism, with its dialectic between spontaneity and
order, could be brought co the fore. 6
For these reasons, then, and doubtless for others, there has been a
decisive reorientation of scholarly interest toward the political and cul-
tural dimensions of the French Revolution. One consequence of chis
shift one that informs the present volume is that historians have
begun to look again at che political dynamics of the Old Regime and at
the processes by which revolutionary principies and practices were in-
vented in the context of an absolute monarchy. As long as the social
interpretation of the French Revolution was che dominant one, this ques-
tion remained at the margins of historical research. Although the politi-
cal history of the Old Regime was never entirely abandoned as a subject
in its own righc, those in search of che "real" social origins of the Revolu-
4 Introduction
tion were obliged to look rather to processes occurring, as it were,
behind the political scenes of the Old Regime, and it appeared relatively
simple to explain the ianguage and ideology of the Revolution, once it
occurred, as the expression of social interests. But once we start looking
again at political culture, we find that the Revolution did not simply
erupt from behind the scenes of the Old Regime. On the contrary, the
events that brotight it into being were improvised and acted out on a
well-lit and well-populated stage and were articulated in language that
gave them their fundamental meaning in relationship to a continuing
political drama. The conceptual space in which the French Revolution
was invented, the structure of meanings in relationship to which the
quite disparate actions of 1789 took on a symbolic coherence and politi-
cal force, was the creation of the Old Regime. If the revolutionaries carne
to a profound sense of the character of their actions and utterances as
constituting a radical rupture, that claim too was historically constituted
(and rhetorically deployed) within an existing linguistic or symbolic field.
The problem for the historian is to show how the revolutionary script
was invented, taking on its power and its contradictions, from within the
political culture of the absolute monarchy.

referring here to "political culture," I should emphasize at the outset

that I use the term in a way that differs considerably from the meaning
that became common in the social-scientific literature of the 1950s and
1960s and that found its principal formulation in the work of political
scientists like Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye, and Sidney Verba on com-
parative political development.7 Inspired by modernization theories,
their understanding of political culture was essentially social-psychologi-
cal. They were concerned with values and sentiments instilled by pro-
cesses of socialization within differing political systems, and particularly
with those that appeared to promote or retard the development of a
Western political system. The definition offered here is more linguistic.8
lt sees politics as about making claims; as the activity through which
individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement,
and enforce the competing claims they make upon one another and upon
the whole. Political culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or
symbolic practices by which these claims are made. It comprises the
definitions of the relative subject-positions from which individuals and
groups may (or may not) legitimately make claims one upon another, and
therefore of the identity and boundaries of the community to which they
belong. It constitutes the meanings of the terms in which these claims are
framed, the natuse of the contexts to which they pertain, and the authori-
ty of the principies according to which they are made binding. It shapes
the constitutions and powers of the agencies and procedures by which
 Introduction 5
contestations are resolved, competing claims authoritatively adjudicated,
and binding decisions enforced. Thus political authority is, in this view,
essentially a matter of linguistic authority: first, in the sense that political
functions are defined and allocated within the tramework of a given
political discourse; and second, in the sense that their exercise takes the
form of upholding authoritative definitions of the terms within that
discourse.
Two objections to this definition of political culture are commonly
made. The first insists that it denies the relevance of social interests to
political practice, seeking instead to privilege a symbolic realm over the
realities of social life. I suggest two principal responses to this kind of
objection. The first is to deny that there are social realities independent
of symbolic meanings: All social activity has a symbolic dimension that
gives it meaning, just as all symbolic activity has a social dimension that
gives it point. This is to argue that claims to delimit the field of discourse
in relation to nondiscursive social realities that lie beyond it invariably
point to a domain of action that is itself discursively constituted. They
distinguish, in effect, between different discursive practices different
language games rather than between discursive and nondiscursive phe-
nomena. To take the example of the Great Fear, so revealingly analyzed
by Georges Lefebvre, it is evident that tradicional local fears of beggars,
during periods of scarcity and unrest, were an important element of the
political situation that developed in the French countryside in the sum-
mer of 1789. But these fears were not the expression of bruce instinct:
They had a cultural and social logic of their own. At the same time, they
could also be given an entirely new force and meaning within a political
language that now defined aristocratic resistance as the primordial obsta-
de to achievement of the reforms being sought by the "Nacional Assem-
bly." Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the events of 1789 is
the way in which quite tradicional forms of social action could suddenly
take on different meanings in a redefined political situation. Unless we
recognize the nature of the discourse (or discourses) that defined the
situation in which the French found themselves in 1789, we cannot grasp
the meanings of the "social" events that occurred within that situation.
My second response to chis objection regarding social interests is to
argue that the notion of "interest" is itself very much a political one.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as Marshall Sahlins has
pointed out, the term comes from a Latin term meaning "it makes a
difference, concerns, matters, is of importance." "Interest," then, is a
principie of differentiation. 9 But individuals in any reasonably complex
society can invariably be seen as occupying any number of relative posi-
tions vis--vis other individuals, and therefore as possessing any number
of potentially differentiating "interests." The nature of the "interest" (or
6 Introduction
difference) that matters in any particular situation and, in consequence,
the identities of the relevant social groups and the nature of their claims
are continually being defined (and redefined). Historians have long
recognized, for example, that the distinction between the privileged or-
ders and the Third Estate, though it became in 1788 the foremost issue
in the conflicts over the convocation of the Estafes General, obscured or
ran counter to other differentiations no less salient to the social and
political life of the Old Regime: that within che privileged orders be-
tween the clergy and the nobility; that within the nobility between new
and old, court and country; that created across the boundary between
nobility and Third Estate by the emergente of a new elite, characterized
by wealth, power, and access to the resources of a modernizing state.
Rather than taking this distinction between the interests of the "privi-
leged" and the "unprivileged" for granted as constituting the most basic
social cleavage of the Old Regime, it is necessary to show how it sud-
denly became according to the logic of political debate the crucial
one, the one upon which the very definition of social and political order
now seemed to hinge. "Interest" is a symbolic and political construction,
not simply a preexisting social reality.
A second objection commonly made to this linguistic approach to
political culture is that it denies the possibility of human agency, trans-
forming individuals (and groups) into mere discursive functions. The
effort to efface the human subject has certainly been characteristic of a
powerful strand of discourse analysis, most notably associated with
Michel Foucault. But to assert that human identity and action are lin-
guistically constituted is a statement regarding the conditions of human
action, not a denial of the possibility of such action. Human agents find
their being within language; they are, to that extent, constrained by it.
Yet they are constantly working with it and on it, playing at its margins,
exploiting its possibilities, and extending the play of its potential mean-
ings, as they pursue their purposes and projects. Although this play of
discursive possibility may not be infinite, in any given linguistic context,
it is always open to individual and collective actors. By the same token, it
is not necessarily controllable by such actors. In practice, meanings (and
those who depend upon them) are always implicitly at risk. Any utter-
ance puts the authority of the speaker, and the place from which he or
she speaks, potentially in question. This is all the more true in that in any
complex society and certainly in a society as complex as eighteenth-
century France there will be more than one language game, each
subject to constant elaboration and development through the activities
of the individual agents whose purposes they define. These language
games are not insulated from one another in any strict manner: They
overlap in social prattice, as well as in the consciousness of the indi-
 Introduction 7
viduals who participate in them. Individual acts and utterances may
therefore take on meanings within several different fields of discourse
simultaneously, redounding upon one another in often unpredictable
ways. Thus language can say more than any iffdividual actor intends;
meanings can be appropriated and extended by others in unanticipated
ways. At the limit, no one is safe from the potential play of discursivity.

This was never more apparent than in the French Revolution, when
successive actors in the revolutionary competition to fix public meanings
were constantly swept away by the power of a language that each proved
unable to control. Frarmis Furet has explained this phenomenon as a
consequence of the manner in which the relationship between power and
social interests was disrupted by the collapse of royal authority in 1787.
French society, abruptly freed from the power of a state which both
dismantled and masked the destruction of the traditional social order,
now reconstituted itself, at the level of ideology, through the illusory act
of overthrowing a state that no longer existed. But in so doing, it fell
victim to an illusion of politics in which social interests were suspended
in favor of a "perpetual outbidding of the idea over real history," in "a
world where representations of power are the centre of the action, and
where the semiotic circle is absolute master of politics."1 The Revolu-
tion thus "substituted for the conflict of interests for power a competi-
tion of discourses for the appropriation of legitimacy."' Only with the
reassertion of social interests after 9 Thermidor did this dialectic of
power and the imaginary come to an end.
Furet's analysis has had the great virtue of redirecting historians' atten-
tion to the fundamental character of the French Revolution as a political
phenomenon, a profound transformation of political discourse involving
powerful new forms of political symbolization, experientially elaborated
in radically novel modes of political action that were as unprecedented as
they were unanticipated. But it achieves its clarity of focus upon the
dynamics of revolutionary language by demarcating the years between
1787 and 1794 as a period in which the natural relationship between
power and social interests was temporarily suspended. In this respect,
the argument presents two difficulties. The first difficulty is that the
argument takes as its most essential category a distinction the dichoto-
my between state and society that appears, and becomes central to
European social thought, as part and product of the revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary experience. (The explanation of the unprece-
dented power of revolutionary language as a pathological function of the
disruption of the normal and proper relationship between state and soci-
ety was offered, for example, in the liberal discourse of the Ther-
midorian period.) The second difficulty, an implication of the first, is that
8 Introduction
the linguisticality of the Revolution thus becomes (as Lynn Hunt has
pointed out) "its special, temporary condition... , rather than . . . a
status it shares with any and all events." 2 If power is to be understood as
always linguistically constituted, in any society, we cannot explain the
particular dynamics of power in the revolutionary period simply as a
consequence of che fact that chis latter inhered in language; we must be
able to grasp [hese dynamics as arising from identifiable features of
revolutionary language itself.
In an analysis of the political culture of the French Revolution that
owes much to Furet's approach, Lynn Hunt has suggested such an expla-
nation by characterizing the Revolution as a period in which language
itself became charismatic and took on "a unique magical quality." "As
the king's sacred position in society eroded," she has argued, "political
language became increasingly invested with emocional, even life-and-
death significance." 13 Hunt offers several reasons for chis development.
First, revolutionary language "was itself transformed into an instrument
of political and social change": Ritual use of language (for example, the
swearing of revolutionary oaths) offered the revolutionaries a means of
reconstituting the moral basis of the community, thus creating a "re-
placement for the charisma of kingship."" But they were more suc-
cessful in destroying the sacred sovereignty of the monarch than they
were in replacing royal power with any settled institucional representa-
tion of the sovereignty of the nation. The revolutionary text constantly
subverted its own authority and that of those who appealed to it. Thus,
second, "as a consequence of chis constant displacement of political au-
thority, charisma carne to be most concretely located in words, that is, in
the ability to speak for the Nation. Revolutionary language ... had been
invested with sacred authority."" Third, the language in which sacred
authority was invested was, aboye all, the spoken language. "In the ab-
sence of a common law tradition or any acceptable sacred text for refer-
ence, the voice of the nation had to be heard constantly. Speaking and
naming took on enormous significance; they became the source of sig-
nificance." 16 In revolutionary America, the written word of the Con-
stitution soon became supreme; che politics of the new republic hence-
forth revolved around issues of interest, rights, representation, and the
balance of powers. In France, by contrast, "the spoken word retained its
supremacy (at least until 1794, perhaps until 1799), and political dis-
course was structured by notions of transparency, publicity, vigilance,
and terror."' 7
This is a cogent analysis, in many respects, but it remains ambiguous
on the central point raised by Hunt in her critique of Furet: How far (and
in what manner) is th linguisticality of che French Revolution its "spe-
cial, temporary condition," rather than "a status it shares with any and all
 Introduction 9
events"? At times Hunt characterizes as a special feature of language in
the revolutionary period attributes that language would seem to possess
in any society. That words were endowed "with emocional, even life-and-
death significance," for example, can hardly be sen as distinguishing the
Revolution from the Old Regime (or any other period). On this, at least,
the philosophes engaged in the campaign to craser l'infme could agree
wholeheartedly with those agents of the Paris police constantly on the
watch for mauvais discours. Nor was it the fact that language "itself"
served as an instrument of social and political change that made the
Revolution remarkable. It was, after all, no accident that the most critical
work of the French Enlightenment was an Encyclopdie, ou Dictionnaire
raisonn, or that the most ambitious claim of its editors was to change the
common way of thinking by their critical scrutiny of the meaning of
words. To the extent that social and political arrangements are lin-
guistically constituted in any society, efforts to change them (or to pre-
serve them) can never occur outside of language. Language is constantly
deployed as an instrument of social and political change, or, to be more
precise, social and political changes are themselves linguistic. Nor does
the significance of "speaking and naming" in the revolutionary period
seem to distinguish it from other eras: Although these activities may take
different forms in different societies, they are surely essential to any kind
of action. This must be true, moreover, when political choices are cast in
terms of interest, rights, and representation, just as when they are cast in
terms of transparency, publicity, vigilance, and terror.
Yet revolutionary actors were indeed particularly conscious of the
power of language. They struggled constantly to institute a new social
and political order by framing, deploying, and attempting to control a
radically new discourse of human association. And the more explicitly
language was at issue, the more highly charged it became. Is this to say
that language itself had become charismatic or that it had assumed the
displaced charisma of the monarch? The difficulty with this argument is
that charisma itself must be understood as a linguistic effect: The sense of
the monarch as the sacred center of the corporate social order, express-
ing its very ground of being as the public person in whom a multiplicity
of parts became one, sprang from traditional symbolic representations
constituting the nature of human existence and social identity in essen-
tially religious terms. To say that the charisma of the monarch eroded (as
it did in the course of the eighteenth century) is to say that the symbolic
representations upon which it depended had been rendered increasingly
problematic by changing discursive practices, some of which are dis-
cussed in the following essays. With the Revolution, the sacred center
was symbolically refigured; the public person of the sovereign was dis-
placed by the sovereign person of the public; lse-nation was substituted
10 Introduction
for lse-majest. The nation was thereby constituted symbolically as the
ontological Subject, its unity and identity becoming the very ground of
individual and collective existence.
Although effected within revolutionary language, chis displacement of
power from crown to nation was never entirely secured by it. Revolu-
tionary actors found it impossible to stabilize their new discursive prac-
tices to the degree necessary for these latcer co assume the settled form
of institutions. In this respect, Hunt is right to emphasize that the text of
the Revolution was constancly subverced, and that the claims of chose
enacting it were persistently undermined, by tensions and contradictions
inherent within it. To understand these latcer is to grasp why language
remained so explicitly at issue, and so highly charged, throughout the
revolutionary period. But chis, in turn, requires us to approach that
language as a historical creation. Because the French Revolution as-
sumed its meaning as a radical rupture with the pass, because it sought so
unremittingly to cleanse itself from history, one is tempted to approach it
as a radically new text of human action. Much can be learned from doing
so. But the Revolution, for all its radical character and claims, for all that
was unprecedented in its system of thought and action, was a human
invention, not a blind historical mutation. As a human invention, it was
far from being an immaculate conception. Improvised in the course of
action, it was marked by the tensons and contradictions, the ambiguities
and obscurities, inevitable in any historical creation. To understand
these, we must grasp the particularities of the manner and contexc in
which revolutionary discourse was invented.
This is to revert to an ancient claim of the historian, nowhere better
stated than in Vico's New Science: The nature of things derives from the
manner of their coming into being. Political culture is a historical cre-
ation, subject to constant elaboration and development through the ac-
tivities of the individuals and groups whose purposes it defines. As it
sustains and gives meaning to political activity, so is it itself shaped and
transformed in the course of that activity, as new claims are articulated
and old ones transformed. For this reason, it resembles nothing more
closely than a kind of living archeological site, in which heterogeneous
discourses frequencly overlap and changing practices are frequently su-
perimposed one upon another, coexisting in everyday life as in the con-
sciousness of individuals. Even in chose revolutionary moments when
earlier discourses and practices seem to have been swept away and the
pattern of the site entirely transformed, their traces remain to give mean-
ing to the new. When the revolutionaries coined the term l'anden rgime
the old, or formen regime to describe the social and political order
1
they were repudiating, they were, in effect, acknowledging that their
new order could be defined only in contradistinction to what had gone
 Introduction 11
before. The Old Regime invented, structured, and limited the Revolu-
tion, even as the revolutionaries invented the better to destroy the
Old Regime.
It is the purpose of the following essays to exptore some aspects of this
invention of a historical rupture. Although they are still far from offering
a systematic account of the political discourse of the Old Regime or of
the relation of revolutionary discourse to it, they may perhaps serve as an
invitation to further exploration of a terrain that remains, after two hun-
dred years, still remarkably uncharted.