''Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution'' is a book by

Eric Hobsbawm Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. H ...

first published in 1990 by Verso Books. It was written just after the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 which was accompanied by a large outpouring of new scholarship. The recent anti-communist revolutions of 1989 further polarised commentators between those who saw them as a culmination or embodiment of French revolutionary ideas and those who saw it as their emphatic repudiation. Hobsbawm analyses the Revolution primarily from the perspective of how it has been subsequently interpreted over the course of the two centuries since it occurred, and examines the way that it has been re-written based on contemporary ideologies. In particular, Hobsbawm writes polemically in opposition to what he sees as the dominant trajectory in writing about the Revolution during his era: that of a revisionism which downplayed the successes of the Revolution and stressed instead its violence, rapacity and destructiveness. He argues, for instance, that the bicentenary was "largely dominated by those who, to put it simply, do not like the French Revolution and its heritage". Hobsbawm's view is that for many in the nineteenth century, the Revolution was seen as a bourgeois precursor of potential future proletarian revolutions. He argues further that many

Marxists Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectic ...

, chiefly from 1917 to the 1960s used it as an example of a much longer-term reading of political change but that in the 1970s and 1980s (after the first major work of revisionism by Alfred Cobban written in the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

milieu of the 1950s) many historians began to argue that the Revolution achieved only limited results which were outweighed by extravagant costs. In his eyes, this shift of interpretation was a false one, and his work concludes that the Revolution was a crucial event not only for what it achieved in itself, but in terms of its longer-term patrimony to history. He concludes that "Liberty, equality and fraternity, and the values of Reason and the

Enlightenment Enlightenment or enlighten may refer to: Age of Enlightenment * Age of Enlightenment, period in Western intellectual history from the late 17th to late 18th century, centered in France but also encompassing (alphabetically by country or culture): ...

- the values on which modern civilisation has been built, since the American Revolution - are more needed than ever" and, finally, that the Revolution improved the world, and did so on a permanent basis.

References

{{Reflist 1990 non-fiction books Books by Eric Hobsbawm 20th-century history books History books about the French Revolution Verso Books books

See also

References