Between discourse and experience: Agency and ideas in the french pre-revolution

History and Theory

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 116-142

  Smith, Jay M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149636527     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00185     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Similar assumptions obviously also lie behind the continued attraction of "mierohistory" and the history of "everyday life." See the insightful review article by Brad S. Gregory, "Is Small Beautiful? Mierohistory and the History of Everyday Life," History and Theory 38 (1999), 100-110
2. The essay discusses The History of Everyday Life; Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Alf Ludtke, transl. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
3. and Jeux d'Echelles: La Micro-Analyse à l'Expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)
4. Vivian Gruder, "Whither Revisionism? Political Perspectives on the Ancien Régime," French Historical Studies 20 (1997), 254
5. Jack Censer, "Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after the Bicentennial," French Historical Studies 22 (1999), 146
6. William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sievès and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 36
7. Paul R. Hanson, "Monarchist Clubs and the Pamphlet Debate over Political Legitimacy in the Early Years of the French Revolution," French Historical Studies 21 (1998), 299-324, esp. 301
8. David Andress, "The Denial of Social Conflict in the French Revolution: Discourses around the Champ de Mars Massacre, 17 July 1791," French Historical Studies 22 (1999), 183-209.
9. For acute discussions of historians' ambivalent relationship to the notion of experience since the linguistic turn, see Barry Shank, "Conjuring Evidence for Experience: Imagining a Post-Structuralist History," American Studies 36 (1995), 81-92
10. Martin Jay, "The Limits of Limit-Experience: Bataille and Foucault," Working Paper 3.11, European Society and Culture Research Group, University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, 1993)
11. Miguel A. Cabrera, "Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative to Social History," Social History 24 (1999), 74-89
12. and Michael Pickering, History, Experience, and Cultural Studies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997)
13. The literature devoted to this aspect of Thompson's legacy is vast. For helpful reviews of the main points of debate, see Sean Scalmer, "Experience and Discourse: A Map of Recent Theoretical Approaches to Labour and Social History," Labour History no. 70 (1996), 156-168
14. Marc W. Steinberg, "Culturally Speaking: Finding a Commons between Post-structuralism and the Thompsonian Perspective," Social History 21 (1996), 193-214
15. Also see E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Oxford: Polity, 1990)
16. and Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993)
17. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991). 773-797
18. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York; Routledge, 1990)
19. and Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992). Although I am sympathetic, and obviously indebted, to Scott's elegant and persuasive argument, in "The Evidence of Experience," against the foundationalism implicit in the analysis of experience, her own emphasis on the constitutive power of discourse leaves little space for the exercise of individual agency. The present article builds on and supplements Scott's argument in its attempt to conceptualize the space between discourse and experience, the space where individuals weigh options and make moral choices
20. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. , transl. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988), esp. vol. 3
21. idem, "Life in Quest of Narrative," in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991)
22. Douglas Ezzy, "Lived Experience and Interpretation in Narrative Theory: Experiences of Living with HIV/AIDS," Qualitative Sociology 21 (1998), 169-179
23. Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993)
24. see also Freeman's discussion of several different approaches in "Experience, Narrative, and the Relationship between Them," Journal of Narrative and Life History 8 (1998), 455-466
25. Donald Brenneis, "Telling Troubles: Narrative, Conflict and Experience," Anthropological Linguistics 30 (1988), 279-291.
26. The phrase is from Censer, "Social Twists and Linguistic Turns," 161
27. The search for new alternatives to discourse analysis has also involved many historians and social scientists sympathetic to at least some aspects of postmodernism, including some who are fully aware of the analytical deficiencies of the category of experience, Virtually all of the new alternatives they have articulated, however, ultimately oppose language/culture to something ostensibly more real, thus creating new interpretive dilemmas. See, for example, Gareth Stedman Jones's incisive critique of Roger Chattier's categories of "representation" and "practice," in "The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s," History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), 19-35, esp. 26-27
28. Stedman Jones developed further this line of criticism in his review of Les Formes de l'expérience: une autre histoire sociale, ed. Bernard Lepetit (Paris: A. Michel, 1995)
29. See Stedman Jones, "Une autre histoire sociale?," Annates: Histoire, Sciences Societies 53 (1998), 383-392.
30. Richard Biemacki's attempt to distinguish between "signs" and "practice" raises problems similar to those criticized by Stedman Jones. See Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural History," History and Theory 39 (2000), 289-310
31. critical commentary by Chris Lorenz in the same volume, "Some Afterthoughts on Culture and Explanation in Historical Inquiry," History and Theory 39 (2000), 348-363. esp. 359. The danger in trying to find new ways to bridge the supposed gap between lived "reality" and its interpretation or representation is that the effort inevitably perpetuates unhelpful polarities that divert attention from the central problem of consciousness
32. Kathleen Canning, for example, tries to get at the culturally conditioned agency of working-class women by focusing on the body, "in both its discursive and experiential dimensions" (Canning, "Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience," Signs 19 [1994], 368-404, esp. 386).
33. see Sewell, "Language and Practice in Cultural History: Backing Away from the Edge of the Cliff," French Historical Studies 21 (1998), 241-254. esp. 252
34. Gabrielle Spiegel has similarly called for greater attention to the "social logic of the text," as distinct from its semiotic logic ("History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," Speculum 65 [1990], 59-86). These newer and subtler oppositions between basic realities and imaginative constructions, for all their ingenuity, still manage to cut short the analysis of consciousness and the process of interpretation. In each of these formulations, the historian is spared the trouble of penetrating the labyrinth of the mind because the production of consciousness is traced back to phenomena that supposedly possess self-evident causative implications
35. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
36. See, for example. Jay M. Smith. "Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over Noblesse Commerçante," Journal of Modern History 72 (2000). 339-374
37. and "Recovering Tocqueville's Social Interpretation of the French Revolution: Eighteenth-Century France Rethinks Nobility," in Beyond Tocqueville: New Perspectives on the Ancien Régime, ed. Robert Schwartz and Robert Schneider (Newark: University of Delaware Press. 2002). both of which present arguments perfectly consistent with Tackett's findings
38. The book received the Leo Gershoy Award in 1997 as the best book in early-modern western European history published in 1996. Among the many glowing reviews see, for example, those by Gwynne Lewis, Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 1997), 30
39. William Doyle, Journal of Modern History 69 (1997), 852
40. Alan B. Spitzer, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 566 (1999), 172
41. Sarah Maza, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1997), 112.
42. Tackett, Becoming, 7.
43. Gruder, "Whither Revisionism?" 247.
44. Tackett's bifurcated treatment of experience is strikingly similar to Wilhem Dilthey's analytical distinction between Erlebnis (which can be translated roughly as "immediate sensory experience") and Erfahrung ("knowledge gained from lived experience"), though Tackett makes no allusion to Dilthey. For discussion of Dilthey's categories see Pickering, History, Experience, 94-124
45. Martin Jay, "Experience without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel," New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 20 (1993), 145-155
46. Jay, "The Limits of Limit-Experience," 5-6. 22.
47. Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes [1933] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). "Judgment and experience are inseparable; wherever there is judgment there is inference, and immediacy has given place to mediation. And the claim of sensation to be, on account of its immediacy, a form of experience exclusive of thought, must be said to have failed" (17)
48. For critical discussion of Fish's concept of interpretive communities, see Gerald Graff, "Interpretation on Tlön: A Response to Stanley Fish," New Literary History 17 (1985), 109-117
49. Fish, "Resistance and Independence: A Reply to Gerald Graff," 119-127.
50. See also Robert Scholes, Textual Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
51. For indications of this ferment in social thought, see Smith, "Social Categories;" John Shovlin, "Toward a Reinterpretation of Revolutionary Antinobilism: The Political Economy of Honor in the Old Regime", Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 35-66
52. and Rafe Blaufarb, "Noble Privilege and Absolutist State Building: French Military Administration after the Seven Years' War," French Historical Studies 24 (2001). 223-246
53. Servan's father, the owner of a modest seigneurie, sent his two sons into the customary noble professions of the law and the military. Despite being placed in the conventional career paths of the socially ascendant, both Servan and his younger brother, Joseph Servan de Gerbey, actually acquired their reputations by the pen, calling for the enlightened reform of their own respective institutions and for the overall regeneration of French society. Both became enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution; Servan de Gerbey would go on to serve as Minister of War in 1792. For background, see Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne. ed. Joseph-François Miehaud, 45 vols. (Paris: A. T. Desplaces, 1854-1865), 39: 139-142
54. Dictionnaire historique de la révolution française, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989), 981
55. Dictionnaire Napoléon, ed. Jean Tulard, 2 vols., (Paris:Fayard, 1999), 2: 766
56. Dietionnaire Historique et Biographique de la Révolution et de l'Empire, 1789-1815, ed. Jean-François-Eugène Robinet, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie historique de la révolution et de l!empire, 1899), 2: 749. 42a
57. For more on the idioms of eighteenth-century moralism, see Sarah Maza, "Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle-Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997), 199-229.
58. Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan, Discours sur les moeurs (Lyon: Chez Joseph-SulpiceGrabit, 1769). 44. Ibid. The audience of "honnêtes gens" is identified on p. 2; the "contagion of the imagination" appears on p. 109. 45
59. For a useful discussion of the main features of classical republican thinking in Old Regime France, see Keith Michael Baker, "Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth- Century France," Journal of Modern History 73 (2001), 32-53, esp. 35-42
60. Servan, Discours sur les moeurs, 30-31.
61. Servan, Discours sur le progrés des connoissances humilities en général, de la morale, et de la législation en particulier; lu dans une Assemblée puhlique de l'Académic de Lyon (n. p., 1781), 109-110
62. Servan. Discours sur le progrés, 111.
63. Glose et Remarques sur l'Arrêt du Parlement de Paris, du 5 décembre 1788 (London: n. p., 1789), 5
64. See Glose et Remarques, 9; Commentaire roturier, 12
65. Avis salutaire au Tiers Etat. Sur ce qu'il fut, ce qu'il est, & ce qu'il peut être (n. p., 1789), 27
66. Michaud, Biographic universelle, 39:140. Servan penned a total of seventeen pamphlets in 1788-1789, all of them sympathetic to the claims of the Third Estate. The pamphlets are distinguished from one another mainly by their level of vitriol
67. See, for example, both Commentaire roturier and Glose et Remarques
68. On his admiration for "antique morals," see Discours sur le progrés, 125
69. Servan. Commentaire roturier, 38.
70. Servan, Avis salutaire, 2-3.
71. Servan, Avis Salutaire, 32.
72. For examples of the creative thinking of nobles of the sword, see Victor de Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, L'Ami des Hommes; ou, Traité de la population (Avignon: n. p., 1756)
73. Charles-Gaspard Toustain de Richebourg, Précis historique, moral et politique sur la noblesse françoise (Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1777)
74. Guillaume Barthez de Marmorières, Nouveaux essais sur la noblesse (Neuchatel: Société Typographique, 1781)
75. Louis Gabriel du Buat-Nancay, Eléments de la politique, ou recherche des vrais principes de l'economie sociale, 6 vols. (London: n. p., 1773)
76. and Philippe-Auguste de Sainte-Foix, chevalier d'Arc, La noblesse militaire, opposée à La noblesse commergante: Ou le patriate français (London: n. p., 1756)
77. See Tulard, Dictionnaire Napoléon, 2: 766.