Furet on Historical Materialism and the French Revolution

In order to refute the problems of simplification, dogmatization, and teleological historiography represented by the mainstream French revolutionary historiography of figures such as Albert Soboul and Claude Mazauric, the renowned 20th-century French historian François Furet specifically published the book *Marx and the French Revolution*. This work compiles all of Marx’s important writings on the French Revolution from 1842 to 1871, and provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis and clarification of Marx’s view of the French Revolution, thereby highlighting the essential differences between Marx and his 20th-century French epigones. The discussion revolves around two main points: first, Marx’s understanding of the relationship between the French Revolution and social revolution (i.e., the question of the “second revolution”); second, the autonomy of the political, analyzing Marx’s view of the French Revolution during his youth, the period of materialism, and the period of writing *Capital*.

法国20世纪著名历史学家傅勒为了反驳以索布尔、马佐里克等人为代表的法国主流大革命史学派的简单化、教条化以及目的论史学等方面的问题，特意出版了《马克思与法国大革命》一书。该书汇集了马克思从1842年到1871年间关于法国大革命的所有重要论述，并对马克思的法国大革命观进行了全面、系统的分析和澄清，以彰显马克思与其20世纪法国后学之间的本质差异。论述主要围绕两点展开：第一，马克思对于法国革命与社会革命关系的理解（也就是“二次革命”问题）；第二，政治的自主性，对青年马克思、唯物主义时期和《资本论》写作时期的马克思的法国革命观进行了分析。

The Young Marx’s View of the French Revolution

青年马克思的法国革命观

The youthful period was the formative period of Marx’s view of the French Revolution. Regarding Marx’s initially proposed concept of social revolution, Germany’s backwardness constituted the real reason for Marx’s proposal of social revolution. Marx hoped to overcome Germany’s backwardness through this revolution, which would transcend and thereby complete the French Revolution. In Germany’s condition, he saw two conditions for realizing social revolution: the superiority of German philosophy and the relative advantage of Germany’s backwardness for social revolution. At the same time, through his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, Marx recognized the priority of society over the state in modern society, thereby realizing that political revolution was unhelpful for solving social problems and that human emancipation must be carried out on the social rather than the political level. This constituted the theoretical reason for Marx’s theory of social revolution. In the popular French historical literature of the time, the young Marx discovered that “the French Revolution produced ideas that surpassed its own achievements; that is, the French Revolution was the source of communism, i.e., the idea of ‘a new world order’.” This led Marx to extend social revolution further to France. This means that Marx himself already had the idea of the French Revolution as the matrix of social revolution. The difference between Marx and his epigones lies in the fact that he did not venerate the Jacobin dictatorship as they did; rather, from his youth he already recognized that the Jacobin dictatorship was an anachronism, a result of confusing antiquity with modernity.

青年时期是马克思法国革命观的形成时期。就马克思首倡的社会革命观而言，德国的落后构成了马克思提出社会革命的现实原因，马克思希望借助这种超越并由此完成法国革命的革命，克服德国的落后状况；他在德国的状况中看到了实现社会革命的两个条件，即德国哲学的优越性和德国落后之于社会革命的相对优越性。同时，马克思通过批判黑格尔法哲学认识到了现代社会中社会相对于国家的优先性，由此意识到政治革命无助于社会问题的解决，人的解放必须在社会而非政治层面进行。这一点构成了马克思提出社会革命理论的理论上的原因。青年马克思在当时流行的法国历史文献中发现了“法国革命产生了超出自身成就的思想，也就是说，法国革命是共产主义亦即‘一种新世界秩序’思想的来源”，这就使得马克思将社会革命进一步扩展到了法国。这就意味着，马克思本人就有了法国革命作为社会革命母体的思想。马克思与其后学的差别在于，他并不像后者那样崇敬雅各宾专政，而是从青年时期就已经认识到雅各宾专政是一种时代错乱，是混淆古今的结果。

Regarding political autonomy, while inverting the relationship between civil society and the state, Marx understood the political state as the “alienation” and “illusion” of civil society. Starting from this, he explained the various forms of government that appeared in the French Revolution, thereby acknowledging, in the form of “alienation” and “illusion,” a certain degree of autonomy of the political relative to society. Thus, the Marx of this period took into account the political factor of the Revolution. However, because he did not carefully consider the relationship between the state and civil society from a political perspective, he failed to explain the autonomy of the political during the revolutionary period, simply attributing it to socioeconomic and class factors. The root cause of this was his excessive confinement to the notion that “civil society determines the state.”

就政治自主性而言，马克思在颠倒市民社会与国家关系的同时，将政治国家理解为市民社会的“异化”和“幻想”，由此出发对法国革命中出现的各种政体进行解释，从而在“异化”和“幻想”的形式下承认了政治相对于社会的一定程度的自主性。由此，这一时期的马克思考虑到了大革命的政治因素，但由于他并未从政治角度出发仔细思考国家与市民社会间的关系，因而未对革命时期政治的自主性作出解释，只是简单将其归结为社会经济和阶级因素。之所以如此，根源在于他过分局限于“市民社会决定国家”这一观念。

Through an examination of the young Marx’s view of the French Revolution, two conclusions can be drawn: first, the concept of the French Revolution as the revolutionary “matrix” originated from Marx himself, not from his epigones; second, the young Marx acknowledged the independence of the political state from civil society in the form of alienation or illusion, but he was merely satisfied with the assertion of the priority of civil society over the state and did not conduct a deep, systematic analysis of their relationship.

通过对青年马克思法国革命观的考察，可以得出两点结论：第一，法国革命作为革命“母体”的观念来自马克思本人，而非其后学；第二，青年马克思以异化或者幻想的形式承认了政治国家相对于市民社会的独立性，但他仅仅满足于市民社会优先于国家的断言，并未对二者的关系作出深入、系统的分析。

The Historical Materialist Explanation of the “Second Revolution”

对“二次革命”的唯物史观解释

After the formation of historical materialism, Marx began to analyze ideology and the political state from the standpoint and method of class analysis. His view of the French Revolution thus underwent a major transformation. The earlier notion of “the priority of civil society over the state appeared in the form of the bourgeois class’s class interests determining ideas and representations.” Under this determinism, the various forms of government during the French Revolution were all reduced to “the production of bourgeois society.” Thus, “the drama of the multiple forms of the French Revolution discovered the *deus ex machina* manipulating its legal code.” [1]1 *Deus ex machina*: Latin phrase meaning “god from the machine,” referring to an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of literature or drama to resolve a situation. Here, Furet began to apply his earlier critique of the French “vulgar Marxists” to Marx himself. In his view, “class” and “class interests” became for Marx a universal key to explaining everything, especially the complex and changeable political forms and social ideologies of the French Revolution that particularly concerned him.

马克思在唯物史观形成后，开始从阶级分析的立场和方法出发对意识形态和政治国家进行分析，其法国革命观由此发生重大转变，之前的“市民社会优先于国家的观念以资产阶级的阶级利益决定观念和表象的形式出现”。在这种决定论下，法国革命期间的多种政体形式都被归结为“资产阶级社会的生产”，由此，“法国革命的多种形式的戏剧发现了操纵其法条的机械神”。这里傅勒开始将先前对法国“粗俗的马克思主义者”的批判用到马克思本人身上。在他看来，“阶级”和“阶级利益”在马克思这里变成了以不变应万变的法宝，用以解释一切，尤其是他特别关注的法国革命中复杂多变的政治形式和社会意识形态。

On the question of the second revolution, through the issue of the inevitability of revolution, Furet points out, on the one hand, the contradiction between theory and practice inherent in this question, and on the other hand, analyzes the concept of the French Revolution as the “matrix” of social revolution. From the perspective of historical materialism, both the French Revolution and social revolution should be products of the development of social productive forces. When Marx explained the French Revolution from a materialist standpoint, the materialist concept of inevitability, on the one hand, completely diminished the significance of political activity itself as revolution, and on the other hand, could not explain the problem of “continuity” and “rupture” in the French Revolution between 1789 and 1793, thus failing to provide a unified explanation of the history of this period. Without actually investigating and studying the social and economic development of pre-revolutionary France, it was impossible to demonstrate the inevitability of the revolution from the maturity of civil society. Instead, one “deduced the economic and social maturity of the 18th-century French bourgeoisie” retroactively from the outbreak of the revolution. Thus, the conclusion was not drawn from the premises, but rather the necessary premises were deduced from the conclusion (the goal).

在二次革命问题上，通过革命的必然性问题，一方面指出这个问题存在的理论与实践之间的矛盾，另一方面又分析了法国革命作为社会革命的“母体”的观念。从唯物史观的视角看，无论是法国革命，还是社会革命，均应为社会生产发展的产物。当马克思从唯物论出发解释法国革命时，唯物论上的必然性观念一方面完全消减了作为革命的政治活动本身的意义，另一方面又无法解释1789—1793年间法国革命的“连续”与“断裂”问题，从而无法对这一时段的历史作出统一的解释。如果不能实际考察和研究革命前法国社会和经济的发展，也就无法从市民社会的成熟出发论证革命的必然性，而是反过来从革命的爆发“推演出18世纪法国资产阶级的经济和社会的成熟性”，因而不是从前提推出结论，而是从结论（目的）出发推出其所需要的前提。

For Marx, what truly played a decisive role was not the maturity of social production and classes, but the revolutionary action itself. This led to an internal conflict in his view of revolution: theoretically, the French Revolution was considered the inevitable result of the development of social production, while practically, the revolution itself, rather than the development of social production, was seen as the decisive factor for social revolution. The true significance of the French Revolution lay in the immense energy that erupted during it, sufficient to be emulated by future social revolutions. In Furet’s words, “the Marx of 1845–1850 saw only revolution in French history.” This means that Marx abstracted revolutionary practice from its local social context and endowed it with universal significance. Thus, the French Revolution, in the sense of “revolutionary practice,” contained the possibility, even the necessity, of a “second revolution,” thereby constituting the matrix of social revolution.

在马克思这里，真正起决定作用的并不是社会生产与阶级的成熟，而是革命的行动本身。这导致了其革命观的内在冲突，即理论上认为法国革命为社会生产发展的必然结果，而实践上则认为革命本身而非社会生产的发展构成社会革命的决定性因素。法国革命的真正意义在于革命中爆发出来的足以为未来社会革命效仿的巨大能量。用傅勒的话来说，“1845—1850年的马克思，在法国历史中仅仅看到了革命”。这就意味着马克思使革命的实践抽离了局部的社会语境，并取得了普遍性意义。于是，法国革命便在“革命实践”的意义上包含了“二次革命”的可能性，甚至必然性，因而构成了社会革命的母体。

The French Revolution under Historical Materialism

唯物史观下的法国革命

Unlike Tocqueville and others who considered how to end the French Revolution, Marx in this period continued to contemplate a new social revolution, aiming to incorporate the proletarian revolution into the consideration and explanation of the French Revolution. To this end, he had to overcome the aforementioned tension between theory and practice, both explaining theoretically that the French Revolution was a product of socioeconomic development and explaining the fundamental transformation of the French Revolution from a bourgeois revolution to a proletarian revolution after the mid-19th century.

与托克维尔等人考虑如何终结法国革命不同，马克思在这一时期继续思考新的社会革命，以将无产阶级革命纳入法国革命的思考与解释之中。为此，他不得不克服前述理论与实践之间的张力，既要从理论上说明法国革命乃是社会经济发展的产物，也要说明19世纪中叶以后法国革命从资产阶级革命向无产阶级革命的根本转变。

The Revolution of 1848 posed a theoretical question for Marx: how to explain, from the standpoint of historical materialism, the appearance of so many forms of government in France when its social and class foundations had not fundamentally changed? Marx applied the method of class analysis, reducing the different forms of government to different class foundations (or even different fractions of the same class). “Since there were several forms of government, there must therefore have been several bourgeoisies, or at least several fractions of the bourgeoisie. From 1848 onwards, this notion constituted the key to understanding Marx’s analysis of France.” Furet argues that Marx’s analysis here was more refined, deducing the class foundations of different forms of government from the class struggle of the French Revolution. Since the economic base could not undergo drastic changes in the short term, this analysis was not a social and economic analysis, but a political one.

1848年革命向马克思提出了一个理论问题：如何从唯物史观出发解释法国在社会和阶级基础没有发生根本改变的情况下，出现如此众多的政体形式？马克思运用阶级分析方法，将不同的政体形式还原为不同的阶级基础（甚至同一阶级的不同部分）。“由于有好几个政体，因此也就必定有好几个资产阶级，或者至少有资产阶级的好几个部分。从1848年起，这个观念就构成了理解马克思的法国分析的根本。”傅勒认为，马克思的这种分析更加精致，从法国革命的阶级斗争出发推导出不同政体的阶级基础。由于经济基础不可能在短期内发生急剧变化，因此这种分析就并不是社会和经济分析，而是政治分析。

This same situation appears in Marx’s analysis of the Second Empire. Furet points out that in discussing the Second Empire, Marx once again acknowledged the concept of “the independence of the modern state” that he had held in his youth, yet simultaneously insisted on the materialist view that “society takes precedence over the state,” arriving at the paradox that during the Second Empire “the bourgeoisie ruled without governing.” [2]2 “The bourgeoisie ruled without governing” (la bourgeoisie règne mais ne gouverne pas): a formulation used by Marx in *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte* to describe the political situation under Napoleon III, where the bourgeoisie held economic power but did not directly exercise political authority. Marx further believed that the Second Empire constituted the final form of bourgeois rule. Furet argues that this insight originates from the concept of social revolution. Marx did not deduce the necessity of political change from economic and social change; on the contrary, he “deduced economic and social evolution from political history.” The basis for the unity of theory and practice is not direct economic and social development, but rather the necessity and practice of social revolution. The true foundation of the second revolution [3]3 “The second revolution”: a term used by Furet to refer to Marx’s concept of a further revolutionary upheaval following the bourgeois revolution, aimed at achieving proletarian emancipation, as distinct from the initial bourgeois revolution. is the immense energy for driving social development that Marx saw in the French Revolution.

这种情况同样出现在马克思对第二帝国的分析中。傅勒指出，马克思在论述第二帝国时再度承认了青年时期曾经拥有的“现代国家的独立性”观念，却又同时坚持“社会优先于国家”的唯物主义观点，得出了第二帝国时期“资产阶级统而不治”的悖论。马克思进一步认为，第二帝国构成资产阶级统治的最后形式。傅勒认为这种见解源自社会革命的观念。马克思并非从经济和社会变化推出政治变化的必然性，相反，他“从政治史推出经济和社会的演化”。理论和实践统一的基础不是直接的经济和社会的发展，而是社会革命的需要和实践。二次革命的真正根据是马克思从法国革命中看到的推动社会发展的巨大能量。

Regarding the two issues that Furet focuses on, in fact the young Marx first proposed the concept of social revolution based on the German situation and acknowledged the autonomy of politics, which is not contradictory to his later views. After the formation of historical materialism, he grounded the second revolution in revolutionary practice, thereby avoiding falling into a contradiction between theory and practice. On important questions such as social revolution, historical materialism cannot be mechanically applied to historical interpretation; rather, analysis must be conducted according to specific historical circumstances. Therefore, whether in historical writing or in social construction, adhering to the basic principles of historical materialism and upholding the foundational and priority status of socioeconomic development is by no means an easy task. This requires us to maintain a high degree of vigilance in both theoretical research and practical activities, constantly taking socioeconomic and productive forces development as the fundamental starting point and ultimate goal of all undertakings, so as to avoid falling into various errors.

就傅勒关注的两个问题而言，其实青年马克思先是基于德国状况提出了社会革命观念，并且承认了政治的自主性，这与之后的观点并不矛盾；在唯物史观形成后，他将二次革命建立在革命实践之上，从而避免陷入理论与实践的矛盾之中。在诸如社会革命等重要问题上，唯物史观不能机械地运用到历史解释之中，而必须根据具体的历史情境展开分析。因此，无论是在历史书写还是在社会建设中，坚持唯物史观的基本原则，坚持社会经济发展的基础性和优先性地位，绝非轻而易举之事。这就要求我们在理论研究和实践活动中必须保持高度警惕，时时将社会经济和生产力发展作为一切事业的根本出发点和归宿，以免陷入种种错误之中。

Online editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗