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In the past decade Marxist history has lost its sway as many French intellectuals grew disillusioned with East bloc totalitarianism. A revisionist school, influenced by nonpartisan British and American scholars, presents a more complex picture of the revolution: nobles seeking to weaken royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example; few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from France's current best seller La Revolution, by historian Francois Furet. "The French have come to realize that the revolution was a magnificent event that turned out badly," says Furet, a professor at Paris' Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the University of Chicago.
Furet views contemporary France as a "republic of the center" in which a consensus has emerged in favor of market economics combined with broad social services. "Left-right rhetoric today does not correspond to reality," he says. "France has buried its civil war." Three key changes explain why: the Fifth Republic finally established a strong, stabilizing presidency; the appeal of the Communist Party has withered; and the old antagonism between the Roman Catholic church and state has eased. "The left is in power precisely because it renounced its revolutionary culture," he says.
Frenchmen appear ambivalent about their revolutionary forebears. Polls show that the most revered figure of the era is now the Marquis de Lafayette, who ultimately broke with the Jacobins and fled the country. After a televised re- enactment of Louis XVI's trial, only 27% of French viewers favored beheading the hapless King. One French poll even found that 17% of the country wants the return of the monarchy. Seeking new heroes, Mitterrand said last week that he will place in the Pantheon, France's national mausoleum, the remains of the Marquis de Condorcet, an influential leader of the National Assembly who called for universal public education, and of the Abbe Gregoire, a revolutionary priest who advocated civil rights for Protestants and Jews.
But the church is still not entirely reconciled. Many Catholics consider Gregoire a turncoat priest for swearing allegiance to the revolutionary state, which repudiated the power of the Pope. Last June, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, head of the French church, officially endorsed a campaign to sanctify 181 priests and three bishops who were murdered by a Paris mob in the Carmes prison in 1792. "France is like a family that has had an internal dispute," Lustiger said. "If we don't talk about the bad things that happened, we won't have a real reconciliation." Right-wing Catholics will converge on Paris for an August anti-bicentennial rally. Says Francois Triomphe, founder of Anti-89, an umbrella for several dozen groups protesting the government's celebrations: "We seek reparations for the evils done to the church."