Habermas and Revolution - An Argument

The translation of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der buurgerlichen Gesellschaft into the English language The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society in 1989 could not have come at a more fortuitous time for scholars of the French Revolution and the last years of the Ancien Regime. Although a French language translation had existed since 1978, the English language translation no doubt facilitated the application of the Habermasian model to this particular epoch by Anglo-American scholars, precisely at the time when the bicentennial of the Revolution of 1789 was in the process of stimulating new and innovative scholarship into the political culture of the Ancien Regime and the Revolution.  Although most scholarship has been devoted to revising or attacking the model put forth by Habermas, most scholars seem to agree that the use of this model as a point of demarcation has been an intellectually fruitful endeavor and has led scholars to question previously accepted assumptions about the role of political culture in before and during the French Revolution. The intensity of the scholarship, however, lasted for little more than five years, between 1988 and 1993, or roughly between the publication of Joan Landes’ Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution and the French Historical Studies forum dedicated to the question of the public sphere in the waning years of the Ancien Regime.

The irony in the adoption of the Habermasian model by the proponents of a politico-cultural interpretation of the French Revolution is that it comes at a time when the same Marxist language that characterizes The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere had largely been rejected in its application to the French Revolution. Nevertheless, in revising Habermas’ assertion that the political public sphere developed almost overnight with the calling of the Estates General in 1788 and 1789, these historians have provided convincing evidence that a modified form of the political public sphere existed at least since the 1750’s, if not earlier. From this base, many revisionists have gone on to propose their own model that characterizes the late Ancien Regime as a society defined as a hybrid political/literary public sphere, in which public opinion (in a modified sense) was an important actor in the political life of the Ancien Regime. The purpose of my paper will be synthesize a new model of Habermas’ political public sphere in the late Ancien Regime by drawing upon the works of revisionist scholars in the area of political culture. The most important institutions that contributed to the formation of the political public sphere were the salons, the printing press, and the judicial culture of the Ancien Regime.

Before delving into the revisions of Habermas’ theory, it is important to analyze the model he sets forth of the evolution of the political public sphere as it pertains to France. For the sake of brevity in this particular essay (not in the final essay) I will only very briefly summarize his position. In late Ancien Regime France, there existed an oppositional public sphere that was different from the representative public sphere. This sphere was a proto-political literary public sphere, defined by censorship, oppression, and limited access. It was not until the calling of the Estates General in 1788 that, almost overnight, there developed a political public sphere that was characterized by a temporary life due to the peculiarities of the revolutionary contingency. Thus, 1788 and 1789 was a watershed that proved to be the fundamental demarcation between the literary public sphere and the political public sphere.

Thus, the model provided by Habermas proved to be a fruitful point of demarcation for many scholars whose aim was to revise Habermas’ model in order to better explain their conceptions of the political culture of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution. These scholars (who, for the sake of brevity once more, I will list in the bibliography and not in this essay), through taking issue with the assertion that that political public sphere developed overnight, have stressed the continuity of the political culture from the Ancien Regime to the French Revolution. Thus, the impression we get is that the literary public sphere described by Habermas was also nominally influenced by the discussion of politics, economics and society. The public sphere, however, was much more confined to the private, domestic realm than it was a sphere of its own. By its association with privacy and domesticity, this public sphere largely escaped the watchful eye of the absolutist monarchy, which was itself more interested in its own privacy and secrecy than it was with that of others’. There also emerged during this period a form of “public opinion” which largely escapes the attention of Habermas; this “public opinion” was less of an actor in the political public sphere as it was an abstract concept formulated by elites to legitimize their rule. Finally, the question of women’s participation in this pre-revolutionary public sphere also shows that sociability and inclusiveness were integral features of this political public sphere. Three main thrusts of scholarship, which will be discussed in my essay, have come together to provide a much clearer picture of a modified form of the political public sphere that existed on the eve of the French Revolution.

The first thrust is an examination of the printed press in the half-century before the French Revolution. Roger Chartier, Jeremy Popkin and others have argues that the proliferation of printed material before the French Revolution represented a continuity, and that this continuity was defined not in purely literary terms, but in political terms, albeit private political terms. The works of Robert Darnton and Jean Sgard also contribute to this history, although they align themselves against a political public sphere predating the French Revolution. The second thrust is the history of the salon before, during and after the French Revolution. The focus of their arguments center around the role of women in the salon culture, and although opposed on many issues, both Dena Goodman and Joan Lades provide compelling evidence that the salon was instrumental in the political public sphere before the French Revolution. Finally, David Bell and Sara Maza have explored the way in which the French judiciary of the late eighteenth-century provided a crucial and largely uninhibited platform for the discussion and resolution of issues related to government, economy and society. Together, these three aspects of Ancien Regime culture provided the basis of an political public sphere that existed in a modified form from the one described above.

It is unclear at this moment whether I will have space to discuss all three of these aspects in the larger paper. If it becomes apparent that I cannot, I will focus on the proliferation of printed material and reading practices (i.e. Popin, Darnton, Chartier and more) at the expense of the other two arguments.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.