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Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France Author(s): Alan Knight Source: Past & Present, No. 134 (Feb., 1992), pp. 159-199 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstonorg/stable/650802 Accessed: 18/05/2010 10:23
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VIEWPOINT REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION: MEXICO COMPARED TO ENGLAND AND FRANCE*

This Viewpoint tries to elucidate and compare revisionist interpretations of three major revolutions. It does not seek to contribute, except perhaps indirectly, to the debates which revisionist interpretations have provoked; it does not address substantive historical topics; and it does not advance historical hypotheses or evidence. It tries, rather, to identify the character of revisionism and, where possible, to establish points of comparison and contrast between the three historiographical traditions. The first task is difficult, since revisionism is a protean concept and in the field of Mexican history at least I have yet to find a historian who parades his or her revisionism with the polemical swagger of, say, J. C. D. Clark, or the measured assurance of FranQois Furet.' Mexican revisionism is usually more elliptical, less contentious. It also assumes many forms: hence any talk of revisionism runs the risk of historiographical reductionism, and I have found it necessary to disaggregate the catch-all (and, for some, offensive) term "revisionism" into discrete themes. The second selfimposed task, that of cross-cultural comparison, is even more difficult, or rash, since at a time when "revolutionary" studies seem to grow exponentially it presumes some passing familiarity with all three historiographies. I have only a passing familiarity with the English and French literature. If only to stimulate discussion, however, it seems worth risking some tentative comparisons. This Dantonesque audacity is partly a result of my belief that
* The paper on which this articte is based formed part of a panel entitled " `Revisionise Interpretations of Revolutions: A Comparative Perspective", held at the American Historical Association Conference, San Francisco, 28 Dec. 1989. The original version was written with oral presentation in mind and, despite subsequent rewriting, this published version probably retains something of its original declaratory form. ' "This is a revisionist tract", declares Jonathan Clark at the beginning of his English Society, 1688 - 1832 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 1; Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge, 1981), p. 116, declares that, with the passage of time, "I have become, if I may so express myself, increasingly `revisionist " '.

while the historian of the Mexican Revolution might know a little about the English and French Revolutions, there is less reason to assume any knowledge of the Mexican Revolution on the part of students of European revolutions: a belief which, if true, stems from the Eurocentricity of European history and, conversely, the greater openness (perhaps even "dependency") of Latin American history. 2 Historians of Mexico (and not just colonialists) need to know something about European history, while historians of Europe scarcely need to concern themselves with Mexican history. In part this is because historians have to chase up the cultural attachments of their subjects. Mexico's revolutionaries frequently invoked European especially French revolutionary models: Danton and Robespierre, the guillotine and the Convention. 3 Mexico,furs dnecipoalsrtnfEgih and French revolutionaries; at best, it represented as with Marvell's "Mexique paintings"4 an exotic abstraction, not a political model. Following the lead of my subjects, therefore, I hazard some comparisons with English and French historiography in the hope that, even if I stand corrected, the correction may advance our joint historiographical understanding.

The history of the Mexican Revolution, like that of the English and French Revolutions, was first written by participants. The difference, of course, is that Mexican participants are only a generation or two distant from us; some, who survived the fearful
The Eurocentricity of the A.H.A. audience was borne out by the fact that, after papers on England and France had been given, and that on Mexico was about to start, something like a third of the audience got up and left. Elsa Carrillo, "La revolucin francesa: pauta a la forma discursiva de la revolucin mexicana: la soberana convencin de Aguascalientes, 1914" (unpubd. paper, Centre de recherches d'histoire de l'Amrique latine et du monde ibrique, Paris, 1988); Jean-Pierre Bastian, "El paradigma de 1789, sociedades e ideas y la revolucin mexicana", Historia Mexicana, xxxviii (1988), pp. 79-110. The Mexican case appears to confirm the observations of both William Doyle and Francois Furet that the French Revolution became the model, the "classic political and social experience", to which later revolutionaries turned for inspiration, whereas the English Revolution never attained such a "mother-role": William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), pp. 421 - 3; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 85 n. 5. 4 Andrew Marvell, "Upon Appleton House", 1. 580. It was also from Marvell's "Bermudas" that Aldous Huxley took the title for his Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveller's Journal (Harmondsworth, 1955; first pubd. 1934).

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mortality of 1910-30, like Artemio Cruz, died with their boots on, amid the new post-Revolutionary Mexico they had helped to create.5 The victorious participants those associated with, or sympathetic to, the triumphant Constitutionalist/Sonoran regime of 1915-34 tended to depict the Revolution as a broad popular movement, strongly agrarian in terms of both social composition and political agenda, progressive, egalitarian and nationalist. The Revolution was justified against the normative backdrop of an litist, authoritarian, inegalitarian, reactionary and xenophile old regime, the Porfiriato (1876-1911). And the Revolution thus justified was, of course, a mythologized, sanitized, surprisingly consensual phenomenon, the Mexican equivalent of the "conciliatory" version of the French Revolution propounded by Alphonse Aulard in intellectual deference to the Third Republic. 6 From the outset, however, there were dissenting voices: conservative adherents of the old regime who denounced the Revolution as the work of demagogic arrivistes more concerned with power than with social justice; Catholics who resented Revolutionary antidericalism and who in unison with foreign critics sought to tar the Revolution with the brush of Bolshevism." In addition, each major twist in the trajectory of the Revolution produced its victors and victims, the latter keen to validate their perspective on the movement and to appropriate the Revolution for their own ideological purposes. Almost from its inception, therefore, the Revolution spawned offspring who proclaimed their own legitimacy while denouncing rival revolutionaries as political bastards. The failure of early Maderista liberalism which lost out not only to Victoriano Huerta's counter-revolutionary militarCarlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz, trans. Sam Hileman (New York, 1966). 6 Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 881-90, where the image of the French Revolution "flattened out, tamed, and domesticated by the Third Republic", offers an obvious parallel to the reified Revolution of the Mexican P.R.I. (the Partido Revolucionario Institucional is the political party/machine born of the Revolution, and has dominated Mexican national politics since its creation in 1929). On the mythologization of the Mexican Revolution, see Ilene O'Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920-40 (New York, 1986). Jorge Vera Estao', Historia de la revolucin mexicana: orgenes y resultados (Mexico, 1957); Francisco Bulnes, El verdadero Daz y la revolucin (Mexico, 1967; first pubd. 1920); Francis C. Kelley, Blood Drenched Altars (Milwaukee, 1935); Francis McCulIagh, Red Mexico (London, 1928). Although his book was not published until forty years after the event, Vera Estao' was an active conservative, but not clerical participant in the politics of the Revolutionary decade.
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134 ism, but also to the hard-headed and hawkish realpolitik of Venustiano Carranza and the Sonorans 8 left a legacy of aggrieved liberals, usually educated and middle-class, who excoriated the militarism, the corruption, the populism and (aboye ale the machine politics of the Revolutionary regime.8 These disaffected democrats raised the tattered banner of Antire-electionism in the 1920s, backed Jos Vasconcelos's "crusade" in 1929, formed part of the Almazanista camp in 1940, and (when they conjugated their liberalism with Christian Democracy) aligned with the nascent Partido Accin Nacional after 1939. A liberal-democratic critique of the Revolution, harking back to Francisco Madero and (recently) demanding a "democracy without adjectives", has thus been almost coeval with the Revolution, and with the Revolutionary tradition of historiography.i Meanwhile even those who remained longer within the Revolutionary fold, accepting its illiberal, populist, even militarist tendencies, were prone to schism. The Revolution bifurcated in 1914-15, 1920 and 1923-4; lesser breakaways occurred in 1927 and 1929; and a major factional battle a political rather than a military confrontation occurred in 1935-6." On each occasion the losers were cast out: the Villistas (1915), the Carrancistas (1920), the De la Huertistas (1924), the Callistas (1935-6). If they survived, and if they were not later readmitted to the fold, the losers often turned against their old comrades and penned their
PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER The Maderista movement, led by Francisco Madero, represented a loose alliance of liberal reformers and popular insurgents who united to overthrow the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Daz in 1910-11. Madero's shaky liberal regime (1911-13) was toppled by a military coup, led by Victoriano Huerta, whose military dictatorship (1913-14) was in turn ousted by a renewed liberal-popular coalition, led by Venustiano Carranza and a clutch of leaders from the northern state of Sonora. Unlike Madero, Carranza and the Sonorans placed considerations of power aboye constitutional nicetes. 9 Luis Cabrera, El balance de la revolucin (Mexico, 1931); Luis Cabrera, Un ensayo comunista en Mexico (Mexico, 1937); Federico Gonzlez Garza, La revolucin mexicana: mi contribucin poltico literaria (Mexico, 1936), pp. vii xv. 10 Enrique Krauze, Por una democracia sin adjetivos (Mexico, 1986). Not surprisingly, in Enrique Krauze's series, Las biografas del poder, 8 vols. (Mexico, 1987), Madero gets more sympathetic treatment than either Plutarco Elas Calles or, more strikingly, President Crdenas: see reviews by jess Gmez Serrano, in Secuencia, viii (1987), pp. 226-7; Alan Knight, "Biografa del poder, de Enrique Krauze", Vuelta, no. 138 (May 1988), pp. 39-45. " The years 1914-15 saw the triumph of Carranza and the Sonorans over the forces of Francisco Villa; in 1920 the Sonorans ousted Carranza and established their eponymous "dynasty", which weathered rebellions in 1923-4, 1927 and 1929; finally, in 1935-6, Calles, the Sonoran jefe mximo (supreme chief), was ousted by the radical populist President Crdenas, who inaugurated a spate of social reforms.
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heretical critiques. Some of these ruptures were historically, but not historiographically, significant. After 1924 the victorious Callista "revolution" retained its Clio-genic legitimacy its claim, sanctioned by history, to represent the Revolutionary tradition (no De la Huertista revisionist school carne into being). But the 1934-5 schism between Plutarco Elas Calles and Lzaro Crdenas had historiographical consequences, since the leftward course of Cardenismo offended more conservative revolutionaries, who spurned socialism and communism, and who claimed that Crdenas was perverting a uniquely national revolution in favour of such "exotic doctrines" Again, in the 1940s, as official policy swung away from nationalism, redistribution and reform, the regime still draped itself in the Revolutionary flag; as does the present administration, which, in the very name of the Revolution, now claims to be dismantling much of the Revolution's institutional apparatus and ideological legacy. For, President Salinas declares, the hallmark of revolution is change, not immobility: "we make changes because we wish to make a reality of the Revolution".' 3 The historiography of the Revolution is therefore inseparable from post-Revolutionary political trends (the same, of course, is true of the English and French Revolutions, even though they are further removed from us in time; I will return to this point in conclusion). The first generation of Revolutionary victors, penning their memoirs and apologias, gave substance to the idea of a nationalist, popular and agrarian revolution, the product of the legitimate egalitarian strivings of a people, especially a peasantry, oppressed by Mexican and foreign exploiters. Influential foreign commentators, in particular North Americans, endorsed this image (just as there were other foreign observers, whose work has proved less enduring, who endorsed the criticisms made by conservative and Catholic enemies of the Revolution)." The
12 The expression "exotic doctrines" carne into common usage in the late 1930s and early 1940s. For an example of this interpretation, see Victoriano Anguiano Equihua, Lzaro Crdenas, su feudo y la poltica nacional (Mexico, 1951). 13 See the first informe de gobierno ("state of the union message") of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ultimas noticias, 1 Nov. 1989, p. 1. Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution (New York, 1929); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (New York, 1966; first pubd. 1933); Samuel Guy Inman, Latn America: Its Place in World Life (Chicago, 1937), ch. 20; cf. Kelley, Blood-Drenched Altars; McCullagh, Red Mexico; for non-clerical criticism, see George Agnew Chamberlain, 1s Mexico Worth Saving? (Indianapolis, 1920), which is typical of an entire Mexico-bashing genre.

first generation of pro-Revolution writers thus contained both Mexican participants and foreign participant-observers; the former concerned to explain, justify and celebrate the Revolutionary cause, the latter, often enough, to hail a progressive experiment in Third World reformism (not that they used those words) and to counter American hostility. The subsequent shift from primary to secondary sources from engaged, participant, to "objective", academic, footnoted history cannot be measured with real precision, either chronologically or analytically. Some early engaged commentators foreigners like Ernest Gruening, or Mexican like Jos C. Valads combined first-hand reportage with historical research and analysis; their work has stood the test of time remarkably well." Conversely plenty of today's "academic" historians clearly blend historical investigation with contemporary comment, whether from the (Catholic or Marxist) left, or from the (Catholic or liberal) centre and right." Nevertheless, about a generation after the armed revolution certainly by the 1950s a crop of new historians carne to the fore, academic professionals engaged in archiva] work, committed to "objective" historiography (that is, not engaged primarily in partisan pleading), lodged in universities and often inclining towards national, narrative history: Stanley R. Ross and Charles C. Cumberland in the United States, Daniel Coso Villegas and the team associated with the Historia moderna de Mxico in Mexico." In the main these historians remained within the broad parameters of Revolutionary orthodoxy: not because they necessarily sympathized with the current
'5 Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage (New York, 1928); Jos C. Valads, Historia general de la revolucin mexicana, 10 vols. (Cuernavaca, 1967). 16 The Catholic left would roughly be represented by Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico, 1985; first pubd. 1974); Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion (Cambridge, 1976); Jean Meyer, La rvolution mexicaine (Paris, 1973); the Marxist left by James Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1913 (Austin, 1968); Adolfo Gilly, La revolucin interrumpida (Mexico, 1971); Arnaldo Crdova, La ideologa de la revolucin mexicana (Mexico, 1973); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley, 1987); on the centre and right can be located Daniel Coso Villegas (ed.), La historia moderna de Mxico, 7 vols. (Mexico, 1955-65); Krauze, Biografas del poder. Certainly according to critical opinion, this is also the case with Frangois-Xavier Guerra, Le Mxique: de l'ancien rgime la rvolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985): see Moiss Gonzlez Navarro, "La guerra y la paz, o un nuevo refuerzo francs a la derecha mexicana", Secuencia, v (1987), pp. 57-69. Stanley R. Ross, Francisco I. Madero: Apostle of Mexican Democracy (New York, 1955); Charles C. Cumberland, The Mexican Revolution: Genesis under Madero (Austin, 1952); Coso Villegas (ed.), Historia moderna de Mxico.

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administration(s), but because they tended to accept the historical not the mythical Revolution as a popular, progressive, nationalist movement directed against an exploitative old regime. As conscientious historians, they did not peddle the old simplicities of the Porfirian leyenda negra, and they were not blind to the failings of the revolutionaries, but they were generally sympathetic to, rather than critical of, the revolutionary impulse, and they saw the ensuing Revolutionary regime as being popular, if far from perfect. Since the later 1960s, however, a third generation which I have elsewhere referred to as the baby-boomers of Mexican Revolution historiography has grown to maturity.'s Their presence is evident in the almost exponential growth of Mexican Revolution studies, in the plethora of books, articles, dissertations, doctoral programmes, journals, research centres, workshops, conferences, panels, and both newly organized and newly opened archives. As David Bailey remarked in 1978, it is hard work for the Mexican specialist to keep up with let alone to read and digest the ensuing torrent of new literature; and, during the last decade, the torrent has quickened and deepened.' 9 In this respect the student of the Mexican Revolution has come to resemble more closely his or her English or French counterparts. While there is as yet no Mexican chair of Revolutionary studies (after all, it took 102 years for the French to establish one), and no Mexican equivalent of La Rvolution franlaise and Annales rvolutionnaires, the Mexican Revolution has certainly become a growth industry, characterized by a marked division of labour (between regional and methodological specialists) and by the supersession of traditional artisans by factory production (largescale, competitive and sometimes hierarchical in organization). It is within this prolific recent generation that revisionism has taken root and flourished. What is revisionism? It is not a pejorative term; it does not imply intellectual backsliding; and it has nothing to do with Eduard Bernstein. 2 Revisionists are not hisla Alan Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution" (pre-publ. working paper

166 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 134 toriographical vendepatrias (quislings). Rather, revisionism is a neutral label for a historiographical current which, I shall argue, is also evident in English and French Revolutionary studies. Indeed, in the latter cases, "revisionism" is sometimes a proud label, not a pejorative epithet. However, it is invariably a loose label. Any definition of "revisionism" is likely to be somewhat arbitrary and contentious: there is no fixed canon, no agreed rulebook of the revisionist club. Revisionism, for me, embraces several positions, which may be blended together in varying ways, and with varying degrees of emphasis. A given historian may subscribe to some revisionist positions and not others. Equally, different permutations of "traditional" or "orthodox" positions are possible. However, there is a certain kinship an "elective affinity", in Weberian terms between some of these positions; hence it is not coincidental that historians who adopt revisionist positions in one area are likely to do so in others. I take revisionism to include the following, which I present as interpretative ideal types: 2i 1. A critical stance vis--vis the Revolution and its claims, political and historiographical, to be a popular, progressive and egalitarian movement. 2. A depiction of lites as the true makers of "revolution", and of the masses as indifferent spectators, malleable clients or miserable victitns. 22 3. An emphasis on the Revolution's corrupt, self-serving, Machiavellian, power-hungry, even "totalitarian" character, evident, for example, in its manipulative agrarian reform and its arrogant, unpopular anticlericalism. 23
2 ' That is to say, these are "accentuations" of (in this case a historiographical) reality; it does not follow that a given revisionist historian need adhere to all these views (nor, conversely, that a "traditionalist" need reject them all). However, there is a clear tendency, both empirical and logical, for these views to cluster together. 22 See, for example, Ramon Ruiz, The Great Rebellion, Mexico, 1905 1924 (New York, 1980); Romana Falcn, "Los origines populares de la revolucin de 1910? El caso de San Luis Potos", Historia Mexicana, xxix (1979), pp. 197-240. Jean Meyer begins his chapter "Mexico: Revolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s", in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, v (Cambridge, 1986), with the forthright statement that "the Mexican Revolution was initiated and directed for the most part by the upper and middle classes of the Porfiriato" (p. 155). 23 Meyer, Cristiada; Marjorie Becker, "Lzaro Crdenas, Cultural Cartographers and the Limits of Everyday Resistance in Michoacan, 1934-1940" (paper given at the 46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, 1988).
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of the Mexican Center, Inst. Latin Amer. Studies, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1988), P. 3. '9 David C. Bailey, "Revisionism and Recent Historiography of the Mexican Revolution", Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lviii (1978), pp. 62-79. 20 I am particularly aware of the need for these caveats following a bruising experience at the Conference of Mexican Historians, Oaxtepec, Morelos, Oct. 1988, where my use of the neutral term "revisionism" seemed to provoke more resentment and incomprehension than rational debate.

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4. A stress, therefore, on the Revolution as a political undertaking rather than a social transformation. 24 5. An insistence that the Revolution was not, in consequence, a genuine "social" revolution, and that its claims to social transformation are blather. Not only was the Revolution not a socialist revolution (which any decent self-respecting twentieth-century revolution ought to be); it was not even "bourgeois". 25 6. A consequent stress on historical continuity over historical rupture. The Revolution effected some political change in Mexico: at the very least, it changed political personnel; perhaps it rejigged the state; but inasmuch as it did not substantially transform Mexican society it inherited, perpetuated and perhaps perfected many aspects of the old regime. The Revolution thus appears in neo-Porfirian dress; its (revisionist) historians echo Alexis de Tocqueville.26 7. A rehabilitation of the Porfirian old regime, which now appears as a more wholesome, legitimate society/regime, defective in parts, perhaps, but healthy in others; a society/regime whose ousting is due less to widespread oppression than to political miscalculation, the vagaries of the business cycle, and the machinations of either dissenting lites or meddlesome foreigners. 27 8. Linked to this, a rehabilitation of the Huerta regime (1913-14), whose counter-revolutionary character is questioned or denied; 28 andofpst-1920igvernmots,ablyhe
" As in the case of the historiography of the French Revolution, there would be two main kinds of "political" emphasis: one, reminiscent of the "Anglo-Saxon" school, tends to stress individual careerism, mobility, self-seeking and downright purposelessness (for example, Ruiz, Great Rebellion); another, which evokes and even cites the Annales school, offers a structural approach, stressing mentalits, modernization and the ideological dissolution of the anclen rgime (for example, Guerra, Mxique). Both schools disdain class analysis of the Revolution, and see no coherent socioeconomic rationale underlying it. " Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. ix, 3-8. 26 Guerra's title echoes Tocqueville, just as Ruiz, Great Rebellion (unwittingly?) borrows from Clarendon: see below, n. 84. Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890 1940 (Stanford, 1989), although adopting a quite different approach, also makes a strong claim for continuity. There is some justification for this claim in respect of the (small) industrial sector, but Haber exaggerates the degree to which the sociopolitical environment within which'industry developed (or "underdeveloped") remained constant. 2' Guerra, Mxique; Meyer, Rvolution mexicaine. Both display an excessive fondness for, and reliance upon, the Porfirian conservative historian Bulnes (see aboye, n. 7). Michael C. Meyer, Huerta: A Political Portrait (Lincoln, Neb., 1972); for a milder piece of revisionism, see Peter V. N. Henderson, Flix Daz, the Porfirians and the Mexican Revolution (Lincoln, Neb., 1981).
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Cristiada and the Unin Nacional Sinarquista, which are empathetically portrayed as the autonomous reaction of simple Godfearing folk to the provocations of an aggressive, centralizing, even totalitarian regime. 29 Of course, different historians tend to stress different elements of this loose revisionist ensemble. Revisionist biographers tend to write up Madero (and Huerta!), to write down Calles and C,rdenas.3 Literary historians mine the novels of the Revolution and conclude that the tale was one of sound and fury, signifying nothing, or at least very little. 3' Local and regional historians (Mexican equivalents of the English "provincialists") recover forgotten communities and often the gemeinschaftlich solidarism which underlay them, making them strangers to class conflict and enemies of an alien, intrusive and aggressive Revolution.32 The rehabilitation of the old regime and critique of the Revolution implied in some local/regional studies are presented in monumental and emphatic style by Franlois-Xavier Guerra, who sees the Porfiriato as a mildly paternalist regime, built upon traditional liens de sociabilit, but undermined by insidious modernizing lites. 33 Jean Meyer offers a powerful rehabilitation of the Cristeros (and, less cogently, of the Sinarquistas), rebutting the notion that they were the shock troops of landlord reaction, battling a progressive revolution; and, in doing so, he has strongly influenced general revisionist interpretations of the Revolution. 34 Ramonuizhsctelyogdnh"revlutioay status of the Revolution; while Paul Vanderwood has emphasized the careerism and individualism which motivated rebels and bandits in their opposition to the old regime. 35 Finally John
29 The Cristiada, a popular Catholic rebellion against the anticlerical Revolutionary state, racked western Mexico during 1926-9; the Sinarquistas, a Catholic integralist movement, achieved considerable strength in approximately the same region in the late 1930s and early 1940s: see Meyer, Cristiada; Jean Meyer, El sinarquismo: un fascismo mexicano? 1937 1947 (Mexico, 1979); Becker, "Lzaro Crdenas". 3 Krauze, Biografas del poder; Meyer, Huerta. 31 John Rutherford, Mexican Society during the Revolution: A Literary Approach (Oxford, 1971). 32 Luis Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo: microhistoria de San Jos de Gracia (Mexico, 1972). On the English provincialist school, see J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 4. 33 Guerra, Mxique, passim. 3 Meyer, Cristiada; Meyer, Cristero Rebellion; Meyer, Sinarquismo. 35 Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. 2-8, 407-20; Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln, Neb., 1981); Paul Vanderwood,
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Womack once seen as a protagonist of orthodoxy and still regarded by some out-of-date critics as a woolly populist 36 has produced a notably revisionist synthesis, which criticizes the "pro-revolutionary story of the rise of the down-trodden", and the consequent notion of a popular social revolution, preferring instead to stress factionalism, foreign meddling and underlying continuity. "The struggle that began in 1910", writes Womack, "featured not so much the lower versus the upper class as frustrated elements of the upper and middle classes versus favoured elements of the same classes. In this struggle masses of people were involved, but intermittently, differently from region to region, and mostly under middle-class direction, less in economic and social causes than in a bourgeois civil war". 37 Before venturing further into these historiographical thickets one central problem must be tackled, or we shall find ourselves going round in circles. 38 We know that the Revolution was no monolith: that it was an amalgam of numerous revolutionary experiences. "Many Mexicos" bred "many revolutions". Incidentally, this is no new discovery, no privileged insight of the revisionist nouvelle vague." It is a commonplace, but an important one, which in turn forces general analysts of the Revolution to explain which revolutions they are talking about. In particular we should try to distinguish spatial and temporal dimensions. The plethora of recent and valuable regional studies has highlighted the spatial diversity of the Revolution; but the conversion of such studies into broader syntheses presents major problems. 4
(n.

35 cont. ,

"Explaining the Mexican Revolution", in Jaime E. Rodrguez O. (ed.), The Revolutionary Process in Mexico (Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 97-114. 36 Arnaldo Crdova, La revolucin y el estado en Mxico (Mexico, 1989), p. 14. " John Womack Jr., "The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920", in Bethell (ed.), Cambridge History of Latin America, v, p. 81. Womack also asserts that "from beginning to end foreign activities figured crucially in the Revolution's course" (ibid.). 38 I take this opportunity to clarify a point which, for lack of space and forethought, I neglected in Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution". See Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution, pp. 121, 147. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 122 n. 88, maces the same point concerning Georges Lefebvre, who "very clearly shows both the plurality of revolutions within the Revolution and the autonomy of peasant action". " D. A. Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 1980); Thomas Benjamin and William McNellie (eds.), Other Mexicos: Essays on Mexican Regional History, 1876 - 1911 (Albuquerque, 1984); Thomas Benjamin and Mark Wasserman (eds.), Provinces of the Revolution: Essays on Regional Mexican History, 1910 - 1929 (Albuquerque, 1990); Carlos Martnez Assad (ed.), La revolucin en las regiones, 2 vols. (Guadalajara, 1986).

Aboye all, there is the problem of typicality. To what extent can a given case-study be taken as typical for the country, for a region, for a state, for a type of community, for a particular faction? Which is more typical of Revolutionary Michoacan (let alone Revolutionary Mexico): the bucolic Arcadia of San Jos de Gracia, or the violent agrarismo of Naranja?4' Revisionists would prefer to invoke San Jos, traditionalists would favour Naranja. Morelos, the site of Zapata's rebellion, offers a cast-iron case of popular, agrarian insurrection; but revisionists tend to isolate Morelos as an untypical example, just as traditionalists would argue that Morelos representa, in particularly concentrated form, the kind of agrarian grievances and popular mobilization which underlay much of the Revolution.'" Here, therefore, we face an old historiographical conundrum, that of distinguishing the typical from the untypical, the illustrative case from the aberrant. Since local and regional studies, though rapidly growing in number and sophistication, cannot offer a portrait of the entire country, we find ourselves trading examples or hazarding statistically unfounded generalizations The temporal diversity of the Revolution is no less important. The Revolution varied over time: the Maderista revolution of 1910-11 differed from the Constitutionalist revolution of 1913-14, the Sonoran regime of 1920-34 from the Cardenista of 1934-40, and that in turn from the "preferred" revolution post-1940. With the benefit of hindsight we will eventually know if the "PRIstroika" of the late 1980s marks a further twist in the revolutionary tale. AH historians of twentieth-century Mexico, be they traditionalists or revisionists, accept to a degree the significance of these shifts. But, again, there is no unanimity. Some would
. 43

4 ' Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo; Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revoh in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs, 1970); Paul Friedrich, The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method (Austin, 1986). There is the potential for infinite regress here: since we find it difficult to generalize about the Revolution its goals, components, modalities at the national level, we switch to the state or regional level; where, again, we are confronted by important variations, which seem to demand a closer local or municipal focus; which, in turn, reveals variations even within small communities . . 42 Rutherford, Mexican Society, p. 220: "Zapatismo's social relevance within the whole context of the Mexican Revolution is limited and secondary, for it was never at any stage more than an isolated trouble spot"; Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. 8, 200, 412: "barring the obvious case of Zapatismo, an untypical phenomenon, the inhabitants of rural Mexico lacked a sense of class and even of group". Cf. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986), i, pp. 309-51. 4 Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution", p. 13.

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concede the popular character of the armed revolution (say, 1910-15), but would assert that its termination with the victory of the (bourgeois?) Constitutionalists in 1915 led to the establishment of an litist, tatiste, even neo-Porfirian regime." In other words Mexico experienced a brief revolutionary interlude, when "the people" marched about on the political stage; but after 1915 they were pushed aside by "revolutionary" lites, representative of the bourgeoisie, who substantiaily continued the old Porfirian project of capitalist development, state-building and the repression of popular movements. Since only root-and-branch revisionists (of whom there are some) would deny the importance of powerful popular revolutionary movements during 1910-15, and only benighted apologists of the post-Revolutionary regime would argue that the regime organically represented popular forces and grievances, there is a degree of common ground here; and, to that extent, historiaras of both revisionist and traditional persuasion would like Manuel Gmez Morn see 1915 as a pivotal year in Mexico's modern history: a year in which the tide of civil war, multiple sovereignty and popular protest peaked and then began to ebb, making possible renewed political order and centralization." So too with the climacteric of 1940 (or thereabouts): many would agree that, like it or not, a period of accelerated reform, in part stimulated by popular pressure and manifested in the Crdenas presidency (1934-40), came to an end in or around 1938-40, and gave way to more conservative policies, favourable to capital and hostile to the interests of peasants and workers. In my view the post-1940 shift is so clear and unequivocal that this later period can be safely omitted from our discussion: there can be no pretence that "the Revolution" conceived of as a radical, popular, agrarian movement continued beyond the Second World War. Rather this recent period witnessed the definitive though not unchallenged consolidation of capitalism, encouraged by a solicitous and supportive regime. But this outcome cannot serve as proof of the inherently meaningless or Machiavelhan character of the early Revolution, whether in its armed (1910-15) or even its institutional (1915-40) guise. In fact it can
" Womack, "Mexican Revolution", p. 153. " Manuel Gmez Morn, 1915 (Mexico, 1927); the significance of the intelectual "generation of 1915" is explored by Enrique Krauze, Caudillos culturales en la revolucin mexicana (Mexico, 1976).

be argued that this later capitalist consolidation was in part facilitated by the preceding years of genuine upheaval and popular mobilization (just as "traditional" interpretations of the English and French Revolutions the "Old Guard" and "social" versions respectively suggested that popular revolution presaged the rise of capitalism in both countries)." Indeed this argument has an attractive logic, since it answers that old conundrum, beloved of Mexico-watchers: how did a regime born of social revolution eventually emerge as one of the most stable, procapitalist and socially regressive in Latin America? 47 Answer (in very simple terms): for the same reason that the English popular radicalism of the 1640s eventually gave way to the new-found political stability of the early eighteenth century and the "Venetian oligarchy" of the mid-eighteenth century." Popular radicalism helped destroy the old regime, but could not install a popular alternative in its place; instead, having completed its destructive work, it fell victim to the new post-Restoration rulers of England: the bourgeoisified aristocracy, "Old Corruption", the English P.R.I. 49 If, in the case of Mexico, we agree to shelve discussion of the period after 1940, we are still left with a serious debate about the immediate post-Revolutionary period, the 1920s and 1930s. To what extent were the popular and agrarian forces of the armed revolution (assuming that they did exist and are not, as some revisionists would suggest, the figments of Revolutionary rhetoric) embodied in, represented by, or capable of influencing, the post-Revolutionary state? How important were the nascent peasant leagues and trade unions, the nationalist legislation and, aboye all, the agrarian reform? My own view is that, especially in the 1930s, these were sufficiently important and autonomous to qualify the revisionist picture of a manipulative and Machiavellian state, dominating civil society. The state certainly sought to manipulate; but even when it manipulated it perforce represented
" Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 2, passim; Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964). " Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 8, 71 ff. " J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967). " E. P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English", in his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), p. 49; Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985), ch. 5. For the P.R.I., see aboye, n. 6.

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(the dividing-line between "manipulation" and "representation" is a fine one, which some revisionist analyses assume rather than demarcate). 5 And the outcome of this dialectic, certainly in the 1930s, was a programme of radical reform which went beyond the mere consolidation of neo-Porfirian lites, or the construction of a cynical, centralizing state. This, of course, is my own somewhat traditional opinion. 51 I advance it not in order to convine, but rather to suggest that even for the post-Revolutionary period (1920-40) the current of revisionist reinterpretation may have carried us too far; that the revisionist image of neo-Porfirian continuity, state-building, political centralization and popular quiescence (or defeat) is overstated and, at the very least, worthy of continued debate. Thus any comprehensive and fair analysis of revisionist and traditional interpretations must take into account both spatial and temporal variations, and recognize that these make possible and even necessary quite complex historiographical permutations and nuances. A historian can, quite consistently, argue a traditional (popular, agrarian) thesis for 1910-15, but adopt a revisionist (tatiste, neo-Porfirian) stance for 1920-40 (or even 1920-34, a further temporal refinement). Womack, it seems to me, has written a quintessentially traditional study of Morelos during the period of armed revolution, and a quintessentially revisionist narrative of Mexico during the same period. 52 It may help to sketch some of these historiographical divergences schematically (with the caveat that these are my attributions: the cited historians may choose to locate themselves differently within the scheme or indignantly cast off its typological constraints). (See Diagram.) As this schema reveals, to some extent I dissent from the revisionist scholarship of recent years, especially in respect of its treatment
" Alan Knight, "Land and Society in Revolutionary Mexico: The Destruction of the Great Haciendas", Mexican Studiesl Estudios Mexicanos, vii (1991), pp. 73-104. " The several tenets of revisionism, listed aboye, seem to display a distinct affinity, as do the mirror-image tenets of traditionalism; adherents of one are likely to be adherents of others. For myself, however, I dissent from one tenet which, while present in traditional interpretations like Tannenbaum's, also reappears in revisionist writings highly critical of Tannenbaum, as well as in more recent Marxist versions (and which consequently does not offer a good litmus test to differentiate these schools of thought): I refer to the depiction of the Revolution as a nationalist and even antiimperialist movement (a "war of national liberation", in John Hart's words), directed against foreign, especially U.S., economic exploitation: see Hart, Revolutionary Mexico; Alan Knight, U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1910-1940: An Interpretation (San Diego, 1987). " John Womack Jr., Zapata and the ~kan Revolution (New York, 1968); Womack, "Mexican Revolution".

DIAGRAM*

Revisionist Old Regime (c. 1876-1910) Gonzlez Navarro Guerra Revolution (1910-1920) Hart, Knight, Womack (1) Ruiz, Womack (2) Revolution (1920-1940) Tannenbaum, Shulgovski Meyer, Falcn, Anguiano Post-1940 P.R.I. rhetoric Almost everybody *Note: The works and authors referred to in this diagram are Moiss Gonzlez Navarro, Historia moderna de Mxico: el Porfiriato, la vida social (Mexico, 1970); Franqois-Xavier Guerra, Le Mxique: de rancien rgime la rvolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley, 1987); Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986); Womack (1) refers to John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1968), Womack (2) to John Womack Jr., "The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920", in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, v (Cambridge, 1986); Ramon Ruiz, The Great Rebellion, Mexico, 1905-1924 (New York, 1980); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (New York, 1966; first pubd. 1933); Anatol Shulgovski, Mxico en la encrucijada de su historia (Mexico, 1972); Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico, 1985; first pubd. 1974); Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion (Cambridge, 1976); Romana Falcn, "El surgimento del agrarismo cardenista: una revisin de las tesis populistas", Historia Mexicana, xxvii (1978), pp. 333-86; Arturo Anguiano, El estado y la politica obrera del cardenismo (Mexico, 1975). P.R.I. rhetoric is especially apparent in such commemorative works as Mxico, cincuenta aos de revolucin, 4 vols. (Mexico, 1960); Conferencia nacional de anlisis ideolgico sobre la revolucin mexicana ( 1910-1985) (Mexico, 1985).

Tradicional

of the 1910-20 period (for the 1920-40 period my dissent is less marked, or less developed; but there is still a substantial measure of disagreement, especially for the later 1930s). This, I repeat, is not because I regard revisionist scholarship as wrong-headed (and I certainly do not use "revisionist" as a term of opprobrium). On the contrary, many fine recent studies, notably in the field of local and regional history, combine excellent empirical evidence, the product of pioneering archival work, with a more or less clear commitment to revisionism: the reader can benefit from the first without buying the second. 53 Thus, beneath the grand syntheses and high-level debates, plenty of scope for agreement remains, especially at the level of middle- and lower-range hypotheses, which are often the stuff of history anyway; we should not force
" As this suggests, the empirical evidence does not always sit entirely comfortably alongside the revisionist conclusions. Examples would include Romana Falcn, Revolucin y caciquismo: San Luis Potosi, 1910-1938 (Mexico, 1984); Ian Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt: The Mexican Revolution in the State of Guerrero (Austin, 1982).

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all modern Mexican historiography into a crude dichotomous scheme, traditionalists versus revisionists. But we should not gloss over differences either. I believe the traditional, "Tannenbaumian" image of a popular, agrarian and peasant revolution (never as crude in its original form as its critics tend to allege) remains to a large degree valid, especially for 1910-15. I also believe that the post-Revolutionary regime of the 1920s (and, a fortiori, the later 1930s) embodied some of these same characteristics, and that the post-Revolutionary history of Mexico prior to 1940 was not a simple saga of state-building and capital accumulation. The period 1920-40 witnessed less the creation of a political Leviathan, the monstrous progenitor of Mexican capitalism, than a sustained struggle for the Revolutionary inheritance, the continuation of the armed revolution by other means. Classes, regions and ideologies contested that inheritance; and the state burgeoning, but still shaky and, aboye all, the target of recurrent political bids and campaigns did not control the outcome. In a sense the state was the prize, not the main competitor. 54 Meanwhile the state faced serious opposition: from foreign interests, militant Catholics, newly mobilized conservatives, and a host of caciques and caudillos whose parochial powers barred the way to political centralization. Indeed, even after the politico-economic realignments of the 1940s, there still remained wide areas of political contestation, notwithstanding the celebrated "economic miracle" and the "Peace of the P.R.I.". The hegemony of state and party remained imperfect (the phrase "a Swiss-cheese P.R.I." has recently been coined) and popular movements, challenges to centralized state power, continued to arise, even before the celebrated climacteric of 1968. 55 But they showed no sign of substantially threatening the survival of the central government, or the broad pattern of capitalist and inegalitarian development which became firmly established after 1940. By then the tumultuous conflict, the popular mobilization and
' Alan Knight, "The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a 'Great Rebellion'?", Bull. Latin Amer. Research, iv (1985), pp. 1-37; Spanish trans. in Cuadernos polticos, xlviii (1986), pp. 5-32. " Alan Knight, "Historical Continuities in Social Movements", in Joe Foweraker and Ann L. Craig (eds.), Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico (Boulder, Colo., 1990), pp. 78-102. In August 1968, on the eve of the Mexico Olympics, severa' hundred civilian demonstrators, mostly students, were killed by government forces at Tlatelolco in Mexico City; it is generally accepted that this notorious event both revealed and aggravated the "Revolutionary" state's loss of legitimacy.

NUMBER 134 the high political stakes of the Revolutionary era (1910-40) were things of the past, still invoked in contemporary rhetoric, but effectively neglected in contemporary practice. It would be impossible in an article to enter into a detailed discussion of the merits and deficiencies of revisionism. As I have suggested elsewhere, such a discussion would have to embrace both empirical and theoretical dimensions." Empirically we face the problem of assembling examples and case-studies in order to achieve a convincing overall picture. But this leads at once to theoretical problems: what criteria are to be used to evaluate popular mobilization, state-building and degrees of social transformation? Often, for example, the "non-revolutionary" character of the "Revolution" (or "Great Rebellion") is established by setting extreme and arbitrary standards: the only proper modern revolution has to be a Bolshevik one. 57 Similarly the nonrevolutionary (docile, bucolic, God-fearing, inert) character of the Mexican peasantry is established by requiring a degree of sustained revolutionary activity, consciousness and unanimity which no class, not even the most hegemonic "class-for-itself" in history, has attained. Some of those who damn the Mexican Revolution for its comparative feebleness seem to have spent little or no time studying the comparative examples which they invoke, and which appear as reified abstractions, rather than complex historical processes. Thus the stance of revisionists vis--vis the Mexican Revolution their use of foreign sticks with which to beat remiss Mexican "revolutionaries" recalls E. P. Thompson's Podsnappian lampoon of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson: "Other countries . . . do . . . in Every Respect Better. Their Bourgeois Revolutions have been Mature. Their Class Struggles have been Sanguinary and Unequivocal. Their Intelligentsia has been Autonomous and Vertically Integrated. PAST AND PRESENT Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution". " Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. 4, 8. "New Left" interpretations of the Revolution (which include those of James Cockcroft, Adolfo Gilly and Arnaldo Crdova) are more theoretically subtle: like Ruiz, they assume a capitalist Porfiriato and set up a socialist yardstick against which to judge the (inadequate) Revolution of 1910; unlike Ruiz, however, they credit that Revolution with powerful radical popular currents which, though they do not triumph, nevertheless do to varying degrees mould the Revolutionary outcome and presage further social, even socialist, transformation. Hence, for example, Gilly's recent commitrnent to Cardenismo, as both an historical phenomenon of the 1930s and a political hope of the 1980s and 1990s. For a useful rsum of these views, see Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, Mexico, 1910 - 1982: Reform or Revolution? (London, 1983), ch. 4.

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Their Morphology has been Typologically Concrete. Their Proletariat has been Hegemonic". 58 One beneficial effect of a historiographical comparison such as this might be to sweep aside such abstractions, and reveal the imperfections of all revolutions: the notion that the grass in the other field is always redder would seem to be the result of reification conspiring with ignorance. For, in any revolution, the revolutionary activists are a minority; to prove that many peasants were indifferent or even hostile to the Revolution (of 1910-15), or to the agrarian reform (of 1934-40), does not invalidate the importante, radicalism and transforming effect of these processes. 59 A related misconception involves the creation of abstract canons of "revolutionary" orthodoxy, whereby only those possessed of "national projects" and revolutionary blueprints are deemed "revolutionary" whereby, therefore, the vast majority of Mexico's revolutionaries, peasants especially, are instantly disfranchised. 6 Again this is a curiously arbitrary and ahistorical approach for those who claim privileged access to the dialectical processes of history. Many revolutions have been the work of popular classes whose lack of revolutionary blueprints was more than offset by their objective revolutionary actions, by their violent rending of the old order, whether in rural England, France or Mexico. 6' This privileging of the literate classes is apparent on the part of both Marxist and anti-Marxist analyses. While Arnaldo Crdova, drawing on an old Marxist tradition of anti-peasantism, stresses and presumably laments the peasantry's failure to achieve true revolutionary consciousness, Guerra celebrates such sancta simplicitas; for him, the peasants lack any class identity, they are locked into their corporate, communal identities, and they resist the siren song of meddlesome intellectuals and polticos, who are the true carriers of a corrosive, cerebral, revolutionary Jacobinism. 62 Here an explicit reliance on certain French Revolutionary historiography (Augustin Cochin and Furet in particular)
Thompson, "Peculiarities of the English", p. 37. Knight, "Land and Society". 6 For a critique of Zapatismo along these fines, see Crdova, Ideologa de la revolucin mexicana, pp. 144-55; Knight, Mexican Revolution, i, pp. 309-15, questions the critique; Arnaldo Crdova, La revolucin y el estado en Mxico (Mexico, 1989), p. 14, shows he has misunderstood the critique. 61 See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (Yale, 1976), esp. pp. 10-11, 192. 62 Guerra, Mxique, passim.
58

combines with a touching faith in the old certitudes of modernization theory. Some aspects of the old regime Guerra captures better than anyone chiefly those aspects, such as Porfirian clientelism and Maderista ideology, which are susceptible to his penetrating, but narrow, methodology. Others, such as popular mobilization, rural class conflict, U.S.-Mexican relations, and Revolutionary "developmentalism", he cannot encompass, and hence cannot evaluate.63 Guerra's old regime is analytically a very partial one; his Revolution is no more than incipient (the study stops in 1911). One reason for this marked partiality, which is particularly relevant in the comparative historiographical context, is Guerra's penchant for French (and, more generally, European) examples, and his questionable tendency to transport them, without adequate adjustment, across time and space. It is one thing to see the French (monarchical) anclen rgime as a victim of enervating Enlightenment ideas and proselytizing intellectual cadres, quite another to see the Porfirian (republican) antiguo rgimen the heir of the Independence and Reform Wars, infused with liberal-positivistic philosophy in the same light. In Mexico there could be no regicide, real or symbolic: monarchy, caste and corporate privilege had been toppled years before, not least by the efforts of Porfirio's fellow liberals. 64 Finally, empirical and theoretical probiems afflict much of the revisionist analysis of the post-Revolutionary era, which is now often interpreted in terms of the rise and rise of the state (hence, "statolatry"); the state assumes the role which, in the Whig ("Old Hat") historiography of England, was played by the ever-ascendant middle class. 65 Again, without entering into the debate, it can be suggested that such analysis is excessively teleological, that it homogenizes the complex vicissitudes of post-Revolutionary history; that it lacks both the empirical and (perhaps more important) the theoretical knowledge with which the weight of the state can be meaningfully calibrated. Too often, "statolatry" depends

63 See my review of Guerra, Mxique, in Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lxviii (1988), pp. 139-43. 64 On the other hand, from a quite different standpoint, analogous to French interpretations such as that of Albert Soboul, which Guerra would surely reject, it can be reasonably argued that Porfirian Mexico retained and in some areas even reinforced "feudal" socio-economic forms, rooted in landlord exploitation of peon and sharecropper; and that the Revolution's destruction, over time, of these forms was one of its crucial "revolutionary" accomplishments. 65 Knight, "Mexican Revolution", pp. 11-12; Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 2, 9.

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on a ritual invocation of Bonapartism: another ill-considered French Revolutionary impon which, even in its country of origin, leaves a lot to be desired in terms of clarity and precision. 66

II
Rather than rehearse these empirical and theoretical questions, however, I want to take a different tack. First, I will offer some passing comparisons with other revolutionary revisionisms. Secondly, I shall consider how and why revisionism has developed. Finally, I will ask whether these revisionisms in any sense represent related branches of a common revisionist trunk, and, if so, what are the ideological nutrients of this recent effiorescence? My attempt at comparison consists paraphrasing Collingwood of crude "scissors and paste" historiography; or, adopting a Hexterian vocabulary, of blatant "source-mining". In other words, I scanned some texts and probably found what I was looking for. The result is a brief collage, which purports to show that several of the main tenets of Mexican Revolutionary revisionism Usted above67 are also to be found in the corpus of English and French Revolutionary revisionism. Conversely the respective orthodoxies also have a good deal in common. In each case, of course, analysts are at pains to point out that neither revisionism nor orthodoxy are interpretative monoliths. 68 Like me, they are not sure whether, for example, revisionism is so well entrenched as to constitute a new orthodoxy. Gerald Cavanaugh, in celebrating Alfred Cobban's revisionist tour de force, plays Lucretius to Cobban's Epicurus: ergo vivida vis animi pervicit ("so the lively force of his mind has broken down all barriers"); but, if the old paradigm of the "social interpretation" has indeed been single-handedly destroyed, as Cavanaugh boldly claims, he remains unsure what new paradigm Cobban-Epicurus
Knight, "Mexican Revolution", pp. 4-5. ' See aboye, pp. 166-8. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Confite in Early Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 3, 11; Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution", p. 10; Knight, Mexican Revolution, i, p. xi. Martyn Lyons, "Cobb and the Historian", in Gwynn Lewis and Colin Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794 1815 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 1, notes that historiographical divisions tend to be crude and that there are nimble individuals, like "Professor Jacques Godechot . . . who has successfully managed to dodge the cross-fire".
6
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has put in its place. 69 Notwithstanding these indeterminacies, however, we can still discern striking parallels. I approach these parallels from my own, Mexicanist standpoint (and no doubt a different approach would yield different, though not, I think, radically different, results). Each of the eight revisionist propositions culled from Mexican studies has clear parallels in the English and French literature; in listing them, I apologize for a degree of unavoidable repetition. 1. First, the notion of a progressive revolution incurs revisionist accusations of teleology; of, in the English context, "Old Hat" Whiggism. Revisionists set great store by contemporary opinions (especially critica' contemporary opinions) concerning the revolutionary process; they abhor hindsight (at least, they say they do; in practice they use it like everyone else); and they sometimes make the preposterous and inconsistent claim that history must be analysed in the terms used by the historical actors themselves (that, in the anthropological terminology of Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris, history can operate only in the "emic" mode)." On this basis they tend to conclude that revolutions
"Gerald J. Cavanaugh, "The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond", French Hist. Studies, vii (1971-2), p. 589: "In our present case of the historical paradigm, the outsider, Cobban, appeared and precipitated the overthrow of the old paradigm but unfortunately, if understandably, he could not provide a new one" (p. 597). Cf. Bailey, "Revisionism and Recent Historiography", p. 63, who similarly sees [Mexican] revisionism as a powerful antithesis, yet to be synthesized. ' "Emic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of the native informant to the status of ultimate judge of the adequacy of the observer's descriptions and analyses .. Etic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of observers to the status of ultimate judges of the categories and concepts used in descriptions and analyses .. . Frequently, etic operations involve the measurement and juxtaposition of activities and events that native informants may find inappropriate and meaningless": Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York, 1979), p. 32. Revisionist studies of the English Revolution seem to parade their "emic" approach more than their French counterparts (see, for example, Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 36, where, attributing to Christopher Hill the view that "the Civil War . . . must have been the result of the impersonal forces of social change", Clark questions whether "such forces have any existence outside the historian's study"). French revisionists, while they similarly criticize their orthodox opponents for squeezing history into a teleological strait-jacket, argue that the strait-jacket was manufactured c. 1789; that, in other words, the orthodox interpretation remains imprisoned within the emic categories of the revolutionaries themselves. For example, Furet praises Tocqueville for stressing "the discrepancy he discerns between the intentions of actors and the historical role they played", and criticizes Soboul because "he takes his bearings from the contemporary perceptions of the event he describes": Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, pp. 16, 92. Simon Schama, on the other hand, justifies narrative on the grounds that "artificial as written narratives might be, they
(con, on p. 181)

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were less genuinely popular than orthodox historians believed (see no. 8 below) and that, moving on: 2. Revolutions were more the work of lites than of masses. The Stuart House of Commons was the site, not of major ideological or social conflicts, but of "more prosaic interests intrigues at court, the war plans of the 1620s, plain economic interest, the pressure of local and county politics, the scramble for office": English M.P.s, in other words, were pretty much like Mexican caciques or "out" landlords; and the revolutions they captained were Namierite competitions for place and position, not ideological or class struggles." Linked to this is the "provincialism" of English Revolutionary, and what has even been termed the "municipalization" of French Revolutionary, studies. 72 Elites wield power and the masses are inert because they are locked into localist factions, vertical integrations of different classes premised upon deferential sentiments and parochial allegiances: the English county communities, Mexican serrano movements. 73 To argue for such vertically-integrated factional formations need not, of course, carry unqualified revisionist as opposed to traditional implications; factions of this kind (whose appearance, under different guises in different revolutions, is of intrinsic interest) may in fact represent both manifestations of popular mobilization and serious challenges to the national status quo ante. Their lack of interna] class polarization does not necessarily make them forces for standpat conservatism. However, they assume distinctively revisionist colouring when the deferente and parochialism which underpin them are stressed, and when they are depicted, in somewhat rosy, sentimentalized terms, as embodiments of a "one-class", gemeinschaftlich, rustic community. 74
in. 70 com.,

often correspond to ways in which historical actors construct events"; hence they offer "chaotic authenticity over the commanding neatness of historical convention": Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), p. xvi. Theodore K. Rabb, "Revisionism Revised: Two Perspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History: (I) The Role of the Commons", Past and Present, no. 92 (Aug. 1981), p. 59. 72 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, ch. 4; Lyons, "Cobb and the Historians", p. 7. " Knight, Mexican Revolution, i, pp. 115-26, 301-9. " Christopher Hill, "Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England", Past and Present, no. 92 (Aug. 1981), p. 103, on "the danger of sentimentalizing the `county community'" and of glossing over class differences within provincial society; see also Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", pp. 3, 5.

182 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 134 3. Conversely, revisionism tends to stress the overweening power of the centralizing revolutionary state, be it Cromwellian, Jacobin or Constitutionalist/Sonoran/Cardenista. The history of the revolution becomes a counterpoint between organic local communities and a mechanical national Leviathan. Richard Cobb (doyen of a revisionist current, if not headmaster of a revisionist "school") "is eternaily hostile to all those who exercise power"; his "prime villain" is Robespierre, the hero of older, orthodox historians like Albert Mathiez and Georges Lefebvre. 75 As we shall see (no. 8 below), we could substitute Calles "an [Edouard] Herriot in a Mexican general's riding boots", 76 as he has been called for Robespierre, Michoacan for the Vende, the Cristiada for the chouannerie. 4. The revolution thus becomes a political undertaking: at best, an exercise in ambitious and arrogant state-building; at worst, a careerist scramble for office. Those who seek to interpret revolutions in terms of underlying "structural" causes, socio-economic pressures, or class antagonisms, are labelled crude reductionists. 77 KeithMcalBkr,ongwithmyesr ath chief novelty of the French Revolution was its introduction of a new political culture, though, to his credit, he recognizes that this approach risks (a) an underestimation of class and (b) an exaggeration of the significance of "discourse". 78 Guerra, drawing heavily on French historiographical models, notably Cochin and Furet, sees the Mexican Revolution (or at least six months of it) as the culmination of Namierite clientelist conffict on the one hand and of a bold, new, modernizing and mobilizing political culture on the other. 5. As a result the outcome of the revolutionary process is a Namierite reshuffie and, perhaps, a more significant shift in political culture. It is not a social transformation, nor even a major contribution to a longer process of social transformation. It is certainly not a "bourgeois" revolution. Cobban, an admirer confidently asserts, has "exploded the `Marxise theory which purported to explain the Revolution"; "like the concept of the
" Lyons, "Cobb and the Historians", p. 13. 76 Meyer, Cristiada, ii, p. 169, quoting the Italian iournalist Marco Appelius. 77 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 9, 22, 42, where the author finally mies that any "socio-economic" explanation is, ipso facto, "economic-reductionist". 78 Keith Michael Baker, "Introduction", to Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The French
Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, i, The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), pp. xi-xiii.

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bourgeoisie as a unified social class, that of the sans-culottes dissolves under analysis". 79 Simon Schama, resurrecting a weary choreographical metaphor, scoffs at the "dialectical dance routine" of social classes and concludes that "the `bourgeoisie' said in the Marxist accounts to have been the authors and beneficiaries of the [revolutionary] event have become social zombies, the product of historiographical obsessions rather than historical realities" .80 6. Revisionists therefore stress continuity over rupture (which fits well with their denial of teleological trends). According to one critic of the English provincialist school, the latter "carne near to proving that the Civil War did not happen".8' For Clark, the English "ancien regime" survives lustily, a deferential, aristocratic, monarchical and confessional state/society, well into the nineteenth century. 82 In the French case the argument for continuity can count on the august authority of Tocqueville; and here, too, the point is almost reached where the Revolution disappears from sight. Cobban punctures the "myth" of the Revolution; Cobb, focusing on the marginal poor, deems the Revolution an irrelevance.83 For Ruiz, the Mexican Revolution is a "great rebellion" (an interesting, although it seems unwitting, borrowing from Clarendon, who is, of course, something of an English revisionist icon), or even a mere "mutiny"." Guerra's
" Cavanaugh, "Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography", p. 587. Schama, Citizens, p. xiv. 81 Hill, "Parliament and People", p. 101. 82 Clark, English Society. 83 Alfred Cobban, "The Myth of the French Revolution", in his Aspeas of the French Revolution (New York, 1968); Lyons, "Cobb and the Historian", pp. 12-13. Note also Schama, Citizens, p. xiv. For a more balanced view of the degree of change brought about by the French Revolution and one which offers striking parallels with Mexico see Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 391-425; Knight, Mexican Revolution, ii, pp. 517-27, offers some parallels, and counters revisionist dismissal of the Revolution by suggesting that, aside from any structural socioeconomic changes, "the temper of the people the Mexican mentalit we might say had altered, and that new structures of power were demanded precisely because of that alteration" (p. 520); which echoes the (much more developed) arguments of Michel Vovelle, Introduccin a la historia de la Revolucin francesa (Barcelona, 1984), pp. 76-7, chs. 7-10. " Ruiz, Great Rebellion; Ramon Ruiz, The People of Sonora and Yankee Capitalists (Tucson, 1988), p. 228; Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 12, 100 (citing Zaller: "some revisionists prefer the title 'The Great Rebellion' for its historical authenticity"); Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", p. 15, where the authors note that the revisionists' approach has been "much influenced by Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion, with its emphasis on the short-term causes of the Civil War and contingent events".

Revolution (a critic claims) is just a "blip" on the screen of Mexican history. 85 7. While revisionists write down the revolution as manipulated, political and of limited significance, they write up the anden rgime as organic, harmonious and durable. If the revolution was an irrelevance or a blip, it follows that much, even most, of the old regime survived. To be assailed by "revolutions" such as these was, to borrow a phrase of Denis Healey, like being savaged by a dead sheep. We have noted the tendency of the English provincialist school to depict "local society as basically settled and harmonious, with vertical links binding together the different social groupings and a general acceptance of the authority and leadership of the gentry". 86 Similarly bucolic images can be culled from Mexican historiography. 87 Who or what entered Arcadia and ended the idyll? By definition, disruption cannot stem from class antagonisms: it must be exogenous rather than endogenous. The answer strangely evocative of Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style in American politics" is: a minority of interna] subversives, or the machinations of foreign enemies. 88 Since culture, rather than class, is given priority, it must be carriers of a new subversive culture who disrupt Arcadia from without. The English Civil War "carne to each county from outside", notes an ironic (orthodox) critic; it was the devious Anabaptists, the royalist historian William Dugdale alleged in the 1680s, who brought on the Civil War "by planting schismatick lecturers in most corporate towns and populous places throughout the realm, so to poison the people with anti-monarchical principles". 89 Clark,pcingthedmsoflrgieacntuydhlf later, and convinced of the centrality of religion, sees Dissent as the gravedigger of the English "ancien regime". 9 In eighteenth" Paul Vanderwood, "Building Blocks but Yet No Building: Regional History and
the Mexican Revolution", Mexican Studiesl Estudios Mexicanos, iii (1987), p. 232. It does not appear that Vanderwood disagrees that much with Guerra: elsewhere, he refers to the 1810 insurgency and 1910 Revolution as "two important conjunctures two rather large bleeps along the continuum of Mexican history": Paul Vanderwood, "Comparing Mexican Independence with the Revolution: Causes, Concepts and Pitfalls", in Jaime E. Rodrguez O. (ed.), The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation (Los Angeles, 1989), p. 312. 86 Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", p. 5. " Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo; Guerra, Mxique, i, pp. 120-4, 127-9. 19685See 8 ). Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Policia (New York,
89 99

Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", p. 15. Clark, English Society, chs. 5, 6.

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century France, Cochin believed, it was the free-thinking, Freemasonic societies which performed a similarly subversive role; an argument Guerra faithfully echoes for late nineteenth-century Mexico. At least this argument offers a general explanation, albeit a strongly idealist one. It clearly offers a partial truth (that revolutions were preceded and although this is often less clear carried out by bearers of new, heterodox ideas). But it becomes very questionable when its protagonists offer it as something akin to the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Economic reductionism having been ceremoniously trashed, idealist reductionism takes its place. Alternatively (and this alternative is considerably worse) the tocsin of revolution is sounded, not by domestic subversives, but foreign meddlers. Revolution is triggered, pretty fortuitously, by foreign war and invasion. Only such exogenous factors can upset the happy harmony of domestic politics. Revolution depends on the random roll of geopolitical dice. For war induces "administrative debility" and with it a vacuum at the centre and, in James Harrington's words, a dissolution of government, which in turn causes civil war; it is not a popular mobilization and civil war which causes the dissolution of government. 91 Such an interpretation fits neatly with certain fashionable general theories of revolution, which similarly stress externa], military and geopolitical pressures within the international state system as key stimuli of revolution.92 Such theories, however, are notoriously ex post facto; they do not explain why one war, rather than another, should lead to domestic political dbcle. And in the Mexican case (usually neglected or misunderstood by such theorists) no war was fought, let alone lost; no international crisis triggered the revolution.93 Notwithstanding the assertions of some histor91 See the critique of Corvad Russell by Derek Hirst, "Revisionism Revised: Two Perspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History: (2) The Place of Principle", Past and Present, no. 92 (Aug. 1981), pp. 80, 83-4. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, 1980). 93 As I have argued elsewhere, Skocpol's state-centred theory of revolutionary etiology whatever its merits in the Eurasian context fares pretty badly in Latin America (Mexico especially): see Alan Knight, "Social Revolution: A Latin American Perspective", Bull. Latin Amer. Research, ix (1990), pp. 175-8. Nevertheless Skocpol has received favourable mention from analysts of Latin American revolutions: Steve Topik, "Mexican Independence in Comparative Perspective", in Rodriguez (ed.), Independence of Mexico, p. 333; Ian Roxborough, "Revolution in Latin America" (paper delivered at the 15th Latin Amer. Studies Assoc. Conference, Miami, Dec. 1989).

ians, the Harringtonian explanation of revolution is thoroughly inappropriate for Mexico: the civil war very much caused the dissolution of the government, rather than vice versa." More generally, too, revisionists stress chance and contingency over pattern and structure. If it is not the fortunes of foreign war, it is the vagaries of individual character which count. Clark sees "chance, ignorance and error overriding purposeful endeavour"; Schama terms the French Revolution "a thing of contingencies and unforeseen consequences". 95 8. Finally, negative re-evaluations of revolution encourage positive re-evaluations (sometimes of a somewhat contrived and polemical character) of counter-revolution. We have seen that revisionist Mexican historians have sought to rehabilitate both individual counter-revolutionaries, like Huerta and Flix Daz, and more importantly and successfully collective counterrevolutionary movements like the Cristiada. Again, the parallels are striking. Jean Meyer deems the Cristiada the greatest peasant movement in modern Mexican history; Furet makes the same claim for the Vende. 96 It is a counter-revolutionary tune which really sets the sabots and huaraches marching off to war. At the same time, Meyer and Furet criticize with some justification, but also, perhaps, trop de zle the orthodox view of the Cristeros/Vendeans as instrumenta of landlord and clerical manipulation.97 Rightly questioning crude socio-economic reduction94 Paul Vanderwood, "Resurveying the Mexican Revolution: Three Provocative Syntheses", Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, v (1988), pp. 147-62, echoes the Harringtonian thesis in respect to Mexico, as does Simon Miller, "Land and Labour in Mexican Rural Insurrections", Bull. Latin Amer. Research, x (1991), p. 72. 95 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 18, 36, citing Laslett; Schama, Citizens, p. xiv (see also p. 6). Elsewhere Clark refers to the final "defeat of the 'old society', in and after the events of 1828-32" as being "no more foreordained than Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo" or, presumably, Nottingham Forest's defeat in the 1991 Cup Final (Clark, English Society, p. 7). Cavanaugh, "Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography", p. 590, approvingly quotes Cobban to the effect that "at soy point the course of the Revolution could be diverted by a chance happening, or an individual decision, determined by a freak of personal character", and links this observation to a similarly accidentalist view of the Russian Revolution put forward by George Kennan. Again, Anglo-Saxon revisionist historians (of both the English and French Revolutions) seem much more drawn to such shapeless and contingent interpretations than their French counterparts, whose revisionism involves structural explanations (cf. aboye, n. 70). 96 Meyer, Cristiada, iii, p. 23; Meyer, Rvolution mexicaine, p. 104; Frangois Furet, "Vende", in Furet and Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, pp. 165-75. " Meyer, Cristiada, esp. i, pp. 281-97; Furet, "Vende", pp. 171-5. Doyle generalizes that "anti-revolution . . . was a popular movement far more so than that of

(con, on p. 187)

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ism, they end up asserting the transparent religiosity of these counter-revolutionary movements.98 The problem with this approach is that it is assertive, over-reliant on the overt statements of the participants, and thus, like so much revisionist scholarship, myopically wedded to contemporary sources and opinions (and, one might add, a skewed selection of such sources and opinions). Again we have a perversely "emic" mode of historiography, which charges any analysis of covert motivation ("etic" analysis) with being "reductionist". 99 But in this respect Jean Meyer and Furet are sophisticated in comparison to Michael Meyer and Clark. The latter's revisionism involves the rehabilitation of individual counter-revolutionaries, the simple reversal of the old Manichaean orthodoxy, hence the highly selective invocation of specific traits or policies. Michael Meyer sets out to redeem Huerta by questioning his direct involvement in political
in.

188 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 134 assassinations (this might be termed the Salvadorean gambit) and by writing up Huerta's supposed commitment to reform.i Clark, driven by his distaste for revolution, embraces the likes of the Old Pretender and Timothy Brecknock, a "practising alchemist who . . . was reputed to drink a bowl of his own blood every Good Friday as a specific for long life".''

97 cont.)

the sansculottes who have usually monopolized this description"; indeed, "there is a sense in which the sansculottes were anti-revolutionary, too"; which argument seems to depend on privileging one revolution (of several) as the Revolution: Doyle, Oxford History of Me French Revolution, p. 407. 98 Meyer bases his argument heavily on oral accounts, concluding: "in general, the motivation is religious . . . it is a question of a reaction of self-defence, the most natural kind. The peasant knew only one thing: the soldiers carne, closed the church, arrested the priest, shot those who protested, hung their prisoner [sic], burned the church and raped the women . . . These aggrieved peasants, who loved their village, church and priest, very naturally rose up. That other interests, other motives for discontent, were intermingled, is of little importance": Meyer, Cristiada, iii, p. 295. According to Furet, "Vende", p. 173, "all indications are that the principal source of the Vendean revolt was religious and not social or simply political". Both authors also stress the dogmatic ferocity of revolutionary repression what Meyer terms a "murderous apocalypse" (in his bibliographical essay on "Mexico: Revolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s", in Bethell [ed.], Cambridge History of Latin America, v, p. 847). Against these interpretations can be set the more sociopolitical (neoorthodox?) explanations of Charles Tlly, The Vencle (London, 1964), and Ramn Jrade, "Religion, Politics and the State: The Rural-Urban Alliance in Mexico's Cristero Insurrection" (paper delivered at the 15th Latin Amer. Studies Assoc. Conference, Miami, Dec. 1989). 99 See aboye, n. 70. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 15, 65-6, 106-9, also puts in a pitch for transparent religious explanations, by way of "countering reductionism", and (p. 103) he blames "Old Guard" and "Old Hat" historians victims of their "secular priorities" for failing to "understand the ancien regime on its own terms" and for deploying concepts (radicalism, liberalism) "of which contemporaries were as yet innocent". By the same token, it is presumably illicit to talk of sixteenthcentury inflation, or seventeenth-century plague bacilli, or eighteenth-century demography, and so on ad absurdum. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 25, takes a justifiable swipe at [ancient] historians who "cannot cheat themselves finto the past by using unfamiliar and obsolete words, any more than they would become better Greek or Roman historians if they delivered their lectures in a chlamys or a toga". See also Hill, "Parliament and People", p. 119.

III Finally, there is the tempting but difficult question of accounting for these common traits which, if I am right, characterize revolutionary historiography in these three discrete cases. By virtue of being the most recent of the three, the Mexican Revolution is, very likely, the one most intimately linked to contemporary political issues. Of course, even the English and (a fortiori) French Revolutions carry political connotations, and provide ample political ammunition. Tony Benn invokes the Diggers, and questions whether the Glorious Revolution was really so glorious; Philippe de Villiers talks of the "hundreds of Popieluskos" who perished in the Terror. i2 More important, historians and their history are influenced by contemporary trends and issues. Sometimes that influence is diffuse and non-specific, moulding general approaches and interpretations (more of that in conclusion); at other times it may prompt targeted analogies as when Clark rounds off against that bte noire of modern Toryism, the Greater London Council, or snipes at the Social Democratic Party (both examples, we might note, of how Clark's essay has, in the words of one reviewer, virtually "become obsolete before its publication"). 103 Either way, historians can hardly claim to insulate their work from contemporary attitudes and inclinations.'" James Joll's
Meyer, Huerta, passim. i' Joanna Innes, "Jonathan Clark, Social History, and England's 'Anden Regime' ", Past and Present, no. 115 (May 1987), p. 166 n. 3. Cust and Hughes, "Intrduction: Alter Revisionism", p. 14, points to the revisionists' tendency to "reject some perceptions and take others at face value", for example, those of Laud and Charles I. 102 Phillipe De Villiers, "La Terreur tait-elle ncessaire?", Nouvel observateur, 4-10 May 1989. On the "antics of the Greater London Council" and provincialism as "an historiographical echo of the value-nexus of the SDP", see Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 57, 59; the quote is from David Underdown's review, in Amer. Hist. Rey., xciii (1988), pp. 1047-8. 1 " Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 100 n. 27, points out that not all revisionists are "scholars with present-day conservative opinions", Corvad Russell being an obvious example; which point Daniel Szechi, in a communication to Amer. Hist. Rey.,
(cont. on p. 189)

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observation that, while all history may be contemporary history, some is more contemporary than others, would seem to be particularly true in the case of revolutions.'" As regards Mexico, I have no doubt, recent interpretations of the Revolution have been strongly coloured by the historical record of the last twenty or twenty-five years: a period initiated with the traumatic Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, characterized by the apparent delegitimization of the regime and the collapse of the import-substitution industrialization model of development, and culminating in economic travails after 1982 and the electoral bombshell of 1988, when the P.R.I., the party of the Revolution, felt obliged to resort to "electoral alchemy" to preserve its monopoly of power. Womack is surely right to link revisionism to this collective experience, especially to the repression of 1968: "the standard interpretation of the Revolution, according to which the people's will had been institutionalized in the government, made historical explanation of the repression impossible. For some young scholars the most tempting explanation was to argue, as the critics always had, that the Revolution had been a trick on 'the people' ". 106 We should add, too, that today's revisionist historians have grown up in a bipolar world, in which, especially from the Latin American perspective, the United States is noted more for Nixonian or Reaganite aggression than for Wilsonian or Rooseveltian reformism; the United States thus appears as a threat, not an example; and it is the threat (not the example) which is read back to the days of the Revolution, when in fact a different world order prevailed. In consequence the history of U.S.-Mexican relations during the Revolution especially the Mexican version of those relations often remains remarkably, and regrettably, untouched by revisionist scepticism."" Elsewhere in the world, of course, the story was different:
(n. 104 com.)

xciv (1989), p. 579, echoes. Certainly a perfect match between revisionism and conservatism does not exist, and it would be surprising if it did; recognition of this truism, however, does not disprove a certain correlation and affinity between the two which in Clark's work is strikingly obvious. The general proposition that historians do not work and think in political vacuums is, of course, an old one, most forthrightly advanced by Carr, What Is History?, pp. 22-6, and conceded as "so obvious as to dispense with any need for discussion" by Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 117. 1 " Quoted in David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984), p. 1. l" Womack, "Mexican Revolution", p. 80. 10 ' Knight, U.S.-Mexican Relations, pp. 19-20.

according to revisionist critics, it was the facile leftism of the 1960s which facilitated the spread of Marxist and marxisant ideas. Thus, the "Old Guard" of British Marxist historians Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson allegedly peddled their radical historiography, itself a throwback to the 1930s, to a receptive audience of left-leaning readers and students.m In an age of consumerism and complacency at home, and of imperialist aggression and peasant revolution abroad, radicals drew inspiration from the good old cause of the English Revolution, or celebrated the making of the English working class. At the same time (its critics also allege) the "social interpretation" of the French Revolution held sway, and French Revolutionary historiography reflected the institutional strength of a quasi-Stalinist school of historians. 109 It may not matter much that these are crude caricatures of the historiographical establishment of the 1960s (certainly of the English historiographical establishment): they do convey the self-confessed perceptions of revisionists, their own rationalizations of the revisionist urge. In the Mexican case, repudiation of the Revolution and of Revolutionary orthodoxy had a powerful contemporary appeal. If the regime of the P.R.I. was rotten, and if the regime of the P.R.I. was a direct descendant of the Revolution (both of which propositions could be convincingly defended), then the Revolution must have contained a canker which orthodox apologista had striven with success to conceal. Hence the revisionist search for manipulative lites, duped campesinos, Revolutionary careerists, popular victims, persecuted Catholics and conniving gringos. Politically understandable, the approach was intellectually flawed. It is also currently being overtaken by events, as the regime of the 1980s, especially under the present leadership of President Salinas de Gortari, proceeds to dismantle the corporate structure of Mexico's political economy, and informs a somewhat sceptical audience that genuine multi-party democracy is now on the way. As this quick comparison of the political roots of revisionism suggests, the three cases are not closely comparable. Revisionism cannot be raid to respond to specific national experiences. After all, Mexican revisionists implicitly and sometimes explicitly attacked an incumbent regime as well as a historiographical tradition, for the two were closely intertwined, and the revolutionary
1 " Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 2, 22, 24; Clark, English Society, pp. 1, 8-9. '" Furet, Interpreting Me French Revolution, pp. 82, 86, 89.

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genesis of both was relatively recent. English and French revisionists, on the other hand, broke their lances in academia: they were not necessarily, or even usually, critics of incumbent regimes and governments. For one thing, conservative governments prevailed in both countries throughout much of the period of revisionist writing. Conversely the argument that revisionism reflected sentiments of disillusionment brought on by the end of empire cannot explain the prevalence of such sentiments in Mexico, which has always been a victim rather than a practitioner of empire-building. If the cycle of English historiography is determined by the experience of imperial decline, it is hard to see why Mexican Revolutionary studies should display such obvious interpretative parallels." Since individual national experiences are unable to explain the historiographical parallels we have identified, we must turra, first, to the logic of historiography tself, and, secondly, to the broader cultural milieu within which historiography flourishes, and which transcends specific national politics, at least in the countries under consideration. In Mexico the political rationale of revisionism was strongly reinforced by certain historiographical pressures. The most obvious (also shared by European revisionists) was generational. w No doubt all historiography embodies a certain dialectical process: a offers synthetic account, b proposes an antithesis, c strives to transcend both with a new synthesis. But this dialectical process has been accelerated and institutionalized with the prodigious growth of higher education. By definition, a doctoral dissertation has to be original; it is therefore de rigueur to disagree with preceding historians. The result is a tendency towards generational polarization and, even more, towards revisionism for its own sake. The first process is, of course, counterbalanced by professional clientelism (which is not meant to be a pejorative term). The pupils of x who are to a degree self-selecting are likely to subscribe to x's general approach. To that extent, distinct self-reproducing schools of interpretation will tend to develop: for example, the Cobbite school or "tradition" of French Revolutionary studies." 2 Nevertheless reputations are to
" David Cannadine, "Viewpoint: British History: Past, Present and Future?",
Post and Present, no. 116 (Aug. 1987), pp. 174-5, 185.

be made by slaying giants, hence there is an inherent tendency for the ambitious young historians of today to aim their slings at the ageing Goliaths of yesterday. " 3 To the extent that a dominant interpretation exists, it will become a target of slingshots. Thus the interpretative dialectic creaks its way full circle: the orthodoxies of yesterday are dismantled, the revisionism of today becomes the new orthodoxy of tomorrow. It happens in politics; history follows suit in its own more ponderous, less flamboyant fashion. According to the very logic of the profession, therefore, historians tend to distance themselves from the orthodoxies of their intellectual parents. A dissertation which bolsters received opinions and which slays no giants is less publishable, its author less promotable. In the Mexican case, revisionist studies regularly invoke in order to strike down the grand old men of Revolutionary orthodoxy: Molina Enrquez, who foolishly asserted the seigneurial character of the Mexican hacienda; or Frank Tannenbaum, who, with typical gringo naivety, interpreted the Revolution as a spontaneous uprising of the common people of Mexico." 4 In that much of what Enrquez and Tannenbaum said was open to question, and bears closer inspection, revisionism is healthy and necessary." 5 But revisionism for its own sake is another matter: it sometimes involves the caricaturing of the targeted authorities and, yet more often, the arbitrary reversal of old assumptions. If Revolutionary orthodoxy held that Huerta was all bad, then the dictator must have possessed redeeming but neglected features. So historians have scurried about in search of these elusive virtues, and have recently told us that Huerta was in fact a closet reformer, a protagonist of popular education, no more reactionary than Madero, and, anyway,
(o. 112 coto.)

"' Hill, "Parliament and People", p. 101. "2 Gwynn Lewis and Colin Lucas, "Preface", to Lewis and Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror, p. xi; Lyons, "Cobb and the Historian", p. 1; see also other essays in the Lewis and Lucas volume. Schama, Citizens, p. xv, acknowledges his debt to Cobb's
(cont. 071

p. 192)

"unforgettable seminar in Ballo! College in the late 1960s", which makes methodological sense; however, P. M. Jones (whom Lyons, "Cobb and the Historians", pp. 8-9, describes as "Cobb-inspired") has produced an excellent synthetic history of the Revolutionary peasantry a topic Cobb avoided and does so by combining structural analysis with a justifiable deference to Lefebvre: see P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1988). "3 Clark, in particular, is fond of brandishing the dog-eared birth certificates of his "Old Guard" opponents: Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 170. " 4 Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico, 1909); Tannenbaum, Mexican Agrarian Revolution; Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution. 15 See, for example, Simon Miller, "Mexican Junkers and Capitalist Haciendas, 1810-1910: The Arable Estate and the Transition to Capitalism between the Insurgency and the Revolution", 71. Larin Amer. Studies, xxii (1990), pp. 229-63.

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supported by the bulk of the Mexican people." 6 In other words, the old Manichaean orthodoxy is turned around; villains deserve rehabilitation precisely because they are villains." 7 This may be enlightened penology, but it is lousy history. A second, more interesting and complex question concerns the changing subject matter of revolutionary historiography. Here, technical questions of methodology enter in. The global trend in recent historiography has been towards archival research and specialization, especially specialization by region or locality (and, of course, these two trends are functionally related). Now it does not logically follow that detailed archival research, linked to a local or regional perspective, leads ineluctably to narrow, structureless, revisionist histories, in which "economic reductionism" is eschewed in favour of contingency and idealism, and continuity is stressed at the expense of change: consider Lefebvre." 8 There are local/regional histories which embody general structural argumento, locating the locality or region within a broad geographical, comparative or theoretical context, and thus performing the difficult but rewarding task of knitting together the particular and the general. Such studies also provide the vital tesserae with which national historians attempt to build their grand but frage mosaics. Mexican examples would include Womack's and Arturo Warman's studies of Morelos; Gilbert M. Joseph's and Allen Wells's analyses of Yucatn; Thomas Benjamin's and Antonio Garca de Len's works on Chiapas." 9 But while a regional focus need not lead necessarily to revisionist myopia, in practice it often does. There would seem to be three
Meyer, Huerta; Meyer, Cristiada, ii, pp. 64-7. Henderson, Flix Daz, with its reference to the "harsh and undeserved fate of many Porfirians" (p. x), is an example of modest Manichaean revisionism; as is Kenneth J. Grieb, The United States and Huerta (Lincoln, Neb., 1969), which condudes (p. 192), with the doubly questionable comment that Huerta "might have accomplished much for Mexico if given the opportunity, but Woodrow Wilson never allowed him the chance". 18 Georges Lefebvre, Les paysans du nord pendant la Rvolution franpaise (Paris, 1924). "9 Womack, Zapata; Arturo Warman, Y venimos a contradecir: los campesinos de Morelos y el estado nacional (Mexico, 1976); Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatn, Mexico and the United States, 1880-1924 (Cambridge, 1982); Allen Wells, Yucatn's Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860-1915 (Albuquerque, 1985); Thomas Benjamin, A Rich Land, a Poor People: Politics and Society in Modern Chiapas (Albuquerque, 1989); Antonio Garca de Len, Resistencia y utopa: memorial de los agravios y crnicas de revueltas y profecas acaecidas en la provincia de Chiapas durante los ltimos quinientos aos de su historia, 2 vols. (Mexico, 1985).
"6 "7

reasons for this, two of which have already been touched on. First, the sheer accumulation of archival detail makes it difficult for the author to stand back and discern the wood for the trees. The archive becomes, instead of a source of data to be used and critically selected, a black hole which swallows up the investigator, and which prevents the emergence of enlightening conclusions. Of course, the investigator must connive at this archival entrapment. "Sticking close to the data" can be rationalized in terms of supposedly hard-headed realism, solid (Anglo-Saxon?) empiricism, and fidelity to the historical record. No high-flown theory here; no bastard sociology; no promiscuous ffirtations with the comparative method. Such bullish empiricism even acquires normative overtones: historians see themselves defending the individual against the tyranny of "grand impersonal forces". Cobb, of course, is the doyen of this school, and Anglo-Saxon historians are certainly more given to bullish empiricism than their French counterparts.'w Whereas French Revolutionary revisionism at least offers a structural alternative to the old "social interpretation" (just as Guerra, to his credit, offers a considered idealist alternative to traditional interpretations of the Mexican old regime), English revisionist writing on the French Revolution often seems to revel in the accumulation of data especially local, popular, low-life, macabre data for their own sake. Nostalgie de la boue, it seems, exercises a powerful appeal. We are all in the gutter, the revisionists seem to say, but some of us are looking down the drain. Of course the accumulation of empirical data and the critical testing of received falsifiable hypotheses are important. They can be defended by appeal to august empiricist authorities like Karl Popper. But for revisionists like Cobb, such rationalizations are superfluous and, indeed, reminiscent of the positivist approaches to history which they roundly reject. Even when he uses statistics, generalizes, and even ventures comparisons, Cobb insists on sniping at sociology, sociological history (such as Charles Tilly's The Vende), and even historical argument ("for myself", Cobb writes, "history has never been an intellectual debate"). 121 You won't catch Cobb flirting with the comparative study of revoluLyons, "Cobb and the Historian", pp. 1-3. 121 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (Oxford, 1969), pp. 17-18, 111-21.
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tions, or revolutionary historiography. 122 The result can be a chronicle of aimless, if colourful, detail: Death in Paris, a sympathetic critic points out, "is a brilliant piece of historical detective work, leading apparently nowhere". 123 Other revisionist works, too, combine prodigious detail and parsimonious conclusions.' 24 Narrow empiricism is also reinforced by the "emic" methodology which some revisionists, immersed in archival minutiae and scornful of "reductionism" and "teleology", appear to advocate. History, they say, must be seen through the eyes and told in the words of participants. The recourse to concepts and explanations of which the historical actors were ignorant is teleological and anachronistic, an abuse of hindsight. Plainly this position is logically untenable. Yet it can lay claim to a spurious realism ("sticking close to the data" again) and thus encourage a narrow, episodic, jumbled and highly contingent view of history. Cobb rejoices in chaos; Clark stresses the "chance, ignorance and error", which "a proper study of the intricacy and uncertainty of human affairs" reveals, and which triumphantly defy any "teleological explanation of English liberties or a dialectic of social classes". 125 Oral historians of the Mexican Revolution risk reducing the popular movement to an atomistic collage of aimless individual experiences, with ir a la bola! ("let's join the fun!") as its basic slogan; novels of the Revolution, when treated as historical sources, generate similar structureless, "emic" images.' 26 Thirdly, local studies, as already mentioned, often tend to project a rosy picture of gemeinschaftlich communities, rustically resistant to the centralizing state, its power-hungry revolutionary cadres, and their parasitic intellectual clients. The English county community becomes a haven of organic relations, of bucolic deferente, and of "populist neutralism" if not downright hostility .22 Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820
(Oxford, 1970), p. xix. '" Lyons, "Cobb and the Historian", p. 12; Richard Cobb, Death in Paris: The Records of the Basse-Gele de la Seine, October 1795-September 1801 (Oxford, 1978). 124 See, for example, Colin Lucas, "Themes in Southern Violence after 9 Thermidor", in Lewis and Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror, pp. 152-94. 125 Cobb, Police and the People, p. xv; Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 18. Warman, Venimos a contradecir, pp. 104-5, recognizes the problema of oral history; Rutherford, Mexican Society, illustrates the drawbacks of a self-confessed "literary approach". It is noteworthy that, as Moiss Gonzlez Navarro points out, Guerra refies overmuch on the memories of the celebrated "Pedro Martnez" to establish the benign, paternalist character of the Porfiriato: Gonzlez Navarro, "Guerra y la paz", p. 60. For Martnez, see Oscar Lewis, Pedro Martnez: A Mexican Peasant and his Family (London, 1969).

to the national revolution. 127 "Localist" resistance to the Revolution forms a staple theme of Anglo-Saxon French Revolutionary revisionism.' 28 And, in Mexico, Luis Gonzlez's pioneering microhistoria has combined with Jean Meyer's powerful but polemical La Cristiada to create a new stereotype of the rustic, God-fearing, solidary community, standing up to an invasive Revolution and a Leviathan state. 129 Where Cobb (who has little time for peasants) rejoices in individual dissent, deviance and waywardness, Mexican revisionists exalt the peasant community, but as an organic force for Catholicism and conservatism, not a cell of social revolution. This brings me to my final, tentative, observation. Aside from specific political analogies, or the inherent pressures of a competitive, institutionalized academia, there would seem to be broader cultural shifts at work here, helping to prompt and, before long, very likely, to mute revisionism. It is a commonplace that since the late 1960s there has been a profound questioning of orthodox Marxism (in terms of both intellectual debate and political practice); a retreat from Keynesianism and welfare po1icies; and a reassertion of market and competitive values. These are global cultural phenomena, which transcend national experiences, such as England's end of empire, the decline of the P.C.F., or the decadence of the Mexican P.R.I. But they have national manifestations: Thatcherism and the end of Butskellite consensus politics; the rise of a "pragmatic" socialism in France, Spain and England (a "socialism" whose chief claim to rule is that it can run a capitalist economy better than its Conservative rival); the "state-shrinking" (or "PRlstroika") which the current Mexican administration is undertaking, amid the rubble of the old "revolutionary" project. It is no coincidence that revisionist historians now find their place in national politics: John Redwood as a Conservative M.P.; Hector Aguilar Camn as a confidant of President Salinas de Gortari. These individual cases merely highlight the post-1960s ideological trend: away from orthodox Marxism, planning, welfarism, tatisme and dirigirme, towards markets, laissez-faire, individualism and "democracy". I do not say that the trend is uniform or unresisted; nor that it is faithfully translated into practice. "State127 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 63; cf. Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: Alter Revisionism", p. 5. 128 Lewis and Lucas, "Preface", p. x. "9 Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo; Meyer, Cristiada; Becker, "Lzaro Crdenas".

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shrinking" can be accompanied by some pretty heavy-handed state action; economic liberalism is not always matched by social libertarianism. These are ideological constructs, perhaps all the more seductive because they are often inconsistent and divorced from reality. Furthermore these trends have not been confined to the centre and right. Many on the left, too, have lost faith in statism, dirigisme and the working class; if there is hope, it no longer lies with the proles. The ample literature on the "new social movements", which conveniently unites Europe and Latin America, reveals an antipathy to traditional states and parties (of the left), a stress on "issue" politics over class allegiances, an attachment often quite romantic to small self-help groups and communities, and a repudiation of the broad tenets of Marxism which informed an older generation of the left.'" Revisionist studies of revolution, it seems to me, should be seen partly in light of this global ideological shift. It has become fashionable to trash Marxism, to cavil at "economic reductionism", to cherish "individualism", to revere the market, to question the state's positive, arbitrating, and redistributionist role in society. When revolutions (regrettably?) occur, they are the result not of deep-seated structural causes, palpable oppression or organized popular resistance but rather of chance, miscalculation or foreign meddling. As such, revolutions can be avoided, which is perhaps reassuring. And if, due to the inattentiveness of the wise or the machinations of the wicked, they do occur, they merely condemn their victims to a costly and counterproductive ordeal. Each dismal revolutionary experience stands as a sobering warning against the folly of radicalism. Schama congratulates himself on having "returned [violence] to the center of the story since it seems . . . that it was not merely an unfortunate byproduct of politics, or the disagreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished or vicious ones were thwarted. In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the Revolution itself"."' William Doyle, in more balanced and 130 Claus Offe, "New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional
Politics", Social Research, lii (1985), pp. 817-68; David Slater (ed.), New Social Movements and the State in Latin America (Amsterdam, 1985). 131 Scharna, Citizens, p. xv. For views which suggest that a focus on violence per se is misconceived (and that violence can be understood only in terms of its broad social and historical context), see E. J. Hobsbawm, "Revolution", in Roy Porter and Mikuls Teich (eds.), Revolution in History (Cambridge, 1986), p. 7; Alan Knight, "La rvolution mexicaine: rvolution minire ou rvolution serrano?", Annales E.S.C., xxxviii (1983), pp. 449-59.

reasonable style, concludes his cost-benefit analysis of the French Revolution in distinctly Burkean terms: "the men of 1789 . . . failed to see, as their [Enlightenment] inspirers had not foreseen . . . that reason and good intentions were not enough by themselves to transform the lot of their fellow men. Mistakes would be made when the accumulated experience of generation was pushed aside as so much routine, prejudice, fanaticism and superstition. The generation forced to live through the next twentysix years paid the price"." 2 Revisionist revolutionary history, rebutting the orthodoxy concocted by the "Old Guard" of the 1930s and peddled to the deluded "generation of 1968", thus forms part of a broader ideological front and, wittingly or not, aligns itself with contemporary currents of thought which fact I find neither sinister nor surprising. It is the way of all historical flesh. As a result, R. H. Tawney and Hill, Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, Tannenbaum and Valads, become the toppled giants of an outdated orthodoxy, who have gone the way of Marxism and collectivism to the dustbin of history. In my view, reports of these intellectual demises are premature. Some historians never succumbed to the siren song of revisionism; or they picked up snatches of the refrain without bothering to learn the whole lyric. In the process, revisionism performed some useful and necessary functions: it subjected orthodoxies to criticism and forced historians to qualify, amend or fortify them. In particular, analyses based on simplistic class struggles, or overnight transformations of modes of production, were discarded. Revolutions are no longer neatly attributed to the rise (or fall) of the English gentry, to the French bourgeoisie's purposive bid for power, or to the uprising of a monolithic, oppressed Mexican peasantry. Class alignments are seen to be fluid, complex and by no means the whole story in revolutionary processes; revolutionary outcomes may derive less from purposive strategies than from the unplanned but not unpatterned shock of sociopolitical
' 32 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, p. 425. For an extreme view, linking the Terror to Nazism, Stalinism and Pol Pot (on the grounds that each represented an attempt "to break the mould and refashion humanity"), see the comments of De Villiers, "Terreur tait-elle ncessaire?". Of course J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totaltarian Democracy (New York, 1965), helped to start this ball rolling. One wonders if those who spent the bicentennial year of 1989 berating, in Burkean style, revolutionary regicide and the excesses of the Terror, extended their sympathy to Nicolae Cealescu.

199 forces; and structural transformations embracing politics, economy, society and culture are likely to be protracted processes, not discrete "revolutionary" events, especially when we are considering revolutions, such as the English, French and Mexican, which form part of a "bourgeois" rather than a "socialist" sequence. 33 What revisionism has done, therefore, has been to qualify, yet ultimately to strengthen, the basic orthodoxy it sought to demolish. The crudities of orthodoxy have been refined or are being refined while revisionism, in contrast, has largely failed to establish a convincing and rounded alternative. The revisionist Kuhnian paradigm remains as elusive as ever. Meanwhile both the historiographical imperatives and the global cultural matrix which fostered revisionism are changing: today's revisionists become the targets of post-revisionists ("neo-traditionalists"? the "New Old Guard"?) and the shrill certitudes of laissez-faire and state-shrinking appear to be losing some of their intellectual and electoral appeal. Revisionism's challenge has led to an orthodox response which, in turn, produced or is in the process of producing a superior, fitter, synthesis. For revisionism placed tradition on its rnettle, forced it to confront its own weaknesses, compelled it to chape up and stay fit. Negative in conception, revisionism had a positive, if sometimes painful, impact. In historiography, as in aerobics, perhaps, it's a question of no pain, no gain.
REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION

University of Texas at Austin

Alan Knight

' 33 Knight, "Social Revolution". Roughly similar arguments are advanced by Hobsbawm, "Revolution", pp. 26-7; Sayer and Corrigan, Grear Arch; Hill, "Parliament and People", pp. 118-19, 124.