Recently, Francois Furet has acclaimed the French revolution of 1789 as marking the invention of'democratic culture' in 'the torrential birth of democratic politics and ideology'. 1 However, democracy took long to establish itself in France and so Furet's general history, La Revolution, covers the long century from Turgot to Jules Ferry. Defining democracy as, ideally, uniting civil equality and political liberty, it sees that marriage as not being celebrated till the 1870s, with liberty the tardy partner. It would seem to follow that an account of'the first century of French democracy' should direct considerable attention to both civil society and to politics. 2 Social and political history, we would argue, should be closely linked, though quite how, avoiding misleadingly prescriptive generalizations, is not easy to determine. Some obvious pitfalls must be avoided. As is well known, furet strongly condemns the practice of deriving 'the political' mechanistically from 'the social'. However, as this terminology itself suggests, he has sometimes, as in Penser la Revolution frangaise (1978), 3 veered to the opposite extreme, separating too rigidly the political and the social spheres (a separation only partially justified by what he diagnosed as the tyranny of state over society in the Terror). Perhaps now rather more aware of the need for balance, Furet in La Revolution moderates this tendency. But there is no danger that social and political history will here be abusively fused. Certain valid distinctions are made, partly stemming from, but not wholly subservient to, attitudes prevalent in the period discussed. These distinctions are varied and have various implications, not all of them clearly worked out. Furet establishes that nineteenth-century liberals routinely, though not necessarily unthinkingly, separated the social and political levels of the legacy of a revolution which founded an e'tat social but not a pouvoir stable, the term democracy denoting the acceptance of this society and the search or struggle for a 'corresponding' form of government. 4 Moreover, Furet cites Marx as considering the state/society distinction a crucial invention of modern European history (with true democracy coming only with the future reabsorption of the state by society, doubdess 'at a higher level'). And in the nineteenth century, Furet further remarks, the • The works which form the basis of our remarks are: F.
