For a number of reasons, the French Revolution is a kind of Rorschach Test for educated people. One cause of this phenomenon, if I may pile on metaphors, is clearly the blind man/elephant problem. There are so many parts of the Revolution, so many stages, so many protagonists, so many ideas, so many policies—often quite contradictory—that we are sometimes confused not only as to how to interpret it, but as to what part to interpret as well. Ultimately historians tend to explain the Revolution according to their predilections, or even their heroes. Hence, scholars have explored the complicated situation of French farmers (we call them peasants) and assert that these problems were the foundation of the Revolution. Marx and Marxists interpret the upheaval from the viewpoint of the most
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