Essays on the French Revolution

Book excerpt: Clarke Garrett examines the differing responses of Catholics and Protestants and the resulting disturbances. Roderick Phillips describes the wide variation in provincial response to the revolutionary assembly's family reform measures. He traces the different reactions of urban and rural residents to such legal measures as liberalization of divorces, secularization of birth, death, and marriage registrations, and inheritance reform. Peasants in central France were already engaged in total revolution when Joseph Fouche arrived there in late 1793. Nancy Fitch argues that Fouche was formed by his encounter with indigenous peasant radicalism as much as the peasants were influenced by his rhetoric of a new political culture. Donald Sutherland, summarizing scholarly debate on the subject, argues that, in the final analysis, the Revolution itself was tragically and profoundly alien to many French men and women in 1789.