‘The French Revolution: A Political History’ by John Hardman review

It may not have been the first, argues John Hardiman in The French Revolution: A Political History, but it was the first of its kind.

Simon Macdonald | Published in History Today Volume 76 Issue 1 January 2026

The Zenith of French Glory; The Pinnacle of Liberty, James Gillray, 1793. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris. Public Domain.

What was revolutionary about the French Revolution? Contemporary critics such as Edmund Burke lamented that France’s tyro politicians had squandered a golden opportunity to renew with a useable past. Had they found nothing to salvage from their own traditions, he urged, they might yet have imitated ‘wise examples’ available abroad, notably the constitutional model of their British neighbours. Instead, they were hazarding an untested path woe-betided with epochal danger. Such auguries, however, tended to disregard the revolution’s shock-of-the-new logic and appeal. As rhapsodised by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a leading young gun during the Terror, there should be no imitation of anything ‘that has occurred before us’, because ‘heroism has no models’. For Alexis de Tocqueville, seeking to make sense of it all in 19th-century retrospect, Burke had misconstrued the revolution ‘taking place before his eyes’ – one which broke new ground precisely because ‘there could be no question of putting the clock back’.

John Hardman introduces his chronicle of the French Revolution by evoking how the events of 1789 and beyond would indeed put a new type of ‘revolution’ on the world historical map. In the 20th century France’s revolutionary script would become the ‘model’ for Russia and China. And yet, as the author dryly observes, these were hardly ‘happy experiences’. To be sure, Hardman does not pin blame on the generation of 1789 for latter-day revolutionary misadventures, seeing the French case as one-of-a-kind. Instead, he aims to explore how the political history of the French Revolution would become ‘a record of failure, instability and internecine strife’.

Over the final years of the ancien régime the French government countenanced root-and-branch reform to overcome a fiscal malaise which had reached crisis point. In 1787 Louis XVI’s finance minister, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, interlinked the public interest with that of the state while lambasting ‘ancient prejudices that time seems to have hallowed’. This remark from an official rostrum, Hardman notes, constituted ‘one of the most subversive notions ever uttered before 1789’. The immediate target was the tax privileges of the nobility. But, by the same logic, any aspect of the Old Regime might become open to question.

This was precisely what would transpire once the Estates-General, convened in 1789 in a bid to exit the political quagmire, seized the initiative by reinventing itself as the ‘National Assembly’. Louis promptly sought the assembly’s enforced dissolution, bringing troops into the Paris region for the purpose. But these manoeuvres were forestalled by a violent popular uprising in the capital, where the seizure of the Bastille would save the revolution – and radically transform its stakes. The assembly set about reshaping the country and drafting a new constitution. It did so while retaining a limited role for a monarchy, and indeed for the (mistrusted) incumbent king. The upshot of this was what Hardman terms ‘two rival legitimacies’. Fundamentally, though, as recounted by one of the assembly’s leaders, Antoine Barnave, the autonomous legislative body had become ‘the essentially republican basis of the constitution’; monarchy was a lingering anomaly.

Drafting a constitution could not end a revolution whose extension was becoming the lodestar of an array of burgeoning political actors, including ideologues such as Maximilien Robespierre. From a high-politics vantage point, as Hardman underlines, a ‘fatal’ early choice was an assembly decree which barred members of the legislature from becoming government ministers. This fomented the ‘dangerous illusion’ that the ideal of unity in the political sphere ‘should be the norm’, hindering the establishment of a functioning party system and entrenching conflict with the executive.

Antagonism was heightened by Louis’ initial determination to push his perceived rights to the limit. He then switched, in mid-1791, to a perilous double-game of seeming acquiescence while secretly plotting to escape Paris in the abortive flight to Varennes. The king was brought back to Paris and ostensibly reinstated; the constitution was finally enacted, and a new assembly convened. From the spring of 1792, however, the revolution morphed into an international conflict embattling France against a series of European powers. War turbocharged political radicalisation, especially since the royal court appeared to be in league with France’s counter-revolutionary enemies. A bloody day of orchestrated insurrection in Paris in August 1792 sealed the monarchy’s demise, with the deposed king subsequently put on trial; he was executed in January 1793.

The nascent republic which followed would have no head of state. Still, a new and more coherent relationship between legislature and executive did coalesce in the shape of the Committee of Public Safety, drawn from members of the National Convention, as the assembly’s newest iteration was known: ‘After three years of chaos, France had returned to what it had been before the revolution: an administrative state.’ Meanwhile, an ever-more pointed valorisation of unity would foster the violence of the Terror. That ended in the summer of 1794, with Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their allies sent to the guillotine. But this denouement also eclipsed the revolution’s radical promise: ‘Property had replaced fraternity.’

While much of this saga is familiar, Hardman brings his own twists to the tale. His book showcases what a high-politics prism can offer to an understanding of the revolution. Drawing on his earlier work as a biographer of Louis XVI, he is particularly effective in presenting the perspective of the royal court, at one point even imagining ‘the speech the king might have made’ at his trial. Still, as Tocqueville’s admonition to Burke serves to recall, the revolution also extended far beyond traditional conceptions of politics. Much of what was vital to the revolution thus tends to be lost in a narrow political focus; and an ancillary virtue of Hardman’s book is that it helps us to fathom this too.