Peoples against the French Revolution
Tchoudinov Alexander
The author offers a partial summary of the results obtained by the laboratory “The World during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars” (Institute of Universal History of Rassian Academy of Sciences) in the realization of a long-term research project “Social mechanisms of mass protest movements in the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire”. A comprehensive study of the various types of mass movements makes to treat with great caution the widespread assertion that the French Revolution was made by the people, by which it is usually meant the peasantry and the urban plebs. Even the plebs mass protests, normally associated with the Revolution, did not usually pursue far-reaching political goals; they were merely a direct response to the information events that caused a surge of collective fear in a situation of general dissatisfaction with the current economic difficulties. However, even these relatively “revolutionary” events bear no comparison in their scope and duration with the mass popular movements directed against values and ideas of the French Revolution; such movements as the French Vandée, Italian Insorgenze, Egyptian Jihad and others seized entire regions and continued for years.