Few events have drawn the attention of as many writers as the French Revolution. The literature on the topic is truly enormous; it is possible to find mono­graphs on everything from the condi­tions of peasant life in the various provinces to the intellectual currents that led to the formation of the radical revolutionaries’ republican ideology. And yet books on the history of the revolution continue to be published. Many of the questions it raised remain unresolved and contested, just as they were in the late 18th century.

One of the latest such contributions is Jon Elster’s France before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime. (Disclosure: Elster was one of my pro­fessors in college, and I deeply enjoyed taking his class.) In a narrow sense, France before 1789 is not about the revolution itself. Instead the book aims to provide a snapshot of how the old regime functioned. In a broader sense, however, all books about 18th-century France are (at least indirectly) about the history of the revolution — for all authors writing after 1789 know what is coming and can hardly ignore it. As Elster re­marks of his own book, “the portrait of the [old] regime is harnessed to the end of understanding the Revolution.”

France before 1789 is the first volume in an intended trilogy. The second volume will cover America before 1776 and thereby lay the groundwork for the third, which will be a comparison of the constitution-making processes in the two countries. Accordingly, the first volume discusses the features of old-regime France that are most relevant for under­standing the lead-up to the consti­tution of 1791.

The bulk of France before 1789 thus focuses on the various social groups and juridico-political structures of the old regime. Elster has sections on the peasants, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the parlements (courts that also had some legislative power), the Estates-General (a national deliberative body that represented the three orders of society: clergy, nobles, and commoners, i.e., everybody else), the provincial estates (which were like the Estates-General but for regions rather than the whole na­tion), and the monarchy. The book’s technical language, as well as its level of detail, will appeal more to academic specialists than to general readers — yet there is plenty of material to interest general readers as well. This is a work of history, after all, depicting a state of affairs radically different from our own. All such works tell us something about the human condition: about the forms of social organization under which we have lived, about configurations of power and authority that are no longer considered legitimate, and about much else besides.

Although all works of history are valuable for what they reveal about us, Elster’s sense of humor, and his gift for selecting great stories, makes France before 1789 particularly enjoyable. The anecdotes he musters as evidence of the old regime’s obsession with status hierarchies are especially funny. He quotes a French historian who writes that, “when a conflict of [rank in the convocation to the Estates-General of 1576] arose between four barons and four lords from Périgord, one went so far as to have their names written in a circle on the list of convocation, so as not to ruffle sensitivities.” Elster continues: “Saint-Simon recounts that when two coaches carrying noble ladies met before a narrow vault and both refused to yield, the conflict was resolved by both coaches squeezing by, ‘at the expense of the small shops along the walls’ of the vault.”

Apart from contributing to the litera­ture on the ancien régime, about which so much has been written, Elster hopes to make a methodological contribution to the social sciences as a whole. France before 1789, he writes, is “program­matic,” “an attempt to practice the union of history and psychology, which are, in my opinion, the two main pillars of the social sciences.” There is nothing groundbreaking in his under­standing of history as such. Basically, he is interested in examining the facts of the past, particularly when they reveal causal mechanisms that might allow us to understand causal mecha­nisms in the present. (To say that he does not break new ground as far as theo­retical approaches to history go is not a criticism. He just isn’t interested in doing so, at least in this book.) His under­standing of psychology, on the other hand, is intriguing.

In Elster’s view, emotions are an essential part of the causal mechanisms in social life. He tries to show how emotions influence action by making general psychological observations and then demonstrating their validity with specific historical events. He writes, for instance, that “a considerable body of evidence [suggests] that indignation induces less severe punishment than anger does” — in other words, people will punish a wrongdoer more severely when he commits evils against them rather than against others. As historical evidence for this claim, Elster cites two cases of (alleged) hoarding of grain in the 17th century. In the first case, a crowd beat up a man after hearing that he was selling grain at above-market prices to others (indignation). In the second case, a crowd killed a man after somebody directly affected accused him of hoarding grain and causing prices to rise (anger).

So it is that Elster attempts to marry history and psychology. He is interested in how emotions influence actions be­cause he hopes to apply his basic insight — that different emotions yield different political outcomes — to his analysis, in volume 3, of the constitution-making process. This methodological approach is certainly provocative, and Elster executes it capably, but I would prefer to finish the trilogy before passing judgment on it.

In the meantime, I want to quibble with Elster on two points — not because he is wrong, necessarily, but because some of the views he expresses are under­developed or underargued. First, he discusses how French commoners occa­sionally launched insurrections to fix the price of grain in times of scarcity. Contemporaries and historians both agree that such “flour riots” tended, actually, to be quite orderly. Rioters mostly refrained from looting, raping, and killing; and rather than stealing grain from the person selling it, they simply sold it at what they took to be a fair price and then duly handed over the proceeds to its owner. Elster’s way of accounting for this remarkable self-restraint is to say that “if agents are motivated by a sense of in­justice, some actions will be out of bounds.” Indeed, he argues, self-restraint might even be “a normal component in actions moti­vated by a sense of injustice.”

In some cases, yes — but we also see that people motivated by a sense of injustice can be moved to commit in­justices of their own. To take just one example: Some of the victims of the revolutionary Terror inflicted retaliatory violence against the agents and supporters of the terrorist government once they had means of doing so. Historian William Doyle writes that “isolated murders, beatings, and other atrocities became commonplace throughout the south-east over the summer” of 1795, the year after the fall of Robespierre. He goes on to say that this White Terror, as the ­counter­revolutionary violence has come to be known, “operated through lynch mobs and murder gangs, abductions and ambushes.” Injustice can breed injustice.

The second point on which I’d like to challenge Elster concerns his expla­nation of why there does not yet exist a consensus view of the old regime, some two centuries after its demise. He attributes the lack of consensus to ignorance. “The documentation from the ancien régime is massive,” he writes, “but tantalizingly incomplete, often unreliable, and hard to aggregate.” He elaborates: Not every region of France left records behind; the many records that were left behind are not always reliable, because the people who figure in them might have lied (for instance, people might have lied about the amount of property they owned, in order to pay less in taxes); and finally, it is impossible to synthesize the enormous amount of empirical evidence, across time and space, that we do have. Political bodies, social groups, and other agents of interest might have behaved a certain way in certain times and in certain regions, but the sheer amount of (contradictory) evidence prevents us from making many generalizations.

All of which is quite true, but there is another factor militating against the emergence of a canonical interpretation of 18th-century France — namely, the political stakes behind the very enterprise of interpreting the old regime. Ideologues of the Left have an interest in depicting the regime as stagnant and oppressive, the better to justify radical action against it; ideologues of the Right have an interest in depicting it as viable and capable of improvement, the better to condemn the revolution that upended it. In writing their works of history, both kinds of ideologues make empirical claims about the past — but their de­scriptions of the old regime carry obvious implications about the ethics of revolutionary change. Histories of a pre-revolutionary regime are always con­tentious precisely because they are proxy sites of contemporary political struggles. So although Elster does not deny that politics is one driver of disagreement about old-regime France, and I doubt that he would, it would still have been better for him to mention that problem explicitly.

My two quibbles, however, are just that — quibbles. France before 1789 is an excellent and informative work, and it will be exciting to see Elster use his historico-psychological approach in the rest of the trilogy.