Why do historians still fight over what the French Revolution was?

Historians still fight over the Revolution because the same events can be told as a class war or as a political accident. From the late 1920s to the 1960s, social and economic interpretations, often Marxist, dominated the historiography of the Revolution in France. In the 1960s revisionists challenged them, arguing that class conflict was not a major determinant and that political expediency and contingency often mattered more than social factors.

Georges Lefebvre argued that the Revolution was the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the Terror a reaction to an aristocratic plot, and he saw peasants as active participants with an anti-capitalist outlook. Albert Mathiez defended Robespierre, arguing the Terror was necessary to defend the democratic republican revolution. The challengers included Alfred Cobban, who argued the Revolution was primarily a political conflict started by a declining class of lawyers and office holders rather than a rising capitalist bourgeoisie, and later William Doyle, who argued it resulted from political miscalculation.

Another challenger, François Furet, had joined the French Communist Party in 1949 and left in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. With Denis Richet he argued for the primacy of political decisions. He said Jacobin-Marxist interpretations harboured a totalitarian tendency and anachronistically viewed the Revolution through Russia's October 1917. Yet he conceded that they had increased understanding of the role of peasants and urban masses.

Since the 1980s, Western scholars have largely abandoned Marxist class-struggle readings as anachronistic, but no new explanatory model has gained widespread support. The field has diversified into cultural, regional, visual, transnational and decolonisation histories.