Norman Hampson

Norman Hampson is a professor of history at the University of York. His books include The Enlightenment, The Social History of the French Revolution and Danton.

Art and Revolution

Norman Hampson, 18 December 1980

In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present under way in France and America. It is intended ‘for the general reader whose eye has been arrested by David’s images and whose mind has been haunted or irritated by their supernal energy and conviction’. This would seem to focus the centre of interest of the book on David’s ‘revolutionary’ period, from the ‘Oath of the Horatii’, completed in 1785, to the ‘Intervention of the Sabine Women’ and the portrait head of Bonaparte in 1798. Whatever the merits of the portraits that David painted throughout most of his career, it is not by these that the non-specialist is likely to remember him, and fine though some of them are, they are scarcely noteworthy for their ‘supernal’ energy. ‘Leonidas at Thermopylae’, executed between 1800 and 1814, should perhaps be added to the canon, but with this exception, the best-known works of David fall within the revolutionary period.

Revolutionary Economics

Norman Hampson, 20 August 1981

It is generally assumed that social revolutions must be good for the poor. To suggest the contrary is to appear wilfully paradoxical. After all, revolutionaries assert, and most of them probably believe, that their new order will be especially favourable to those who are least able to look after themselves. Their intentions may be benevolent enough, but the effects of their policies on the lives of ordinary people are another matter. Even if the change is for the better in the long run, a transition period of confusion, loss of business confidence or unskilful planning, can be catastrophic for those who have the fewest reserves. When Burke wrote of the impossibility of supplying the poor with ‘those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to withhold from them’, he must have known that those from whom ‘necessaries’ are withheld may not be there when they become available again. Revolutionary leaders, even if they do not share Burke’s views on Providence, are sometimes to be found on the same tack, urging their followers to forget about what Robespierre called chétives marchandises and to sacrifice the present for a glorious future, at least for the survivors. Alan Forrest’s study of how the French Revolution actually affected the poor allows us to study one case in some detail.

The Big Store

Norman Hampson, 21 January 1982

When she regretfully consigned the old world to the dustbin of history in North and South, Mrs Gaskell had no illusions about the nastiness of the new, but still saw it as conferring an unprecedented independence on the working man. Dickens put the emphasis on the dehumanised pursuit and efficient accumulation of material wealth, as an end in itself: the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France.

Friend Robespierre

Norman Hampson, 5 August 1982

Francois Furet’s book, which appeared in France in 1978, reopens the debate on the nature and significance of the French Revolution. For a very long time, what Professor Soboul likes to describe as the ‘classical’ interpretation provided the frame of reference for all the arguments. It was challenged by the late Professor Cobban in his Wiles Lectures, published in 1964 as The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, but Cobban’s attack was essentially negative. He disputed many of the assertions of what he took to be Marxist historians of the Revolution, but, for all his pugnacity, he was more concerned to expose error than to construct a new creed of his own. Indeed, to an extent of which he must have been unaware, what he implied was not that the Marxist interpretation was wrong, but that Lefebvre and Soboul were bad Marxists. He accepted their theoretical assumptions but reversed their conclusions, claiming, for example, that ‘it was a revolution not for, but against capitalism.’ He answered their Jacobin patriotism with an economic determinism that flew the Union Jack: ‘There is nothing surprising in the fact that, the economic development of English society being so far in advance of that of France, its political evolution should also have shown much greater maturity.’ He cut the French Revolution down to size so drastically that one was left wondering what all the excitement was about. Since he wrote, many detailed studies, in America, England and, latterly, in France, have inflicted further, if sometimes unknowing damage on the ‘classical’ synthesis: but this was not the kind of evidence to overthrow the prevailing orthodoxy. Furet sets out to do just that.

British Politicians

Norman Hampson, 4 August 1983

If Robespierre could have read the second volume of John Ehrman’s massive biography of Pitt it would have saved him a good deal of worry. The two men had more in common than might appear at first sight, or than either of them would have cared to admit. Each was a decidedly cold fish, a bachelor of that alarming species that lives only for politics. This presents their biographers with insoluble problems since it is impossible either to delineate their personalities or to detach them at any point from the political history of their period, which was not so much the context as the content of their lives. Even so, Ehrman rather overdoes this side of things in his book, where Pitt himself is liable to disappear for fifty pages at a time. Both Robespierre and Pitt seem to have been convinced of their own infallibility. The latter had already written in 1785, ‘I cannot allow myself to doubt,’ which at least suggests that he had considered a possibility that probably never occurred to the Incorruptible, who had Rousseau to persuade him that he incarnated both vertu and the general will. Pitt was at least addicted to the bottle, whereas Robespierre preferred oranges. Each took the total rightness of the political values he personified so much for granted that he was incapable of even beginning to understand those of his adversary. For Pitt, Robespierre was probably no more than the worst of a bunch of criminal lunatics: Robespierre saw Pitt as the deist equivalent of Antichrist. Each thought of himself as a reformer and was indeed, at least to begin with, a man of vision, enlightenment and humanity. It was the tragedy of the times that the conflict that came to dominate their lives drove them to cruel and repressive expedients which frustrated the original objects of their political ambitions. There is a nasty parallel between the Treasonable Practices Act and the law of 22 Prairial, both designed to ensure that the courts could not rescue those whom the government was resolved to destroy. Pitt, moving in a familiar and traditional world, was less afflicted by apocalyptic delusions than either Robespierre or Burke. He had not their imagination.

Six French Frizeurs

David A. Bell, 10 December 1998

The moment in the 18th century when Anglo-French relations reached their lowest point was probably 29 May 1794 – 10 Prairial, Year II, as the French then styled it. On that day, the Jacobin...

Read more reviews

Lucifer

John Dunn, 4 April 1991

‘On ne peut point régner innocemment. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. This man must reign or die.’ Saint-Just’s maiden speech to the Convention on 13 November 1792...

Read more reviews

Missed Opportunities

Judith Shklar, 4 August 1983

Rousseau has been loved and hated, but has never been ignored. His name rings in our ears because he expressed every form of human resentment with such intensity and intelligence that his endless...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences