Knight Revisionism

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OXFORD JOURNALSOXFORD uNive...RS T Y PRESS

The Past and Present Society

Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and FranceAuthor(s): Alan KnightSource: Past & Present, No. 134 (Feb., 1992), pp. 159-199Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstonorg/stable/650802Accessed: 18/05/2010 10:23Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/term. s.jsp . JSTOR's Term s and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have ob tained prior permission, you may n ot download an e ntire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use con tent in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-comm ercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at


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VIEWPOINTREVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION:MEXICO COMPAREDTO ENGLAND AND F RANCE*

This View point tries to elucidate and compare revisionist inter-pretations of three major revolutions. It does not seek to contrib-ute, except perhaps indirectly, to the debates which revisionistinterpretations have provoked; it does not address substantivehistorical topics; and it does not advance historical hypotheses orevidence. It tries, rather, to identify the character of revisionismand, where possible, to establish points of com parison and con-trast between the three historiographical traditions. The first taskis difficult, since revisionism is a protean concept and in thefield of Mexican history at least I have yet to find a historianwho parades his or her revisionism with the polemical swaggerof, say, J. C. D. Clark, or the measured assurance of FranQoisFuret.' Mexican revisionism is usually more elliptical, less conten-tious. It also assumes many forms: hence any talk of revisionismruns the risk of historiographical reductionism, and I have foundit necessary to disaggregate the catch-all (and, for some, offensive)term "revisionism" into discrete themes. The second self-imposed task, that of cross-cultural comparison, is even moredifficult, or rash, since at a time w hen "revolutionary" studiesseem to grow exponentially it presumes some passing familiar-ity with all three historiogr aphies. I have only a passing familiaritywith the English and French literature. If only to stimulate discus-sion, however, it seems w orth risking some tentative comparisons.This Dantonesque audacity is partly a result of my belief that

* The paper on which this articte is based formed part of a panel entitled" Revisionise Interpretations of Revolutions: A Comparative Perspective", held atthe American Historical Association Conference, San Francisco, 28 Dec. 1989. Theoriginal version was written with oral presentation in mind and, despite subsequentrewriting, this published version probably retains something of its original declaratoryform.' "This is a revisionist tract", declares Jonathan Clark a t the beginning of h is EnglishSociety, 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 1; Francois Furet, Interpret ing the FrenchRevolut ion, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge, 1981), p. 116, declares that, with the passageof time, "I have become, if I may so express myself, increasingly `revisionist".

160AST AND PRESENTUMBER 134while the historian of the Mexican Revolution might know a littleabout the English and French Revolutions, there is less reason toassume any knowledge of the Mexican Revolution on the part ofstudents of European revolutions: a belief which, if true, stemsfrom the E urocentricity of European history and, conversely, thegreater openness (perhaps even "dependency") of Latin Amer-ican history. 2 Historians of Mexico (and not just colonialists) needto know something about European history, while historians ofEurope scarcely need to concern themselves with Mexican his-tory. In part this is because historians have to c hase up the culturalattachments of their subjects. Mexico's revolutionaries frequentlyinvoked European especially French revolutionary models:Danton and Robespierre, the guillotine and the Convention. 3and French revolutionaries; at best, it represented as withMarvell's "Mexique paintings" 4 an exotic abstraction, not apolitical model. Following the lead of my subjects, therefore, Ihazard some comparisons with English and French histori-ography in the hope that, even if I stand corrected, thecorrection may advance our joint historiographical understanding.

The history of the Mexican Revolution, like that of the Englishand French Revolutions, was first written by participants. Thedifference, of course, is that Mexican participants are only ageneration or two distant from us; some, who survived the fearful

The Eurocentricity of the A H.A audience was borne out by the fact that, afterpapers on England and France had been given, and that on Mexico was about tostart, something like a third of the audience got up and left.Elsa Carrillo, "La revolucin francesa: pauta a la forma discursiva de la revolucinmexicana: la soberana convencin de Aguascalientes, 1914" (unpubd. paper, Centrede recherches d'histoire de l'Amrique latine et du monde ibrique, Paris, 1988);Jean-Pierre Bastian, "El paradigma de 1789, sociedades e ideas y la revolucinmexicana", Historia M exicana, xxxviii (1988), pp. 79-110. The Mexican case appearsto confirm the observations of both William Doyle and F rancois Furet that the FrenchRevolution became the model, the "classic political and social experience", to whichlater revolutionaries turned for inspiration, whereas the English Revolution neverattained such a "mother-role": Wil liam Doyle, The Oxford History of the FrenchRevolut ion (Oxford, 1989), pp. 421 -3; Furet, Interpret ing the French Revolut ion, p. 85n. 5.

4 Andrew Marvell, "Upon Appleton House", 1. 580. It was also from Marvell's"Bermudas" that Aldous Huxley took the title for his B eyo n d t h e M ex i q u e B a y: ATraveller' s Journal (Harmondsworth, 1955; first pubd. 1934).


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION6 1mortality of 1910-30, like Artemio C ruz, died with their bootson, amid the new post-Revolutionary Mexico they had helped tocreate. 5 The victorious participants those associated with, orsympathetic to, the triumphant Constitutionalist/Sonoran regimeof 1915-34 tended to depict the Revolution as a broad popularmovement, strongly agrarian in term s of both social compositionand political agenda, progressive, egalitarian and nationalist. TheRevolution was justified against the normative backdrop of anlitist, authoritarian, inegalitarian, reactionary and xenophile oldregime, the Porfiriato (1876-1911). And the Revolution thusjustified was, of course, a mythologized, sanitized, surprisinglyconsensual phenomenon, the Mexican equivalent of the "concili-atory" version of the French Revolution propounded by A lphonseAulard in intellectual deference to the Third Republic. 6From the outset, however, there were dissenting voices: con-servative adherents of the old regime who denounce d the Revolu-tion as the work of demagogic arrivistes more concerned withpower than w ith social justice; Catholics who resented Revolu-tionary antidericalism and who in unison with foreign critics sought to tar the Revolution with the brush of Bolshevism." Inaddition, each major twist in the trajectory of the Revolutionproduced its victors and victims, the latter keen to validate theirperspective on the movement and to appropriate the Revolutionfor their own ideological purposes. Almost from its inception,therefore, the Revolution spawned offspring who proclaimed theirown legitimacy while deno uncing rival revolutionaries as politicalbastards. The failure of early M aderista liberalism wh ich lostout not only to Victoriano H uerta's counter-revolutionary militar-

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz, trans. Sam Hileman (New York,1966).6 Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolu-tion (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 881-90, where the image of the French Revolution"flattened out, tamed, and domesticated by the T hird Republic", offers an obvious

parallel to the reified Revolution of the Mexican P .R.I. (the Partido RevolucionarioInstitucional is the political party/machine born of the R evolution, and has dominatedMexican national politics since its creation in 1929). O n the mythologization of theMexican Revolution, see Ilene O'Malley, The Myth of the R evolution: Hero Cults andthe Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920-40 (New York, 1986).Jorge Vera Estao', Historia de la revolucin mexicana: orgenes y resultados (Mexico,1957); Francisco Bulnes, El verdadero Daz y la revolucin (Mexico, 1967; first pubd.1920); Francis C. Kelley, Blood-Drenched A ltars (Milwaukee, 1935); Francis McCul-Iagh, Red Mexico (London, 1928). Although his book was not published until fortyyears after the event, Vera Estao' was an active conservative, but not clerical participant in the politics of the Revolutionary decade.

1 6 2AST AND PRESENTUMBER 1 3 4ism, but also to the hard-headed and hawk ish realpolitik of Venus-tiano Carranza and the Sonorans 8 left a legacy of aggrievedliberals, usually educated and middle-class, who excoriated themilitarism, the corruption, the populism and (aboye ale themachine politics of the Revolutionary regime. 8 These disaffecteddemocrats raised the tattered banner of Antire-electionism in the1920s, backed Jos Vasconcelos's "crusade" in 1929, formed partof the Almazanista camp in 1940, and (when they conjugatedtheir liberalism with Christian Democracy) aligned with the nas-cent Partido Accin N acional after 1939. A liberal-democraticcritique of the Revolution, harking back to Francisco Maderoand (recently) demanding a "democracy without adjectives", hasthus been almost coeval with the Revolution, and with theRevolutionary tradition of historiography.iMeanwhile even those who remained longer within the Revolu-tionary fold, accepting its illiberal, populist, even m ilitarist tend-encies, were prone to schism. The Revolution bifurcated in1914-15, 1920 and 1 923-4; lesser breakaways occurred in 1927and 1929; and a major factional battle a political rather thana military confrontation occurred in 1935-6." On each occasionthe losers were cast out: the V illistas (1915), the Carrancistas(1920), the De la Huertistas (1924), the Callistas (1935-6). If theysurvived, and if they w ere not later readmitted to the fold, thelosers often turned against their old comrades and penned their

The Maderista movement, led by Francisco M adero, represented a loose allianceof liberal reformers and popular insurgents who united to overthrow the authoritarianregime of Porfirio Daz in 1910-11. Madero's shaky liberal regime (1911-13) wastoppled by a military coup, led by Victoriano H uerta, whose military dictatorship(1913-14) was in turn ousted by a renewed liberal-popular coalition, led by VenustianoCarranza and a clutch of leaders from the northern state of Sonora. Unlike Madero,Carranza and the Sonorans placed considerations of power aboye constitutionalnicetes.9 Luis Cabrera, El balance de la revolucin (Mexico, 1931); Luis Cabrera, Un ensayocomunista en Mexico (Mexico, 1937); Federico Gonzlez Garza, La revolucin mexicana:mi contribucin poltico-iteraria (Mexico, 1936), pp. vii-xv.10 Enrique Krauze, Por una democracia sin adjetivos (Mexico, 1986). Not surpris-ingly, in Enrique Krauze's series, Las biografas del poder, 8 vols. (Mexico, 1987),Madero gets more sympathetic treatment than either Plutarco Elas Calles or, morestrikingly, President Crdenas: see reviews by jess Gmez Serrano, in Secuencia, viii(1987), pp. 226-7; Alan K night, "Biografa del poder, de Enrique Krauze", Vuelta,no. 138 (May 1988), pp. 39-45." The years 1914-15 saw the triumph of C arranza and the Sonorans over the forcesof Francisco Villa; in 1920 the Sonorans ousted Carranza and established their eponym-ous "dynasty", which weathered rebellions in 1923-4, 1927 and 1929; finally, in1935-6, Calles, the Sonoran jefe mximo (supreme chief), was ousted by the radicalpopulist President Crdenas, who inaugurated a spate of social reforms.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION63heretical critiques. Some of these ruptures were historically, butnot historiographically, significant. After 1924 the victorious Cal-lista "revolution" retained its Clio-genic legitimacy its claim,sanctioned by history, to represent the Revolutionary tradition(no De la Huertista revisionist school carne into being). But the1934 -5 schism between Plutarco Elas Calles and Lzaro Crdenashad historiographical consequences, since the leftward course ofCardenismo offended more conservative revolutionaries, whospurned socialism and communism, and who claimed that C rd-enas was perverting a uniquely national revolution in favour ofsuch "exotic doctrines" Again, in the 1940s, as official policyswung away from nationalism, redistribution and reform, theregime still draped itself in the Revolutionary flag; as does thepresent administration, which, in the very name of the Revolu-tion, now claims to be dismantling much of the Revolution'sinstitutional apparatus and ideological legacy. For, PresidentSalinas declares, the hallmark of revolution is change, not immob-ility: "we make changes because we w ish to make a reality of theRevolution".' 3The historiography of the R evolution is therefore inseparablefrom post-Revolutionary political trends (the same, of course, istrue of the English and French Revolutions, even though theyare further removed from us in time; I will return to this pointin conclusion). The first generation of Revolutionary victors,penning their memoirs and apologias, gave substance to the ideaof a nationalist, popular and agrarian revolution, the product ofthe legitimate egalitarian strivings of a people, especially a peas-antry, oppressed by M exican and foreign exploiters. Influentialforeign commentators, in particular North A mericans, endorsedthis image (just as there were other foreign observers, whosework has proved less enduring, who endorsed the criticisms madeby conservative and Catholic enemies of the Revolution)." The

12 The expression "exotic doctrines" carne into common usage in the late 1930sand early 1940s. For an example of this interpretation, see Victoriano AnguianoEquihua, Lzaro Crdenas, su feudo y la pol tica nacional (Mexico, 1951).13 See the first informe de gobierno ("state of the union message") of President CarlosSalinas de Gortari, Ultimas noticias, 1 Nov. 1989, p. 1.Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican A grarian Revolution (New York, 1929); FrankTannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (New York, 1966; first pubd. 1933); Samuel GuyInman, Latn America: Its Place in World Life (Chicago, 1937), ch. 20; cf. K elley,

Blood-Drenched Al tars; McCullagh, Red Mexico; for non-clerical criticism, see GeorgeAgnew Chamberlain, 1s Mexico Worth Saving? (Indianapolis, 1920), which is typicalof an entire Mexico-bashing genre.

164AST AND PRESENTUMBER 134first generation of pro-Revolution writers thus contained bothMexican participants and foreign participant-observers; the for-mer concerned to explain, justify and celebrate the Revolutionarycause, the latter, often enough, to hail a progressive experimentin Third World reformism (not that they used those words) andto counter American hostility.

The subsequent shift from primary to secondary sources from engaged, participant, to "objective", academic, footnotedhistory cannot be m easured with real precision, either chrono-logically or analytically. Some early engaged commentators foreigners like Ernest Gruening, or Mexican like Jos C.Valads combined first-hand reportage with historical researchand analysis; their work has stood the test of time remarkablywell." Conversely plenty of today's " academic" historians clearlyblend historical investigation with contemporary comment,whether from the (Catholic or Marxist) left, or from the (Catholicor liberal) centre and right." Nevertheless, about a generationafter the armed revolution certainly by the 1950s a crop ofnew historians carne to the fore, academic professionals engagedin archiva] work, comm itted to "objective" historiography (thatis, not engaged primarily in partisan pleading), lodged in univer-sities and often inclining towards national, narrative history:Stanley R. Ross and Charles C. Cumb erland in the United States,Daniel Coso V illegas and the team associated with the Historiamoderna de Mxico in Mexico." In the main these historiansremained within the broad parameters of Revolutionary ortho-doxy: not because they necessarily sympathized with the current

' 5 Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage (New York, 1928); Jos C. Valads,Historia general de la revolucin mexicana, 10 vols. (Cuernavaca, 1967).

16 The Catholic left would roughly be represented by Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3vols. (Mexico, 1985; first pubd. 1974); Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion (Cambridge,1976); Jean Meyer, La rvolution mexicaine (Paris, 1973); the Marxist left by JamesCockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mex ican Revolution, 1900-1913 (Austin, 1968);Adolfo Gilly, La revolucin interrumpida (Mexico, 1971); A rnaldo Crdova, La ideologade la revolucin mexicana (Mexico, 1973); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico(Berkeley, 1987); on the centre and right can be located Daniel Coso V illegas (ed.),La historia moderna de Mxico, 7 vols. (Mexico, 1955-65); Krauze, Biografas del poder.Certainly according to critical opinion, this is also the case with F rangois-XavierGuerra, Le Mxique: de l'ancien rgime la rvolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1985): see MoissGonzlez Navarro, "La guerra y la paz, o un nuevo refuerzo francs a la derechamexicana", Secuencia, v (1987), pp. 57-69.Stanley R. Ross, Francisco I. Madero: Apostle of Mexican Democracy (New York,1955); Charles C. Cumberland, The Mexican Revolution: Genesis under Madero (Austin,1952); Coso V illegas (ed.), Historia moderna de Mx ico.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION6 5administration(s), but because they tended to accept the histor-ical not the mythical Revolution as a popular, progressive,nationalist movement directed against an exploitative old regime.As conscientious historians, they did not peddle the old simplicit-ies of the Porfirian leyenda negra, and they were not blind to thefailings of the revolutionaries, but they were generally sympath-etic to, rather than critical of, the revolutionary impulse, and theysaw the ensuing R evolutionary regime as being popular, if farfrom perfect.Since the later 1960s, however, a third generationhich Ihave elsewhere referred to as the baby-boomers of MexicanRevolution historiography has grown to maturity.'s Their pres-ence is evident in the almost exponential growth of MexicanRevolution studies, in the plethora o f books, articles, dissertations,doctoral programmes, journals, research centres, workshops, con-ferences, panels, and both newly organized and newly openedarchives. As David Bailey remarked in 197 8, it is hard work forthe Mexican specialist to keep up with let alone to read anddigest the ensuing torrent of new literature; and, during thelast decade, the torrent has quickened and deepened.' 9 In thisrespect the student of the Mexican Revolution has come toresemble more closely his or her English or Frenc h counterparts.While there is as yet no Mexican chair of Revolutionary studies(after all, it took 102 years for the French to establish one), andno Mexican equivalent of La Rvolution franlaise and Annalesrvolutionnaires, the Mexican Revolution has certainly become agrowth industry, characterized by a marked division of labour(between regional and m ethodological specialists) and by thesupersession of traditional artisans by factory production (large-scale, competitive and sometimes hierarchical in organization).It is within this prolific recent generation that revisionism hastaken root and flourished. What is revisionism? It is not a pejorat-ive term; it does not imply intellectual backsliding; and it hasnothing to do with Eduard B ernstein. 2 Revisionists are not his-

la Alan Knight, "Interpreting the M exican Revolution" (pre-publ. working paperof the Mexican Center, Inst. Latin Am er. Studies, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1988),P. 3.' 9 David C. Bailey, "Revisionism and Recent Historiography of the MexicanRevolution", Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lviii (1978), pp. 62-79.20 I am particularly aware of the need for these caveats following a bruising experi-ence at the Conference of Mexican H istorians, Oaxtepec, Morelos, Oct. 1988, wheremy use of the neutral term "revisionism" seemed to provok e more resentment andincomprehension than rational debate.

1 6 6AST AND PRESENTUMBER 1 3 4toriographical vendepatrias (quislings). Rather, revisionism is aneutral label for a historiographical current which, I shall argue,is also evident in English and French Revolutionary studies.Indeed, in the latter cases, "revisionism" is sometimes a proudlabel, not a pejorative epithet. However, it is invariably a looselabel. Any definition of "revisionism" is likely to be somewhatarbitrary and contentious: there is no fixed canon, no agreedrulebook of the revisionist club. Revisionism, for m e, embracesseveral positions, which may be blended together in varying ways,and with varying degrees of em phasis. A given historian maysubscribe to some revisionist positions and not others. Equally,different permutations of "traditional" or "orthodox" positionsare possible. However, there is a certain kinship an "electiveaffinity", in Weberian terms between some of these positions;hence it is not coincidental that historians who adopt revisionistpositions in one area are likely to do so in others. I take revisionismto include the following, which I present as interpretative idealtypes:2i1. A critical stance vis--vis the Revolution and its claims, polit-ical and historiographical, to be a popular, progressive andegalitarian movement.2. A depiction of lites as the true makers of "revolution", andof the masses as ind ifferent spectators, malleable clients or miser-able victitns. 2 23. An emphasis on the Re volution's corrupt, self-serving, Machi-avellian, pow er-hungry, even "totalitarian" character, evident,for example, in its manipulative agrarian reform and its arrogant,unpopular anticlericalism. 2 3

2 ' That is to say, these are "accentuations" of (in this case a historiographical)reality; it does not follow that a given revisionist historian need adhere to all theseviews (nor, conversely, that a "traditionalist" need reject them all). However, thereis a clear tendency, both empirical and logical, for these views to cluster together.22 See, for example, Ramon Ruiz, The Great Rebellion, Mexico, 1905 -1924 (NewYork, 1980); Romana F alcn, "Los origines populares de la revolucin de 1910? Elcaso de San Luis Potos", Historia Mexicana, xxix (1979), pp. 197-240. Jean Meyerbegins his chapter "Mexico: R evolution and Reconstruction in the 1920s", in L eslieBethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, v (Cambridge, 1986), with theforthright statement that "the Mexican R evolution was initiated and directed for themost part by the upper and middle classes of the Porfiriato" (p. 155).23 Meyer, Cristiada; Marjorie Becker, "L zaro Crdenas, Cultural Cartographersand the Limits of Everyday Resistance in Michoacan, 1934-1940" (paper given at the46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, 1988).


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION6 74. A stress, therefore, on the Revolution as a political undertakingrather than a social transformation. 2 45. An insistence that the Revolution was not, in consequence, agenuine "social" revolution, and that its claims to social trans-formation are blather. Not only was the Revolution not a socialistrevolution (which any decent self-respecting twentieth-centuryrevolution ought to be); it was not even "bourgeois". 2 56. A consequent stress on h istorical continuity over historicalrupture. The Revolution effected some political change in Mex-ico: at the very least, it changed political personnel; perhaps itrejigged the state; but inasmuch as it did not substantially trans-form Mexican society it inherited, perpetuated and perhaps per-fected many aspects of the old regime. The Revolution thusappears in n eo-Porfirian d ress; its (revisionist) historians echoAlexis de Tocqueville. 2 67 . A rehabilitation of the Porfirian old regime, which now appearsas a m ore wh olesome, legitimate society/regime, defective inparts, perhaps, but healthy in others; a society/regime whoseousting is due less to widespread oppression than to politicalmiscalculation, the vagaries of the business cycle, and the ma ch-inations of either dissenting lites or meddlesome foreigners. 2 78. Linked to this, a rehabilitation of the Huerta regime (1913-14),whose counter-revolutionary character is questioned or denied; 2 8

" As in the case of the historiography of the French Revolution, there would betwo main kinds of "political" emphasis: one, reminiscent of the "Anglo-Saxon"school, tends to stress individual careerism, mobility, self-seeking and downrightpurposelessness (for example, Ruiz, Great Rebellion); another, which evokes and evencites the Annales school, offers a structural approach, stressing mentalits, moderniza-tion and the ideological dissolution of the anclen rgime (for example, Guerra, Mxique) .Both schools disdain class analysis of the Revolution, and see no coherent socio-economic rationale underlying it." Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. ix, 3-8.26 Guerra's title echoes Tocqueville, just as Ruiz, Great Rebellion (unwittingly?)

borrows from Clarendon: see below, n. 84. Stephen H. H aber, Industry and Under-development: The Industrialization of M exico, 1890 -1940 (Stanford, 1989), althoughadopting a quite different approach, also makes a strong claim for continuity. Thereis some justification for this claim in respect of the (small) industrial sector, but Haberexaggerates the degree to which the sociopolitical environment within which'industrydeveloped (or "underdeveloped") remained constant.2' Guerra, Mxique; Meyer, Rvolution mexicaine. Both display an excessive fondnessfor, and reliance upon, the Porfirian conservative historian Bulnes (see aboye, n. 7 ).Michael C. Meyer, Huerta: A Political Portrait (Lincoln, Neb., 1972); for a milderpiece of revisionism, see Peter V. N. H enderson, Flix Daz, the Porfirians and theMexican Rev olut ion (Lincoln, Neb., 1981).

168AST AND PRESENTUMBER 13 4Cristiada and the Unin Nacional Sinarquista, which are empath-etically portrayed as the autonomo us reaction of simple God-fearing folk to the provocations of an aggressive, centralizing,even totalitarian regime. 2 9Of course, different historians tend to stress different elementsof this loose revisionist ensemble. Revisionist biographers tend towrite up Madero (and Huerta!), to write down Calles andC,rdenas. 3 Literary historians mine the novels of the Revolutionand conclude that the tale was one of sound and fury, signifyingnothing, or at least very little. 3 ' Local and regional historians(Mexican eq uivalents of the English "provincialists") recoverforgotten communities and often the gemeinschaftlichsolidarism which underlay them, making them strangers to classconflict and enemies of an alien, intrusive and aggressive Revolu-tion. 3 2 The rehabilitation of the old regime and critique of theRevolution implied in some local/regional studies are presentedin monumental and emphatic style by Franlois-Xavier Guerra,who sees the Porfiriato as a m ildly paternalist regime, built upon

traditional liens de sociabilit, but undermined by insidious mod-ernizing lites. 3 3 Jean M eyer offers a pow erful rehabilitation ofthe Cristeros (and, less cogently, of the Sinarquistas), rebuttingthe notion that they were the shock troops of landlord reaction,battling a progressive revolution; and, in doing so, he has stronglyinfluenced general revisionist interpretations of the Revolution. 3 4status of the Revolution; while Paul Vanderwood has emphasizedthe careerism and individualism which motivated rebels andbandits in their opposition to the old regime. 3 5 Finally John

29 The Cristiada, a popular Catholic rebellion against the anticlerical Revolutionarystate, racked western Mexico during 1926-9; the Sinarquistas, a Catholic integralistmovement, achieved considerable strength in approximately the same region in thelate 1930s and early 1940s: see Meyer, Cristiada; Jean Meyer, El sinarquismo: unfascismo mexicano? 1937-1947 (Mexico, 1979); Becker, "Lzaro Crdenas".3 Krauze, Biografas del poder; Meyer, Huerta.31 John Rutherford, Mexican Society during the Revolution: A Literary A pproach(Oxford, 1971).32 Luis Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo: microhistoria de San Jos de Gracia (Mexico, 1972).On the English provincialist school, see J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State

and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986),ch. 4.33 Guerra, Mxique, passim.3 Meyer, Cristiada; Meyer, Cristero Rebellion; Meyer, Sinarquismo.35 Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. 2-8, 407-20; Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress:

Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln, Neb., 1981); Paul Vanderwood,onp. 169)


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION69Womack once seen as a protagonist of orthodoxy and stillregarded by some out-of-date critics as a woolly populist 3 6 hasproduced a notably revisionist synthesis, which criticizes the"pro-revolutionary story of the rise of the down-trodden", andthe consequent notion of a po pular social revolution, preferringinstead to stress factionalism, foreign meddling and underlyingcontinuity. "The struggle that began in 1910" , writes Womack,"featured not so much the lower versus the upper class as frus-trated elements of the upper and middle classes versus favouredelements of the same classes. In this struggle masses of peoplewere involved, but intermittently, differently from region toregion, and mostly under middle-class direction, less in economicand social causes than in a bourgeois civil war". 3 7Before venturing further into these historiographical thicketsone central problem must b e tackled, or we shall find ourselvesgoing round in circles. 3 8 We know that the Revolution was nomonolith: that it was an amalgam of numerous revolutionaryexperiences. "Many Mexicos" bred "m any revolutions". Incid-entally, this is no new discovery, no privileged insight of therevisionist nouvelle vague." It is a commonplace, but an importantone, which in turn forces general analysts of the Revolution toexplain which revolutions they are talking about. In particularwe should try to distinguish spatial and temporal dimensions.The plethora of recent and valuable regional studies has high-lighted the spatial diversity of the Revolution; but the conversionof such studies into b roader syntheses presents major problems. 4 (n. 35 cont. ,"Explaining the Mexican Revolution", in Jaime E. Rodrguez O. (ed.), The Revolu-tionary Process in M exico (Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 97-114.

36 Arnaldo Crdova, La revolucin y el estado en Mxico (Mexico, 1989), p. 14." John Womack Jr., "The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920", in Bethell (ed.),Cambridge History of Latin America, v, p. 81. Womack also asserts that "from begin-ning to end foreign activities figured crucially in the Revolution's course" (ibid.).

38 I take this opportunity to clarify a point which, for lack of space and forethought,I neglected in Knight, "Interpreting the M exican Revolution".See Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution, pp. 121, 147. Furet, Interpreting the FrenchRevolution, p. 122 n. 88, maces the same point concerning Georges Lefebvre, who"very clearly shows both the plurality of revolutions within the R evolution and theautonomy of peasant action"." D. A. Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge,1980); Thomas Benjamin and William McNellie (eds.), Other Mexicos: Essays onMexican Regional History, 1876- 1911 (Albuquerque, 1984); Thomas Benjamin andMark Wasserman (eds.), Provinces of the Rev olution: Essays on Regional MexicanHistory, 1910- 1929 (Albuquerque, 1990); Carlos Martnez Assad (ed.), La revolucinen las regiones, 2 vols. (Guadalajara, 1986).

17 0AST AND PRESENTUMBER 134Aboye all, there is the problem of typicality. To what extent cana given case-study be taken as typical for the country, for aregion, for a state, for a type of community, for a particularfaction? Which is more typical of Revolutionary Michoacan (letalone Revolutionary Mexico): the bucolic Arcadia of San Jos deGracia, or the violent agrarismo of Naranja? 4 ' Revisionists wouldprefer to invoke San Jos, traditionalists would favour Naranja.Morelos, the site of Zapata's rebellion, offers a cast-iron case ofpopular, agrarian insurrection; but revisionists tend to isolateMorelos as an untypical example, just as traditionalists wouldargue that M orelos representa, in particularly concentrated form,the kind of ag rarian grievances and popular mobilization whichunderlay much of the Revolution.'" H ere, therefore, we face anold historiographical conundrum, that of distinguishing the typ-ical from the untypical, the illustrative case from the aberrant.Since local and regional studies, though rapidly growing in num-ber and sophistication, cannot offer a portrait of the entire coun-try, we find ourselves trading examples or hazarding statisticallyunfounded generalizations 43The temporal diversity of the R evolution is no less important.The Revolution varied over time: the Maderista revolution of1910-11 differed from the Constitutionalist revolution of 1913-14 ,the Sonoran regime of 1920-34 from the Cardenista of 1934-40,and that in turn from the "preferred" revolution post-1940. Withthe benefit of hindsight we will eventually know if the "PRI-stroika" of the late 1980s m arks a further twist in the revolution-ary tale. AH historians of twentieth-century Mexico, be theytraditionalists or revisionists, accept to a degree the significanceof these shifts. But, again, there is no unanimity. Some would

4 ' Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo; Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revoh in a Mexican Village(Englewood Cliffs, 1970); Paul Friedrich, The Princes of Naranja: An Essay inAnthrohistorical Method (Austin, 1986). There is the potential for infinite regress here:since we find it difficult to generalize about the Revolution its goals, components,modalities at the national level, we switch to the s tate or regional level; where,again, we are confronted by important variations, which seem to demand a closer local or municipal focus; which, in turn, reveals variations even within smallcommunities . .

42 Rutherford, Mexican Society, p. 220: "Zapatismo's social relevance within thewhole context of the Mexican Revolution is limited and secondary, for it was neverat any stage more than an isolated trouble spot"; Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. 8, 200,412: "barring the obvious case of Zapatismo, an untypical phenomenon, the inhabit-ants of rural Mexico lacked a sense of class and even of group". Cf. A lan Knight,The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986), i, pp. 309-51.4 Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution", p. 13.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION71concede the popular character of the armed revolution (say,1910-15), but would assert that its termination with the victoryof the (bourgeois?) Constitutionalists in 1915 led to the estab-lishment of an litist, tatiste, even neo-Porfirian regime." Inother words Mexico experienced a brief revolutionary interlude,when "the people" marched about on the political stage; butafter 1915 they were pushed aside by "revolutionary" lites,representative of the bourgeoisie, who substantiaily continued theold Porfirian project of capitalist development, state-building andthe repression of popular movements. Since only root-and-branchrevisionists (of whom there are some) w ould deny the importanceof powerful popular revolutionary movements during 1910-15,and only benighted apologists of the post-Revolutionary regimewould argue that the regime organically represented popularforces and grievances, there is a degree of common ground here;and, to that extent, historiaras of both revisionist and traditionalpersuasion would like Manuel Gmez M orn see 1915 as apivotal year in Mexico's modern history: a year in which the tideof civil war, multiple sovereignty and popular protest peaked andthen began to ebb, mak ing possible renewed political order andcentralization."

So too with the climacteric of 1940 (or thereabouts): manywould agree that, like it or not, a period of accelerated reform,in part stimulated by popular pressure and manifested in theCrdenas presidency (1934-40), came to an end in or around1938-40 , and gave way to more conservative policies, favourableto capital and hostile to the interests of peasants and workers. Inmy view the post-1940 shift is so clear and unequivocal that thislater period can be safely omitted from our discussion: there canbe no pretence that "the Revolution" conceived of as a radical,popular, agrarian movement continued beyond the SecondWorld W ar. Rather this recent period witnessed the definitive though not unchallenged consolidation of capitalism, encour-aged by a solicitous and supportive regime. But this outcomecannot serve as proof of the inherently meaningless or M achiavel-han character of the early Revolution, whether in its armed(1910-15) or even its institutional (1915-40) guise. In fact it can

" Womack, "M exican Revolution", p. 153." Manuel Gmez Morn, 1915 (Mexico, 1927); the significance of the intelectual"generation of 1915" is explored by Enrique K rauze, Caudi l los cul turales en la revolu-cin mexicana (Mexico, 1976).

17 2AST AND PRESENTUMBER 134be argued that t his later capitalist consolidation was in part facilit-ated by the preceding years of genuine upheaval and popularmobilization (just as "traditional" interpretations of the Englishand French Revolutions the "Old Guard" and "social" ver-sions respectively suggested that popular revolution presagedthe rise of capitalism in both countries)." Indeed this argumenthas an attractive logic, since it answers that old conundrum,beloved of Mexico-watchers: how did a regime born of socialrevolution eventually emerge as one of the most stable, pro-capitalist and socially regressive in L atin America? 4 7 Answer (invery simple terms): for the same reason that the English popularradicalism of the 1640s eventually gave way to the new-foundpolitical stability of the early eighteenth century and the " Vene-tian oligarchy" of the mid-eighteenth century." Popular radical-ism helped destroy the old regime, but could not install a popularalternative in its place; instead, having completed its destructivework, it fell victim to the new post-Restoration rulers of England:the bourgeoisified aristocracy, "Old Corruption", the EnglishP.R.I. 4 9If, in the case of Mexico, we agree to shelve discussion of theperiod after 1940 , we are still left with a serious debate about theimmediate post-Revolutionary period, the 1920s and 1930s. Towhat extent were the popular and agrarian forces of the armedrevolution (assuming that they did exist and are not, as somerevisionists would suggest, the figments of Revolutionary rhet-oric) embodied in, represented by, or capable of influencing, thepost-Revolutionary state? How important were the nascent peas-ant leagues and trade u nions, the nationalist legislation and, aboyeall, the agrarian reform? My own view is that, especially in the1930 s, these were sufficiently important and autonomous to qual-ify the revisionist picture of a manipulative and Machiavellianstate, dominating civil society. The state certainly sought tomanipulate; but even when it manipulated it perforce represented

" Clark, Revolut ion and Rebel l ion, p. 2, passim; Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpreta-t ion of the French R evolut ion (Cambridge, 1964)." Roger D. Hansen, The Poli t ics of Mexican Development (Baltimore, 1977 ), pp. 8,71 ff." J. H. Plumb, The Growt h of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London,1967)." E. P. Thompson, "T he Peculiarities of the English", in his The Pover ty of Theoryand Other Essays (London, 1978), p. 49; Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The GreatArch: English State Formation as Cultura l Revolut ion (Oxford, 1985), ch. 5. For theP.R.I., see aboye, n. 6.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION7 3(the dividing-line between "manipulation" and "representation"is a fine one, which some revisionist analyses assume rather thandemarcate). 5 A nd the outcome of this dialectic, certainly in the1930s, was a programme of radical reform which went beyondthe mere consolidation of ne o-Porfirian lites, or the constructionof a cynical, centralizing state.This, of course, is my own somewhat traditional opin-ion. 5 1 I advance it not in order to convine, but rather to suggestthat even for the post-Revolutionary period (1920-40) the currentof revisionist reinterpretation may have carried us too far; thatthe revisionist image of neo-Porfirian continuity, state-building,political centralization and popular quiescence (o r defeat) is over-stated and, at the very least, worthy of continued debate. Thusany comprehensive and fair analysis of revisionist and traditionalinterpretations must take into account both spatial and temporalvariations, and recognize that these make possible and evennecessary quite complex historiographical permutations andnuances. A historian can, quite consistently, argue a traditional(popular, agrarian) thesis for 1910-15 , but adopt a revisionist(tatiste, neo-Porfirian) stance for 1920-40 (or even 1920-34, afurther temporal refinement). Womack, it seems to me, has writ-ten a quintessentially traditional study of M orelos during theperiod of arm ed revolution, and a q uintessentially revisionistnarrative of Mexico during the same period. 5 2 It may help tosketch some of these historiographical divergences schematically(with the caveat that these a re my attributions: the cited historiansmay choose to locate themselves differently within the scheme orindignantly cast off its typological constraints). (See D iagram.)As this schema reveals, to some extent I dissent from the revision-ist scholarship of recent years, especially in respect of its treatment

" Alan K night, "Land and Society in Revolutionary Mexico: The Destruction ofthe Great Haciendas", Mexican Studiesl Estudios Mexicanos, vii (1991), pp. 73-104." The several tenets of revisionism, listed aboye, seem to display a distinct affinity,as do the mirror-image tenets of traditionalism; adherents of one are likely to beadherents of others. For myself, however, I dissent from one tenet which, whilepresent in traditional interpretations like Tannenbaum's, also reappears in revisionistwritings highly critical of Tannenbaum, as well as in m ore recent Marxist versions(and which consequently does not offer a good litmus test to differentiate these schoolsof thought): I refer to the de piction of the Revolution as a nationalist and even anti-imperialist movement (a "war of national liberation", in John Hart's words), directedagainst foreign, especially U.S., economic exploitation: see Hart, Revolut ionary Mexico;Alan Knight, U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1910-1940: An Interpretation (San Diego, 1987)." John Womack Jr., Zapata and the ~kan Revolution (New York, 1968); Wom-ack, "Mexican Revolution".

174AST AND PRESENTUMBER 1 3 4DIAGRAM*TradicionalevisionistOld Regime(c. 1876-1910)onzlez Navarrouerra

Revolution(1910-1920)art, Knight, Womack (1)uiz, Womack (2)Revolution(1920-1940)annenbaum, Shulgovskieyer, Falcn, AnguianoPost-1940.R.I. rhetoriclmost everybody*Note: The works and authors referred to in this diagram are Moiss GonzlezNavarro, Historia moderna de Mxico: el Porfiriato, la vida social (Mexico, 1970);Franqois-Xavier Guerra, Le Mxique: de rancien rgime la rvolution, 2 vols. (Paris,1985); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley, 1987); Alan Knight, Th eMexican Rev olu t ion, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986); Womack (1) refers to John WomackJr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1968), Womack (2) to John WomackJr., "The Mexican Revolution, 1910-19 20", in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The CambridgeHistory of Latin America, v (Cambridge, 1986); Ramon Ruiz, The Great Rebellion,Mexico, 1905-1924 (New York, 1980); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (NewYork, 1966; first pubd. 1933); Anatol Shulgovski, Mx ico en la encrucijada de su historia(Mexico, 1972); Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico, 1985; first pubd. 1974);Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion (Cambridge, 1976); Romana Falcn, "El surgimentodel agrarismo cardenista: una revisin de las tesis populistas", Historia Mexicana, xxvii(1978), pp. 333-86; Arturo Anguiano, El estado y la politica obrera del cardenismo(Mexico, 1975). P.R.I. rhetoric is especially apparent in such commemorative worksas Mxico, cincuenta aos de revolucin, 4 vols. (Mexico, 1960); Conferencia nacional deanlisis ideolgico sobre la revolucin m exicana ( 1910-1985) (Mexico, 1985).

of the 1910-20 period (for the 1920-40 period my dissent is lessmarked, or less developed; but there is still a substantial measureof disagreement, especially for the later 19 30s). This, I repeat, isnot because I regard revisionist scholarship as wrong-headed (andI certainly do not use "revisionist" as a term of opprobrium). Onthe contrary, many fine recent studies, notably in the field of localand regional history, combine excellent empirical evidence, theproduct of pioneering archival work, with a more or less clearcommitment to revisionism: the reader can benefit from the firstwithout buying the second. 5 3 Thus, beneath the grand synthesesand high-level debates, plenty of scope for agreement remains,especially at the level of middle- and lower-range hypotheses,which are often the stuff of history anyw ay; we should not force

" As this suggests, the em pirical evidence does not always sit entirely comfortablyalongside the revisionist conclusions. Examples would include Romana Falcn, R evo -lucin y caciquismo: San Luis Potosi, 1910-1938 (Mexico, 1984); Ian Jacobs, RancheroRevolt: The Mexican Revolution in the State of Guerrero (Austin, 1982).


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION75all modern Mexican historiography into a crude dichotomousscheme, traditionalists versus revisionists.But we should not gloss over differences either. I believe thetraditional, "Tannenbaumian" image of a popular, agrarian andpeasant revolution (never as crude in its original form as its criticstend to allege) remains to a large degree valid, especially for1910-15. I also believe that the post-Revolutionary regime of the1920s (and, a fortiori, the later 1930s) embodied some of thesesame characteristics, and that the post-Revolutionary history ofMexico prior to 1940 was not a simple saga of state-building andcapital accumulation. The period 1920-40 witnessed less the cre-ation of a political Leviathan, the monstrous progenitor of Mex-ican capitalism, than a sustained struggle for the Revolutionaryinheritance, the continuation of the armed revolution by othermeans. Classes, regions and ideologies contested that inheritance;and the state burgeoning, but still shaky and, aboye all, thetarget of recurrent political bids and campaigns did not con trolthe outcome. In a sense the state was the prize, not the maincompetitor. 5 4 Meanwhile the state faced serious opposition: fromforeign interests, militant Catholics, newly mobilized conservat-ives, and a host of caciques and caudillos whose parochial powersbarred the way to political centralization. Indeed, even after thepolitico-economic realignments of the 1940s, there still remainedwide areas of political contestation, notwithstanding the celeb-rated "economic miracle" and the "Peace of the P.R.I.". Thehegemony of state and party remained imperfect (the phrase "aSwiss-cheese P.R.I." has recently been coined) and popularmovements, challenges to centralized state power, continued toarise, even before the celebrated climacteric of 1968. 5 5 But theyshowed no sign of substantially threatening the survival of thecentral government, or the b road pattern of capitalist and inegalit-arian development which became firmly established after 1940.By then the tumultuous conflict, the popular mobilization and

' Alan Knight, "The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a'Great Rebellion'?", Bull. Latin Amer. Research, iv (1985), pp. 1-37; Spanish trans.in Cuadernos polticos, xlviii (1986), pp. 5-32." Alan Knight, "Historical Continuities in Social Movements", in Joe Fowerakerand Ann L. Craig (eds.), Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico (Boulder,Colo., 1990), pp. 78-102. In August 1968, on the eve of the Mexico Olympics, severa'

hundred civilian demonstrators, mostly students, were killed by government forcesat Tlatelolco in Mexico City; it is generally accepted that this notorious event bothrevealed and aggravated the "Revolutionary" state's loss of legitimacy.

176AST AND PRESENTUMBER 1 3 4the high political stakes of the Revolutionary era (1910-40) werethings of the past, still invoked in contempo rary rhetoric, buteffectively neglected in contemporary practice.It would be impossible in an article to enter into a detaileddiscussion of the merits and deficiencies of revisionism. As I havesuggested elsewhere, such a discussion would have to embraceboth empirical and theoretical dimensions." Empirically we facethe problem of assembling exam ples and case-studies in order toachieve a convincing overall picture. But this leads at once totheoretical problems: what criteria are to be used to evaluatepopular mobilization, state-building and degrees of social trans-formation? Often, for example, the "non-revolutionary" charac-ter of the "Revolution" (or "Great Rebellion") is established bysetting extreme and arbitrary standards: the only propermodern revolution has to be a Bolshevik one. 5 7 Similarly the non-revolutionary (docile, bucolic, God -fearing, inert) character ofthe Mex ican peasantry is established by requiring a degree ofsustained revolutionary activity, consciousness and unanimitywhich no class, not even the most hegemonic "class-for-itself"in history, has attained. Some of those who damn the M exicanRevolution for its comparative feebleness seem to have spen t littleor no time studying the comparative examples which they invoke,and which appear as reified abstractions, rather than complexhistorical processes. Thus the stance of revisionists vis--visthe Mexican Revolution their use of foreign sticks withwhich to beat remiss Mexican "revolutionaries" recallsE. P. Thompsons Podsnappian lampoon of Tom Nairn andPerry And erson: "Other countries . . . do . . . in Every R espectBetter. Their Bourgeois Revolutions have been M ature. TheirClass Struggles have been Sanguinary and Unequivocal. TheirIntelligentsia has been Autonomous and V ertically Integrated.

Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution"." Ruiz, Great Rebellion, pp. 4, 8. "New Left" interpretations of the Revolution(which include those of James Cockcroft, Adolfo Gilly and Arnaldo Crdova) are

more theoretically subtle: like Ruiz, they assume a capitalist Porfiriato and set up asocialist yardstick against which to judge the (inadequate) Revolution of 1910; unlikeRuiz, however, they credit that Revolution with powerful radical popular currentswhich, though they do not triumph, nevertheless do to varying degrees mouldthe Revolutionary outcome and presage further social, even socialist, transformation.Hence, for example, Gilly's recent commitrnent to Cardenismo, as both an historicalphenomenon of the 1930s and a political hope of the 1980s and 1990s. For a usefulrsum of these views, see Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, Mexico, 1910-1982:Reform or Revolution? (London, 1983), ch. 4.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION77Their Morphology has been T ypologically Concrete. Their Pro-letariat has been H egemonic". 5 8 One beneficial effect of a histori-ographical comparison such as this might be to sweep aside suchabstractions, and reveal the imperfections of all revolutions: thenotion that the grass in the other field is always redder wouldseem to be the result of reification conspiring with ignorance.For, in any revolution, the revolutionary activists are a minority;to prove that many peasants were indifferent or even hostile tothe Revolution (of 1910-15), or to the agrarian reform (of1934-40), does not invalidate the importante, radicalism andtransforming effect of these processes. 59 A related misconceptioninvolves the creation of abstract canons of "revolutionary" ortho-doxy, whereby only those possessed of "national projects" andrevolutionary blueprints are deemed "revolutionary" whereby, therefore, the vast majority of Mexico's revolutionaries,peasants especially, are instantly disfranchised. 6 Again this is acuriously arbitrary and ahistorical approach for those w ho claimprivileged access to the dialectical processes of history. Manyrevolutions have been the work of popular classes whose lack ofrevolutionary blueprints was more than offset by their objectiverevolutionary actions, by their violent rending of the old order,whether in rural England, France or Mexico. 6 'This privileging of the literate classes is apparent on the partof both Marxist and anti-Marxist analyses. While ArnaldoCrdova, drawing on an old Marxist tradition of anti-peasantism,stresses and presumably laments the peasantry's failure toachieve true revolutionary consciousness, Guerra celebrates suchsancta simplicitas; for him, the peasants lack any class identity,they are locked into their corporate, communal identities, andthey resist the siren song of meddlesome intellectuals and polticos,who are the true carriers of a corrosive, cerebral, revolutionaryJacobinism. 6 2 Here an explicit reliance on certain French Revolu-tionary historiography (Augustin Cochin and Furet in particular)

58 Thompson, "Peculiarities of the English", p. 37.Knight, "Land and Society".6 For a critique of Zapatismo along these fines, see Crdova, Ideologa de larevolucin mexicana, pp. 144-55; Knight, Mexican Rev olut ion, i, pp. 309-15, questionsthe critique; Arnaldo Crdova, La revolucin y el estado en Mxico (Mexico, 1989),p. 14, shows he has misunderstood the critique.61 See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistencein Southeast Asia (Yale, 1976), esp. pp. 10-11, 192.62 Guerra, Mxique, passim.

17 8AST AND PRESENTUMBER 13 4combines with a touching faith in the old certitudes of moderniza-tion theory. Some aspects of the old regime Guerra capturesbetter than anyone chiefly those aspects, such as Porfirianclientelism and M aderista ideology, which are susceptible to hispenetrating, but narrow, methodology. Others, such as popularmobilization, rural class conflict, U.S.-Mexican relations, andRevolutionary "developmentalism", he cannot encompass, andhence cannot evaluate.6 3 Guerra's old regime is analytically a verypartial one; his Revolution is no more than incipient (the studystops in 1911). One reason for this marked partiality, which isparticularly relevant in the comparative historiographical context,is Guerra's penchant for French (and, m ore generally, European)examples, and his questionable tendency to transport them, with-out adequate adjustment, across time and space. It is one thingto see the French (monarchical) anclen rgime as a victim ofenervating Enlightenment ideas and proselytizing intellectualcadres, quite another to see the Porfirian (republican) antiguorgimenhe heir of the Independence and Reform Wars, infusedwith liberal-positivistic philosophy in the same light. In Mexicothere could be no regicide, real or symbolic: monarchy, caste andcorporate privilege had been toppled years before, not least bythe efforts of Porfirio's fellow liberals. 6 4Finally, empirical and theoretical probiems afflict much of therevisionist analysis of the post-Revolutionary era, which is nowoften interpreted in terms of the rise and rise of the state (hence,"statolatry"); the state assumes the role which, in the W hig ("OldHat") historiography of England, was played by the ever-ascend-ant middle class. 6 5 Again, without entering into the debate, it canbe suggested that such ana lysis is excessively teleological, that ithomogenizes the complex vicissitudes of post-Revolutionary his-tory; that it lacks both the empirical and (perhaps more import-ant) the theoretical knowledge with which the weight of the statecan be m eaningfully calibrated. Too often, "statolatry" depends

63 See my review of Guerra, Mxique, in Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lxviii (1988),pp. 139-43.64 On the other hand, from a quite different standpoint, analogous to Frenchinterpretations such as that of Albert Soboul, which Guerra would surely reject, itcan be reasonably argued that Porfirian Mexico retained and in some areas evenreinforced " feudal" socio-economic forms, rooted in landlord exploitation of peonand sharecropper; and that the Revolution's destruction, over time, of these form swas one of its crucial "revolutionary" accom plishments.65 Knight, "Mexican Revolution", pp. 11-12; Clark, Revolution and Rebellion,pp. 2, 9.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION79on a ritual invocation of Bonapartism: another ill-consideredFrench Revolutionary impon which, even in its country of origin,leaves a lot to be desired in terms of clarity and precision. 6 6

IIRather than rehearse these empirical and theoretical questions,however, I want to take a different tack. First, I will offer somepassing comparisons with other revolutionary revisionisms. Sec-ondly, I shall consider how and why revisionism has developed.Finally, I will ask whether these revisionisms in any sense repres-ent related branches of a common revisionist trunk, and, if so,what are the ideological nutrients of this recent effiorescence?My attempt at comparison consists paraphrasing Colling-wood of crude "scissors and paste" historiography; or,adopting a Hexterian vocabulary, of blatant "source-mining". Inother words, I scanned some texts and probably found what Iwas looking for. The result is a brief collage, which purports toshow that several of the main tenets of Mexican Revolutionaryrevisionism U sted above 6 7 are also to be found in the corpusof English and F rench Revolutionary revisionism. Conversely therespective orthodoxies also have a g ood deal in comm on. In eachcase, of course, analysts are at pains to point out that neitherrevisionism nor orthodoxy are interpretative monoliths. 6 8 Likeme, they are not sure whether, for example, revisionism is sowell entrenched as to constitute a new orthodoxy. GeraldCavanaugh, in celebrating Alfred Cobban's revisionist tour deforce, plays Lucretius to Cobban's Epicurus: ergo vivida vis animipervicit ("so the lively force of his mind has broken down allbarriers"); but, if the old paradigm of the "social interpretation"has indeed been single-handedly destroyed, as Cavanaugh boldlyclaims, he remains unsure what new paradigm Cobban-Epicurus

Knight, "Mexican Revolution", pp. 4-5.6' See aboye, pp. 166-8.Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", in RichardCust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Confite in Early Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 3,11; Knight, "Interpreting the Mexican Revolution", p. 10; Knight, Mexican Revolu-tion, i, p. xi. Martyn Lyons, "Cobb and the Historian", in Gwynn Lewis and ColinLucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794-1815(Cambridge, 1983), p. 1, notes that historiographical divisions tend to be crude andthat there are nimble individuals, like "Professor Jacques Godechot . . . who hassuccessfully managed to dodge the cross-fire".

180AST AND PRESENTUMBER 13 4has put in its place. 6 9 Notwithstanding these indeterminacies,however, we can still discern striking parallels.I approach these parallels from my ow n, Mexicanist standpoint(and no doubt a different approach would yield different, thoughnot, I think, radically different, results). Each of the eight revi-sionist propositions culled from Mexican studies has clear parallelsin the English and F rench literature; in listing them, I apologizefor a degree of unavoidable repetition.1. First, the notion of a progressive revolution incurs revisionistaccusations of teleology; of, in the English context, "Old Hat"Whiggism. R evisionists set great store by contemporary opinions(especially critica' contemporary opinions) concerning the revolu-tionary process; they abhor hindsight (at least, they say they do;in practice they use it like everyone else); and they sometimesmake the preposterous and inconsistent claim that historymust be analysed in the terms used by the historical actors them-selves (that, in the anthropological terminology of Kenneth P ikeand Marvin Harris, history can operate only in the "emic"mode)." On this basis they tend to conclude that revolutions"Gerald J. Cavanaugh, "The Present State of French Revolutionary Histori-ography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond", French Hist . Studies, vii (1971-2), p. 589: "Inour present case of the historical paradigm, the outsider, Cobban, appeared andprecipitated the overthrow of the old paradigm but unfortunately, if understandably,he could not provide a new one" (p. 597). Cf. Bailey, "Revisionism and RecentHistoriography", p. 63, who similarly sees [M exican] revisionism as a powerful anti-thesis, yet to be synthesized.' "Emic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of the native informant tothe status of ultimate judge of the adequacy of the observer's descriptions and analyses.. Etic operations have as their hallmark the elevation of observers to the status ofultimate judges of the categories and concepts used in descriptions and analyses .. .Frequently, etic operations involve the measurement and juxtaposition of activitiesand events that native informants may find inappropriate and meaningless": MarvinHarris, Cultura l Materia l ism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York, 1979),p. 32. Revisionist studies of the English Revolution seem to parade their "emic"approach more than their French counterparts (see, for example, Clark, Revolutionand R ebel l ion, p. 36, where, attributing to Christopher Hill the view that "the CivilWar . . . must have been the result of the impersonal forces of social change", Clarkquestions whether "such forces have any existence outside the historian's study").French revisionists, while they similarly criticize their orthodox opponents for squeez-ing history into a teleological strait-jacket, argue that the strait-jacket was manufac-tured c. 1789; that, in other words, the orthodox interpretation remains imprisonedwithin the emic categories of the revolutionaries themselves. For example, Furetpraises Tocqueville for stressing "the discrepancy he discerns between the intentionsof actors and the historical role they played", and criticizes Soboul because "he takeshis bearings from the contemporary perceptions of the event he describes": Furet,Interpret ing the French Revolut ion, pp. 16, 92. Simon Schama, on the other hand,justifies narrative on the grounds that "artificial as written narratives might be, they

(con, on p. 181)


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION8 1were less genuinely popular than orthodox historians believed(see no. 8 below) and that, moving on:2. Revolutions were more the w ork of lites than of masses. TheStuart House of Commons was the site, not of major ideologicalor social conflicts, but of "m ore prosaic interests intrigues atcourt, the war plans of the 1620s, plain economic interest, thepressure of local and county politics, the scramble for office":English M.P.s, in other words, were pretty much like M exicancaciques or "out" landlords; and the revolutions they captainedwere N amierite competitions for place and position, not ideolo-gical or class struggles." Linked to this is the "provincialism" ofEnglish Revolutionary, and what has even been termed the"municipalization" of French Rev olutionary, studies. 7 2 Eliteswield power and the masses are inert because they arelocked into localist factions, vertical integrations of differentclasses premised upon deferential sentiments and parochial allegi-ances: the English county communities, Mexican serrano move-ments. 7 3 To argue for such vertically-integrated factionalformations need not, of course, carry unqualified revisionist as opposed to traditional implications; factions of this kind(whose appearance, under different guises in different revolutions,is of intrinsic interest) may in fact represent both manifestationsof popular m obilization and serious challenges to the nationalstatus quo ante. Their lack of interna] class polarization does notnecessarily make them forces for standpat conservatism. However,they assume distinctively revisionist colouring when the deferenteand parochialism which underpin them are stressed, and whenthey are depicted, in somewhat rosy, sentimentalized terms, asembodiments of a "one-class", gemeinschaftlich, rustic com-munity. 7 4in. 70 com.,often correspond to ways in w hich historical actors construct events"; hence theyoffer "chaotic authenticity over the command ing neatness of historical convention":Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), p.xvi. Theodore K. Rabb, "Revisionism Revised: Two Perspectives on Early StuartParliamentary History: (I) The Role of the Comm ons", Past and Present, no. 92 (Aug.1981), p. 59.

72 Clark, Revolut ion and Rebell ion, ch. 4; Lyons, "Cobb and the H istorians", p. 7." Knight, Mexican Revolution, i, pp. 115-26, 301-9." Christopher Hill, "Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England",Past and Present, no. 92 (Aug. 1981), p. 103, on "the danger of sentimentalizing the`county community'" and of glossing over class differences within provincial society;see also Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", pp. 3, 5.

1 8 2AST AND PRESENTUMBER 1 3 43. Conversely, revisionism tends to stress the overweening powerof the centralizing revolutionary state, be it Cromwellian, Jacobinor Constitutionalist/Sonoran/Cardenista. The history of therevolution becomes a counterpoint between organic local commu-nities and a mechanical national Leviathan. Richard C obb (doyenof a revisionist current, if not headmaster of a revisionist"school") "is eternaily hostile to all those who exercise power";his "prime villain" is Robespierre, the hero of o lder, orthodoxhistorians like Albert Mathiez and Georges Lefebvre. 7 5 Aswe shall see (no. 8 below), we could substitute Calles " an[Edouard] Herriot in a Mexican general's riding boots", 7 6 as hehas been called for Robespierre, Michoacan for the Vende,the Cristiada for the chouannerie.4. The revolution thus becomes a political undertaking: at best,an exercise in ambitious and arrogant state-building; at worst, acareerist scramble for office. Those who seek to interpret revolu-tions in terms of underlying "structural" causes, socio-economicpressures, or class antagonisms, are labelled crude redu ctionists. 7 7chief novelty of the French Revolution was its introduction of anew p olitical culture, though, to h is credit, he recognizes thatthis approach risks (a) an underestimation of class and (b) anexaggeration of the significance of "discourse". 7 8 Guerra, drawingheavily on French historiographical models, notably Cochin andFuret, sees the Mexican Revolution (or at least six months of it)as the culmination of N amierite clientelist conffict on the on ehand and of a b old, new, modernizing and m obilizing politicalculture on the other.5. As a result the outcome of the revolutionary process is aNamierite reshuffie and, perhaps, a more significant shift in polit-ical culture. It is no t a social transformation, nor even a majorcontribution to a longer process of social transformation. It iscertainly not a "bourgeois" revolution. Cobban, an admirer con-fidently asserts, has "exploded the `Marxise theory which pur-ported to explain the Revolution"; "like the concept of the

" Lyons, "Cobb and the Historians", p. 13.76 Meyer, Cristiada, ii, p. 169, quoting the Italian iournalist Marco A ppelius.77 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 9, 22, 42, where the autho r finally mies thatany "socio-economic" explanation is, ipso facto, "economic-reductionist".78 Keith Michael Baker, "Introduction", to Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The FrenchRevolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, i, The Political Culture of theOld Regime (Oxford, 1987), pp. xi-xiii.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION83bourgeoisie as a unified social class, that of the sans-culottesdissolves under analysis". 7 9 Simon Schama, resurrecting a wearychoreographical metaphor, scoffs at the "dialectical dance rou-tine" of social classes and concludes that "the bourgeoisie' saidin the Marxist accounts to have been the authors and beneficiariesof the [revolutionary] event have become social zombies, theproduct of historiographical obsessions rather than historicalrealities" . 8 06. Revisionists therefore stress continuity over rupture (whichfits well with their denial of teleological trends). According to onecritic of the E nglish provincialist school, the latter "carne near toproving that the Civil War did not happen". 8 ' For Clark, theEnglish "ancien regime" survives lustily, a deferential, aristo-cratic, monarchical and confessional state/society, well into thenineteenth century. 8 2 In the French case the argument for con-tinuity can count on the august authority of Tocqueville; andhere, too, the point is almost reached where the Revolutiondisappears from sight. Cobban punctures the "myth" of theRevolution; Cobb, focusing on the marginal poor, deems theRevolution an irrelevance. 8 3 For Ruiz, the Mexican Revolutionis a "great rebellion" (an interesting, although it seems unwitting,borrowing from Clarendon, who is, of course, something of anEnglish revisionist icon), or even a mere "mutiny"." Guerra's

" Cavanaugh, "Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography", p. 587.Schama, Citizens, p. xiv.81 Hill, "Parliament and People", p. 101.82 Clark, English Society.83 Alfred Cobban, "The Myth of the French Revolution", in his Aspeas of theFrench Revolution (New York, 1968); Lyons, "Cobb and the Historian", pp. 12-13.Note also Schama, Citizens, p. xiv. For a more balanced view of the degree of changebrought about by the French Revolution and one which offers striking parallelswith Mexico see Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 391-425;Knight, Mexican Revolution, ii, pp. 517-27, offers some parallels, and counters revi-sionist dismissal of the Revolution by suggesting that, aside from any structural socio-economic changes, "the temper of the people the M exican mentalit we might

say had altered, and that new structures of power were demanded precisely becauseof that alteration" (p. 520); w hich echoes the (much more developed) arguments ofMichel Vovelle, Introduccin a la historia de la Revolucin francesa (Barcelona, 1984) ,pp. 76-7, chs. 7-10." Ruiz, Great Rebellion; Ramon Ruiz, The People of Sonora and Yankee Capitalists(Tucson, 1988), p. 228; Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 12, 100 (citing Zaller:"some revisionists prefer the title 'The Great Rebellion' for its historical authenti-city"); Cust and Hughe s, "Introduction: After Revisionism", p. 15, where the authorsnote that the revisionists' approach has been "much influenced by Clarendon's Historyof the Great Rebellion, with its emphasis on the short-term causes of the Civil Warand contingent events".

184AST AND PRESENTUMBER 13 4Revolution (a critic claims) is just a "blip" on the screen ofMexican history. 8 57. W hile revisionists write down the revolution as manipulated,political and of limited significance, they write up the andenrgime as organic, harmonious and durable. If the revolution wasan irrelevance or a blip, it follows that much, even most, of theold regime survived. To be assailed by "revolutions" such asthese was, to borrow a phrase of Den is Healey, like being savagedby a dead sheep. We have noted the tendency of the Englishprovincialist school to depict "local society as basically settledand harmonious, with vertical links binding together the differentsocial groupings and a general acceptance of the authority andleadership of the gentry". 8 6 Similarly bucolic images can be culledfrom Mexican historiography. 8 7 Who or what entered Arcadiaand ended the idyll? B y definition, disruption cannot stem fromclass antagonisms: it must be exogenous rather than endogenous.The answer strangely evocative of Richard Hofstadter's "para-noid style in American politics" is: a minority of interna]subversives, or the machinations of foreign enemies. 8 8 Since cul-ture, rather than class, is given priority, it must be carriers of anew subversive culture who disrupt Arcadia from without.The English Civil War " carne to each county from outside", notesan ironic (orthodox) critic; it was the devious Anabaptists, theroyalist historian William Dugdale alleged in the 1680s, whobrought on the Civil W ar "by planting schismatick lecturers inmost corporate towns and populous places throughout the realm,so to poison the people with anti-monarchical principles". 8 9later, and convinced of the centrality of religion, sees Dissent asthe gravedigger of the Eng lish "ancien regime". 9 In eighteenth-

" Paul Vanderwood, "Building Blocks but Yet No Building: Regional History andthe Mexican Revolution", Mexican S tudiesl Estudios Mex icanos, iii (1987), p. 232. Itdoes not appear that Vanderwood disagrees that much with Guerra: elsewhere, herefers to the 1810 insurgency and 1910 Revolution as "two important conjunctures two rather large bleeps along the continuum of M exican history": Paul Vander-wood, "Comparing M exican Independence with the Revolution: Causes, Conceptsand Pitfalls", in Jaime E. Rodrguez O. (ed.), The Independence of Mexico and theCreation of the New Nation (Los Angeles, 1989), p. 312.

86 Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", p. 5." Gonzlez, Pueblo en vilo; Guerra, Mxique, i, pp. 120-4, 127-9.19685See. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Policia (New York,89 Cust and Hughes, "Introduction: After Revisionism", p. 15.99 Clark, English Society, chs. 5, 6.


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION85century France, Cochin believed, it w as the free-thinking, Free-masonic societies which performed a similarly subversive role; anargument G uerra faithfully echoes for late nineteenth-centuryMexico. A t least this argument offers a general explanation, albeita strongly idealist one. It clearly offers a partial truth (that revolu-tions were preceded and although this is often less clear carried out by bearers of new, heterodox ideas). B ut it becomesvery questionable when its protagonists offer it as something akinto the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Econom ic reduction-ism having b een ceremoniously trashed, idealist reductionismtakes its place.Alternatively (and this alternative is considerably worse) thetocsin of revolution is sounded, not by domestic subversives, butforeign meddlers. Revolution is triggered, pretty fortuitously, byforeign war and invasion. Only such exoge nous factors can upsetthe happy harmony of domestic politics. Revolution depends onthe random roll of geopolitical dice. For war induces "adminis-trative debility" and with it a vacuum at the centre and, inJames Ha rrington's words, a dissolution of government, which inturn causes civil war; it is not a popular mobilization and civilwar which causes the dissolution of government. 9 1 Such an inter-pretation fits neatly with certain fashionable general theories ofrevolution, which similarly stress externa], military and geopolit-ical pressures within the international state system as key stimuliof revolution. 9 2 Such theories, however, are notoriously ex postfacto; they do not explain why one war, rather than another,should lead to domestic political dbcle. And in the Mexicancase (usually neglected or misunderstood by such theorists) nowar was fought, let alone lost; no international crisis triggeredthe revolution. 9 3 Notwithstanding the assertions of some histor-

91 See the critique of Corvad Russell by Derek Hirst, "Revisionism Revised: TwoPerspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History: (2) The Place of Principle", Pastand Present, no. 92 (Aug. 1981), pp. 80, 83-4.Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,Russia and China (Cambridge, 1980).

93 As I have argued elsewhere, Skocpol's state-centred theory of revolutionaryetiology whatever its merits in the Eurasian context fares pretty badly in L atinAmerica (Mexico especially): see A lan Knight, "Social Revolution: A Latin AmericanPerspective", Bull. Latin Amer. R esearch, ix (1990), pp. 175-8. Nevertheless Skocpolhas received favourable mention from analysts of Latin American revolutions: SteveTopik, "Mexican Independence in Comparative Perspective", in Rodriguez (ed.),Independence of Mexico, p. 333 ; Ian Roxborough, "Revolution in Latin America"(paper delivered at the 15th Latin A mer. Studies Assoc. Conference, Miami, Dec.1989).

186AST AND PRESENTUMBER 13 4ians, the Harringtonian explanation of revolution is thoroughlyinappropriate for Mexico: the civil war very much caused thedissolution of the government, rather than vice versa." Moregenerally, too, revisionists stress chance and contingency overpattern and structure. If it is not the fortunes of foreign war, itis the vagaries of individual character which count. Clark sees"chance, ignorance and error overriding purposeful endeavour";Schama terms the French Revolution "a thing of contingenciesand unforeseen consequences". 9 58. Finally, negative re-evaluations of revolution encourage posit-ive re-evaluations (sometimes of a somewhat contrived andpolemical character) of counter-revolution. We have seen thatrevisionist M exican historians have sought to rehabilitate bothindividual counter-revolutionaries, like Huerta and Flix Daz,and more importantly and successfully collective counter-revolutionary movements like the Cristiada. Again, the parallelsare striking. Jean Meyer deems the Cristiada the greatest peasantmovement in modern M exican history; Furet makes the sameclaim for the Vende. 9 6 It is a counter-revolutionary tune whichreally sets the sabots and huaraches marching off to war. At thesame time, M eyer and Furet criticize with some justification,but also, perhaps, trop de zle the orthodox view of theCristeros/Vendeans as instrumenta o f landlord and clerical manip-ulation. 9 7 Rightly questioning crude socio-economic reduction-

94 Paul Vanderwood, "Resurveying the M exican Revolution: Three ProvocativeSyntheses", Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, v (1988), pp. 147-62, echoes theHarringtonian thesis in respect to Mexico, as does Simon Miller, "Land and L abourin Mexican Rural Insurrections", Bull. Latin Amer. Research, x (1991), p. 72.95 Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 18, 36, citing Laslett; Schama, Citizens, p.xiv (see also p. 6). Elsewhere Clark refers to the final "defeat of the 'old society', inand after the events of 1828-32" as being "no more foreordained than Napoleon'sdefeat at Waterloo" or, presumably, Nottingham Forest's defeat in the 1991 CupFinal (Clark, English Society, p. 7). Cavanaugh, "Present State of French Revolution-ary Historiography", p. 590, approvingly quotes Cobban to the effect that "at soypoint the course of the Revolution could be diverted by a chance happening, or anindividual decision, determined by a freak of personal character", and links thisobservation to a similarly accidentalist view of the Russian Revolution put forwardby George Kennan. Again, A nglo-Saxon revisionist historians (of both the Englishand French Revolutions) seem much more drawn to such shapeless and contingentinterpretations than their French counterparts, whose revisionism involves structuralexplanations (cf. aboye, n. 70).96 Meyer, Cristiada, iii, p. 23; Meyer, Rvolu t ion m exica ine , p. 104; Frangois Furet,"Vende", in Furet and Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution,pp. 165-75." Meyer, Cristiada, esp. i, pp. 281-97; Furet, "Vende", pp. 17 1-5. Doyle gener-alizes that "anti-revolution . . . was a popular movement far more so than that of

(con, on p. 187)


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION8 7ism, they end up asserting the transparent religiosity of thesecounter-revolutionary movements. 9 8 The problem with thisapproach is that it is assertive, over-reliant on the overt statem entsof the participants, and thus, like so m uch revisionist scholarship,myopically wedded to contemporary sources and opinions (and,one might add, a skewed selection of such sources and opinions).Again we have a perversely "emic" mode of historiography,which charges any analysis of covert motivation ("etic" analysis)with being "reductionist". 9 9 But in this respect Jean Meyer andFuret are sophisticated in comparison to Michael Meyer andClark. The latter's revisionism involves the rehabilitation ofindividual counter-revolutionaries, the simple reversal of theold Manichaean orthodoxy, hence the highly selective invocationof specific traits or policies. Michael Meyer sets out toredeem Huerta by questioning his direct involvement in politicalin. 97 cont.)the sansculottes who have usually monopolized this description"; indeed, "there is asense in which the sansculottes were anti-revolutionary, too"; which argument seemsto depend on privileging one revolution (of several) as the Revolution: Doyle, OxfordHistory of Me French Revolution, p. 407.98 Meyer bases his argument heavily on oral accounts, concluding: " in general, themotivation is religious . . . it is a question of a reaction of self-defence, the mostnatural kind. The peasant knew only one thing: the soldiers carne, closed the church,arrested the priest, shot those who protested, hung their prisoner [sic], burned thechurch and raped the women . . . These aggrieved peasants, who loved their village,church and priest, very naturally rose up. That other interests, other motives fordiscontent, were intermingled, is of little importance": Meyer, Cristiada, iii, p. 295.According to Furet, "Vende", p. 173, "all indications are that the principal sourceof the Vendean revolt was religious and not social or simply political". Both authorsalso stress the dogmatic ferocity of revolutionary repression what Meyer terms a"murderous apocalypse" (in his bibliographical essay on "Mexico: Revolution andReconstruction in the 1920s", in Bethell [ed.], Cambridge History of Latin America,v, p. 847). Against these interpretations can be set the more sociopolitical (neo-orthodox?) explanations of Charles Tlly, The Vencle (London, 1964), and RamnJrade, "Religion, Politics and the State: The Rural-Urban Alliance in MexicosCristero Insurrection" (paper delivered at the 15th Latin Amer. Studies Assoc. Confer-ence, Miami, Dec. 1989).

99 See aboye, n. 70. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 15, 65-6, 106-9, also putsin a pitch for transparent religious explanations, by way of "countering reduction-ism", and (p. 103) he blames "Old Guard" and "Old Hat" historians victims oftheir "secular priorities" for failing to "understand the ancien regime on its ownterms" and for deploying concepts (radicalism, liberalism) "of which contemporarieswere as yet innocent". By the same token, it is presumably illicit to talk of sixteenth-century inflation, or seventeenth-century plague bacilli, or eighteenth-century demo-graphy, and so on ad absurdum. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondsworth, 1964),p. 25, takes a justifiable swipe at [ancient] historians who "cannot cheat themselvesfinto the past by using unfamiliar and obsolete words, any more than they wouldbecome better Greek or Roman historians if they delivered their lectures in a chlamysor a toga". See also Hill, "Parliament and People", p. 119.

1 8 8AST AND PRESENTUMBER 1 3 4assassinations (this might be termed the Salvadorean gambit) andby writing up Huerta's supposed commitment to reform.i Clark,driven by his distaste for revolution, embraces the likes of theOld Pretender and Timothy Brecknock, a "practising alchemistwho . . . was reputed to drink a bowl of his own blood everyGood Friday as a specific for long life".''

II IFinally, there is the tempting but difficult question of acco untingfor these common traits which, if I am right, characterize revolu-tionary historiography in these three discrete cases. By virtue ofbeing the most recent of the three, the Mexican R evolution is,very likely, the one most intimately linked to contemporary polit-ical issues. Of course, even the English and (a fortiori) FrenchRevolutions carry political connotations, and provide ample polit-ical ammunition. Tony Benn invokes the Diggers, and questionswhether the Glorious Revolution was really so glorious; Philippede Villiers talks of the "hundreds of Popieluskos" who perishedin the Terror. i 2 More important, historians and their history areinfluenced by contemporary trends and issues. Sometimes thatinfluence is diffuse and non-specific, moulding general approachesand interpretations (more of that in conclusion) ; at other times itmay prompt targeted analogies as when Clark rounds offagainst that bte noire of modern Toryism, the Greater LondonCouncil, or snipes at the Social Democratic Party (both exam ples,we might note, of how Clark's essay has, in the words of onereviewer, virtually "become obsolete before its publication"). 103Either way, historians can hardly claim to insulate their workfrom contemporary attitudes and inclinations.'" James Joll's

Meyer, Huerta, passim.i' J oanna Innes, "Jonathan Clark, Social History, and Englands Anden Regime " ,Past and Present, no. 115 (May 1987), p. 166 n. 3. Cust and Hughes, "Intrduction:Alter Revisionism", p. 14, points to the revisionists tendency to "reject some percep-tions and take others at face value", for example, those of Laud and Charles I.

102Phillipe De Villiers, "La Terreur tait-elle ncessaire?", Nouvel observateur, 4-10May 1989.On the "antics of the Greater London Council" and provincialism as "anhistoriographical echo of the value-nexus of the SDP", see Clark, Revolution andRebellion, pp. 57, 59; the quote is from David Underdowns review, in Amer. Hist.R ey . , xciii (1988), pp. 1047-8.

1" Clark, Revolu t ion and Rebel l ion, p. 100 n. 27, points out that not all revisionistsare "scholars with present-day conservative opinions", Corvad Russell being anobvious example; which point Daniel Szechi, in a communication to Amer. Hist. Rey.,

(cont. on p. 189)


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REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION89observation that, while all history may be contemporary history,some is more contemporary than others, would seem to b e par-ticularly true in the case of revolutions.'" As regards Mexico, Ihave no doubt, recent interpretations of the Revolution have beenstrongly coloured by the historical record of the last twenty ortwenty-five years: a period initiated with the traumatic Tlatelolcomassacre of 1968, characterized by the apparent delegitimizationof the regime and the collapse of the import-substitution industri-alization model of development, and culminating in economictravails after 1982 and the electoral bombshell of 1988, when theP.R.I., the party of the Revolution, felt obliged to resort to"electoral alchemy" to preserve its monopoly of power. Womackis surely right to link revisionism to this collective experience,especially to the repression of 1968: "the standard interpretationof the Revolution, according to which the people's will had beeninstitutionalized in the government, made historical explanationof the repression impossible. For some young scholars the mosttempting explanation was to argue, as the critics always had, thatthe Revolution had been a trick on 'the people' ". 1 0 6 We shouldadd, too, that today's revisionist historians have grown up in abipolar world, in which, especially from the Latin Americanperspective, the United States is noted more for Nixonian orReaganite aggression than for W ilsonian or R ooseveltian reform-ism; the United States thus appears as a threat, not an example;and it is the threat (not the example) which is read back to thedays of the Revolution, when in fact a different world orde

Knight Revisionism

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