Echoes of the Marseillaise

The recent anti-communist revolutions of 1989 further polarised commentators between those who saw them as a culmination or embodiment of French revolutionary ideas and those who saw it as their emphatic repudiation.

Hobsbawm analyses the Revolution primarily from the perspective of how it has been subsequently interpreted over the course of the two centuries since it occurred, and examines the way that it has been re-written based on contemporary ideologies.

He argues, for instance, that the bicentenary was "largely dominated by those who, to put it simply, do not like the French Revolution and its heritage".

He argues further that many Marxists, chiefly from 1917 to the 1960s used it as an example of a much longer-term reading of political change but that in the 1970s and 1980s (after the first major work of revisionism by Alfred Cobban written in the Cold War milieu of the 1950s) many historians began to argue that the Revolution achieved only limited results which were outweighed by extravagant costs.

In his eyes, this shift of interpretation was a false one, and his work concludes that the Revolution was a crucial event not only for what it achieved in itself, but in terms of its longer-term patrimony to history.