"New Russian School" in the historiography of the French Revolution of the XVIII century.

The study of the French Revolution in Russia dates back to September 6, 1868, when V.I. Guerrier began to lecture on the history of the revolution at Moscow University. In the next three decades, V.I. Guerrier, I.V. Luchitsky , M.M. Kovalevsky , their students, and then the students of their students, created one of the leading scientific schools in the world historiography of the revolution, called the “Russian school” (école russe). A characteristic feature of the “Russian school” was ideological and methodological pluralism: its representatives varied in their works different methods and approaches, following only their own tastes and preferences. Another important feature of the “Russian school” is its absolute integration into world science. Russian historians, no less than French ones, used materials from the central and departmental archives of France in their works, and therefore in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the main works of Russian scientists on this subject were translated and published in France) ^[3] .

The Soviet school of historians of the French Revolution that came to replace the “Russian school” after 1917, on the contrary, existed almost in the conditions of autarchy from world historical science. With the establishment of the Iron Curtain, Soviet historians of the French Revolution lost the opportunity to regularly work in the French archives. If in the late 1920s and in the 1960s and 1980s some of the Soviet researchers were given permission to travel abroad, then even such a visit to the country under study was limited, as a rule, to several weeks. In the absence of full access to foreign archives, Soviet historians had to develop those relatively few funds of French historical documents that previously came to Russia in various ways. But even when studying their capabilities, Soviet researchers were significantly limited by the need to use exclusively Marxist methodology. Therefore, the vast majority of the numerous works on the French Revolution that appeared in the USSR turned out to be outside the mainstream of the development of world historiography. Abroad, they knew almost nothing about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and even if they did, the compositions that were mostly offered by the Marxist-Leninist “rethinking” of studies published in the West did not, as a rule, make a great impression on foreign colleagues. An exception to this general rule was only the work of J. M. Zaher , V. M. Dalin and A. V. Ado , which for various reasons received wide international recognition ^[4] .

The Formation of the “New Russian School”

The change of research paradigms and generations of scientists in the Russian historiography of the French Revolution began in the 1980s and later received the name “changement de jalons” ^[5] in the scientific literature by the name of an article by A. V. Chudinov , where these processes were analyzed ^[6] . Already in 1995, A. V. Ado , the then indisputable leader of Russian historiography of the French Revolution , noted a radical change in scientific paradigms:

“The Soviet historiography of the French Revolution ended. It is being replaced by the formation of the new Russian historiography of the French Revolution. "It does not lose continuity with the most positive legacy of Soviet historiography, but it belongs to a different time and has its own special face."

- Ado A.V. Letter to Professor Shen Chengxin // Bulletin of Moscow University. Ser. 8, the story. 1996. No. 5. P. 32.

Research Areas of Scientists at the New Russian School

Representing the third stage in the development of Russian historiography of the French Revolution, the “new Russian school” maintains continuity with both of the previous ones. It is brought together with the “Russian school” by complete methodological pluralism and tight integration into the international scientific community. Continuity with the Soviet school can be traced in the subject of part of its research. To date, the development of the "new Russian school" can be divided into two periods characterized by different research topics.

In the second half of the 1990s - in the 2000s, the main directions of research of the "new Russian school" were determined by the desire of its representatives to form their own identity, different from the Soviet school, and therefore partly represented a direct or indirect denial of scientific attitudes of such. This was due to the increased interest of Russian historians in this period to the practically unstudied during the Soviet era, but only to “exposed”, conservative and “revisionist” (“critical”) ^[7] historiography of the French Revolution. The history of Soviet historiography itself was also subjected to critical reflection ^[8] .

Another line of research by historians of the “new Russian school” also represented a dialectical denial, or rather, the development of the scientific heritage of Soviet historiography of the French Revolution. If the latter was characterized by a kind of “Jacobinocentrism” - increased attention to left-wing political groups, then the efforts of the representatives of the “new Russian school” in this period focused on studying a wide range of political forces that were to the right of the Jacobins: the Felyans ^[9] , constitutional monarchists ^{[10 ]} , Thermidorians ^[11] , royalist emigration ^[12] and Vendee rebels ^[13] .

In the 2010s, scientific problems no longer directly related to the legacy of Soviet historiography were at the center of the research interests of Russian historians of the French Revolution. Continuity with the latter remains only in the desire to consider inextricably linked the history of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, as did the Soviet historian V. G. Revunenkov .

One of the priority areas for this period was imagological research carried out on the basis of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, that is, the study of the image of the Other and, above all, the image of the Enemy ^[14] .

Another main area of ​​research by historians of the “new Russian school” in the 2010s is the study in historical retrospective of the conflict of the liberal-democratic and traditionalist paradigms at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. inside France and beyond ^[15] .

• Gordon A.V. Historians of the Iron Age. Moscow - St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2018.448 p.
• Tanshina N.P. On the 150th anniversary of the study of the French Revolution in Russia: from Guerrier to the "new Russian school" // New and modern history. 2018. No. 6. P. 118-136.
• Uvarov P. Yu. Our favorite revolution (about the book by A. Chudinov, but not only about it) // New Literary Review. 2018. No. 6 (154). S. 313-325.
• Chudinov A. V. "New Russian school" in the historiography of the French Revolution: ad fontes! // UNIVERSITAS HISTORIAE: Collection of articles in honor of Pavel Yuryevich Uvarov. Moscow, 2016.S. 523-534.
• Chudinov A. V. “Russian School” of the Historiography of the French Revolution of the 18th Century : Choosing the Way , 2008.
• Chudinov A.V. History of the French Revolution: the path of knowledge. Moscow: Political Encyclopedia, 2017.280 s.
• Écrire l'histoire par temps de guerre froide: Soviétiques et Français autour de la crise de l'Ancien régime. Paris, 2014.312 p.
• Ducange J., Tchoudinov A. La Révolution comme modèle et comme miroir (URSS, Chine, Japon) // Annales historiques de la Révolution française. 2017. No. 1 (387). P. 3-8.