François Furet’s role in creating a new orthodoxy as far as historiography of the 1789 revolution is concerned is well known, and is significant in its own right. But it is also interesting to examine Furet’s liberal re-interoretation of the revolution and its heritage in the context of the emergence of a more general, liberal discourse on the part of various scholars and ideologues – political philosophers, historians, social theorists and anthropologists – who set out to consolidate such liberal tradition as there was in France, to re-work areas which had hitherto been largely the preserve of left intellectuals, to import ideas from abroad, and generally to create on the intellectual plane an ongoing, sympathetic discussion of French political liberalism. In addition to François Furet, relevant individuals include Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Rosanvallon, Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, Jacques Julliard, Blandine Kriegel and Phillipe Raynaud, who since the early 1980s have seen themselves not only as scholars who see greater intrinsic worth in Constant that Marx, in Tocqueville than in Rouseau, but also as ideologues whose ideas are more in keeping with the less revolutionary politics of late twentieth-century and early twenty first-century France.

In this paper Nick Hewlett will argue that with socio-ecenomic and political modernization of France since the beginning of the 1970’s came the evolution of dominant forms of French thought, which meant that forms of liberalism gradually became more influential and revolutionary thought of various kinds far less so. Re-interpretation of the revolutionary heritage was part of this broader process, whose practical high point perhaps came when in the 1980s and 1990s well-known individuals from academia (including François Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon, and Jacques Juuliard) worked with others from the world of business and the upper echelons of the civil service in the influential Fondaton Saint-Simon