Ever since Marc Bloch's seminal article on the growth of agrarian individualism, the struggle against common rights has been associated with the second half of the eighteenth century. The bureaucrats of the late ancien regime launched the debate, the Revolution resolved it by consecrating the principle of private property. Subsequent regimes had merely to complete the mopping-up operation. That such a linear perspective should have survived for so long despite the nuanced judgements of historians like Henri Sée and Georges Lefebvre and, indeed, Bloch, owes much to the pervasive quality of the revolutionary myth. Few would dispute the claim of the French Revolution to mark the beginning of a new political era, but its impact in the field of economic policy and development calls for careful assessment. As evidence accumulates which casts doubt upon the Revolution as the point of convergence of maturing economic, social and political processes, the old assumptions have been undermined. The champions of 1789 continue to assert its specificity, but with faltering conviction. Arguments are adjusted to acknowledge recent research, but even where this points strongly in other directions the categories of debate and the conclusions remain unchanged. By destroying seigneurial privilege and collective rights the Revolution accelerated the dissolution of the rural community, asserts Albert Soboul.

He concedes that the process was slower in the regions of ‘petite culture’ and accepts that revolutionary legislation was not always implemented; nevertheless he rejects the idea of a ‘compromise’ proposed by Lefebvre and prefers to use the term ‘paradox’ instead.